I’ll begin with some breaking news. The Secret Service has finally come out and explained, in detail, how they allowed Donald Trump to get shot in the head on Saturday. They’ve released a thorough explanation for why exactly the slope of the roof 140 yards away from the stage was, in fact, insurmountable for even the most skilled Secret Service sniper or special agent.
They articulated very clearly why they didn’t pull Donald Trump off the stage, even after they saw the shooter behaving suspiciously — equipped with a rangefinder — before they somehow lost track of him several times over.
It’s now abundantly clear exactly why the DHS secretary says he has 100% confidence in the director of the Secret Service.
All of our questions have been answered.
Or maybe not. Actually, they still haven’t explained any of that.
But on the bright side, the Secret Service did come out and address the most important issue surrounding Saturday’s assassination attempt, by far. And that issue is that people have been very mean to the Secret Service on the internet. People have even put out tweets that are critical of the fact that the Secret Service had female agents “protecting” Donald Trump who weren’t tall enough to cover his head. Can you imagine the indecency of it all? The Secret Service can’t.
It’s one thing for a guy to shoot a presidential candidate on live television. But for people to say rude things on social media? Well that’s just a bridge too far.
That’s why the Secret Service just sent a statement to NBC News explaining:
We stand united against any attempt to discredit our personnel and their invaluable contributions to our mission and are appalled by the disparaging and disgusting comments against any of our personnel. … As an elite law enforcement agency, all of our agents and officers are highly trained and fully capable of performing our missions. It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce.
Yes, this is the priority of the Secret Service, just three days after they allowed the leading presidential candidate to get shot in the head during a political rally that they were in charge of securing. This is what they’re concerned about: the feelings of their female agents. They’re not “appalled” by their unprecedented security failures, which very nearly changed the course of U.S. history. They’re not “appalled” by their completely incoherent excuses about a sloped roof and a lack of manpower. They’re not “appalled” by the total destruction of the Secret Service’s reputation as a competent federal agency. None of that appalls the Secret Service. What really bothers them are mean tweets about their female agents.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
A couple things about this. First of all, every criticism of the female agents on Trump’s security detail is accurate. On the day of the assassination attempt, as I’ve covered before, one female agent cowered behind the pile of agents protecting Trump.
If you cower when you are called to perform your duty as a Secret Service agent, you should be fired immediately.
Lady is a disgrace! pic.twitter.com/rZs7etF7bf
— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) July 14, 2024
Another female agent clearly struggled to cover Trump’s head as he stood up, because she wasn’t tall enough.
Trump just got shot in the head and got up like a fucking gangster and fist pumped
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) July 13, 2024
None of the male agents have this problem, but the female agent clearly can’t cover Trump’s face even if she wanted to. It’s painful to watch.
Trump is placed inside @SecretService SUV after the assassination attempt…
We can’t help but notice many – mostly female – USSS agents bumbling to holster firearms, spinning in place, bouncing all around… granted, men are also rushing
But this looks very, very unpolished pic.twitter.com/7usSp2B9zM
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) July 14, 2024
And then of course, as the SUV carrying Trump pulled away, the female agents had trouble holstering their weapons, and started messing with their sunglasses. None of them appeared to have any idea what they were doing. It was like they’re cosplaying Secret Service agents. It looked like they had been pulled off the street that morning and recruited into Trump’s security detail without any prior training at all.
I’ve shown all of this footage before, but it bears repeating because the Secret Service is now pretending that none of this is an issue. They’re saying you’re a bigot if you notice the problem. Now, they clearly don’t believe that. They know female agents aren’t as effective. That’s why, when Trump appeared at the RNC, in his first public appearance after the shooting, he was surrounded by men who were actually tall enough and strong enough to protect him from threats. There were no short females in his detail anymore, or any females at all, because they understand that women can’t do the job as well as men. Period.
But the Secret Service is choosing to use the shield of identity politics anyway because, as always, it helps distract from their own failures and mediocrity. This is always the reason that identity politics is deployed, and this is no exception. They’d rather accuse their critics of hating women, instead of reckoning with their own incompetence — which appears more and more to be willful and malicious with each passing day.
And the corporate press, of course, is doing the feds’ bidding.
The Financial Times reported:
Secret Service target of misogynistic backlash after Donald Trump assassination attempt.
The New York Times added:
The rush by conservatives to pin blame for the shooting on women in the protective detail reflects a broader opposition among Republicans to diversity efforts in hiring.
The Washington Post complained:
Right-wing influencers use Trump assassination attempt to attack DEI.
Well, I thought that a former president getting shot was pretty bad. But if it leads to attacks on DEI then it’s way worse than I thought.
The Post singled me out with this paragraph:
Far-right influencer Matt Walsh posted a video featuring female Secret Service agents gathering around Trump after the attack with the caption, ‘There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.’
According to the Post, which cited “experts,” tweets like mine are an attempt to “generate social media attention and outrage.” They also say I’m trying to “undermine” DEI (and that part is true, I admit).
What’s interesting about these attacks is that they’re commenting on my motivations. They’re pretending they can read my mind, and they’ve determined my outrage — over a presidential candidate getting shot — can’t possibly be genuine. So that’s that. They’re not actually addressing what I said, because they know I’m right.
Here’s what none of these articles and valiant defenses of the female agents have done, or can do: actually defend the proposition that Trump was safer with females in his security detail, rather than with only men in his security detail.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that, if one woman agent on stage had been replaced by a male agent, that Trump would not have been shot. I’m not saying that more men would have definitely prevented this from happening, although it’s quite possible.
I’m saying that these female agents constitute an obvious security vulnerability — one among many. And because the Secret Service put them out there on stage on Saturday, it raises obvious questions about their ability to competently protect Donald Trump. I’m not going to just ignore a glaring sign of incompetence that’s front-and-center, on live television. If there’s glaring incompetence to that degree, there’s glaring incompetence at every other layer of the agency, too.
That’s a pretty safe assumption, and the Secret Service has done absolutely nothing to dispel that assumption in the days since the shooting.
Here’s the crucial point: the fact that they are going out of their way to recruit women in the name of diversity shows where their priorities lie. It not only makes them less capable of doing the job they’re supposed to do, but even more to the point, it means they are fundamentally focused on the wrong things.
Consider for example what the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, has been saying since Saturday. She’s best known for her promise that 30% of the Secret Service’s work force would be female by 2030.
First, she came out and said that the roof was too sloped for agents to stand on top of it, which makes no sense for about a million reasons. And she’s really not helping her case for including women in the agency. Looking up at a roof and deciding that you can’t put snipers on it because it’s slightly sloped and someone might slip, is the kind of thing your mom might do. “Hey you boys come down from there! And put those guns away! You’re gonna hurt yourself!” Then, in an interview yesterday, Cheatle defended the security plan that left the roof completely exposed. She also refused to explain how exactly the agency had supposedly beefed up security after an alleged threat against Trump from Iran. Watch:
“The perimeter encompassed the area that we needed to secure for the event that we had on that day.” That’s her response when she’s asked why the secure perimeter didn’t include a building directly across from Trump. But, obviously, the perimeter didn’t encompass the area they needed to secure, because a gunman managed to climb on that roof and fire several shots without anyone stopping him.
She then goes on to completely fail to explain how the agency supposedly “stepped up” its security following this supposed Iranian threat. That’s probably because security wasn’t stepped up in any way.
But for a moment, let’s give this woman the benefit of the doubt. Let’s pretend that the security was indeed stepped up to the max. And let’s recap how exactly this “stepped up” security failed, since the details get crazier with each passing hour.
Now we’re learning that the shooter was at the rally a full three hours before he shot Trump. He was on the radar of the security team three hours ahead of time. Then at 5:10 p.m., authorities identified him as a person of interest. At 5:30 p.m., he was spotted again with a rangefinder. He was then observed “furiously checking his phone and operating the rangefinder,” according to The Daily Mail.
The Secret Service noticed this and kept an eye on him, but apparently they lost track of him when he left the secure area. Then the shooter was caught on film an hour before the assassination attempt, casing the the building he would later climb to shoot Trump. Watch:
1 hour before the shooting Matthew Crooks casually casing the scene. Utter failure in security. #Trump
— Johnny (@tallyman2023) July 17, 2024
So you can see the guy is clearly by himself, acting strangely as he cases the building. Then, forty minutes before the shooting, law enforcement spotted the shooter “appearing to crawl on the ground” while scouring the area. They circulated a photograph, tagging him as a suspicious person. But again, they apparently lost track of them.
And again, that wasn’t the end of it. The Secret Service also saw the gunman on the rooftop at 5:52 p.m. At 6:02 p.m. Trump took the stage. Shots were fired at 6:12 p.m.
In other words, as ABC News reported:
20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president.
To reiterate: This is a suspicious person with a rangefinder who is on top of a roof looking down directly at the stage where Donald Trump is about to speak. And still they didn’t secure the roof, or delay the rally. Even if you ignore the three hours prior to this when they could have detained the shooter, they still had 20 minutes when he was on the roof, and they did nothing. In fact, this guy — who’d already been identified as a person of interest — was on the roof ten minutes before Trump even took the stage. At a minimum they could have delayed Trump coming out until they investigated. But they didn’t.
Then, shortly before the shooting started, people in the crowd saw the man on the roof. I’ve played several of those videos before. The crowd began calling to police officers nearby. Now we’re learning exactly when that happened in the chronology of events that day.
As The Washington Post reports:
The shots began 86 seconds after the first audible attempts to alert police, according to the analysis, which synchronized several clips based on the sound of Trump’s voice over the public address system.
All that needed to happen in those 86 seconds was for the officer to get on the radio and say there’s a suspicious person on the roof, get Trump off the stage. Or he could have directed the counter snipers to look for the person, and identify the specific roof. Instead, once again, nothing happened. No one stopped the shooter until Trump was shot first.
The only explanation for these events — outside of the possibility that the Secret Service deliberately intended for Trump to get shot, which is not by any means a crazy thing to believe — is incompetence of a staggering, historic degree. The only conceivable way this assassination attempt happens, excluding malice, is if people who have no idea what they’re doing — who were not chosen based on merit — were put in jobs they can’t possibly perform.
And through its explicit DEI policies — the dramatically lowered physical fitness standards for women, the hiring quotas, the “special” push for more LGBTQ agents and so on — the Secret Service has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care about merit. Instead, the agency cares about politics and appearances. That’s the reason for their DEI hiring. That’s the reason they’re “appalled” by mean tweets like mine.
And it’s the reason Donald Trump was just shot in the face, and why U.S. history very nearly changed forever.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
I’ll begin with some breaking news. The Secret Service has finally come out and explained, in detail, how they allowed Donald Trump to get shot in the head on Saturday. They’ve released a thorough explanation for why exactly the slope of the roof 140 yards away from the stage was, in fact, insurmountable for even the most skilled Secret Service sniper or special agent.
They articulated very clearly why they didn’t pull Donald Trump off the stage, even after they saw the shooter behaving suspiciously — equipped with a rangefinder — before they somehow lost track of him several times over.
It’s now abundantly clear exactly why the DHS secretary says he has 100% confidence in the director of the Secret Service.
All of our questions have been answered.
Or maybe not. Actually, they still haven’t explained any of that.
But on the bright side, the Secret Service did come out and address the most important issue surrounding Saturday’s assassination attempt, by far. And that issue is that people have been very mean to the Secret Service on the internet. People have even put out tweets that are critical of the fact that the Secret Service had female agents “protecting” Donald Trump who weren’t tall enough to cover his head. Can you imagine the indecency of it all? The Secret Service can’t.
It’s one thing for a guy to shoot a presidential candidate on live television. But for people to say rude things on social media? Well that’s just a bridge too far.
That’s why the Secret Service just sent a statement to NBC News explaining:
We stand united against any attempt to discredit our personnel and their invaluable contributions to our mission and are appalled by the disparaging and disgusting comments against any of our personnel. … As an elite law enforcement agency, all of our agents and officers are highly trained and fully capable of performing our missions. It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce.
Yes, this is the priority of the Secret Service, just three days after they allowed the leading presidential candidate to get shot in the head during a political rally that they were in charge of securing. This is what they’re concerned about: the feelings of their female agents. They’re not “appalled” by their unprecedented security failures, which very nearly changed the course of U.S. history. They’re not “appalled” by their completely incoherent excuses about a sloped roof and a lack of manpower. They’re not “appalled” by the total destruction of the Secret Service’s reputation as a competent federal agency. None of that appalls the Secret Service. What really bothers them are mean tweets about their female agents.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
A couple things about this. First of all, every criticism of the female agents on Trump’s security detail is accurate. On the day of the assassination attempt, as I’ve covered before, one female agent cowered behind the pile of agents protecting Trump.
If you cower when you are called to perform your duty as a Secret Service agent, you should be fired immediately.
Lady is a disgrace! pic.twitter.com/rZs7etF7bf
— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) July 14, 2024
Another female agent clearly struggled to cover Trump’s head as he stood up, because she wasn’t tall enough.
Trump just got shot in the head and got up like a fucking gangster and fist pumped
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) July 13, 2024
None of the male agents have this problem, but the female agent clearly can’t cover Trump’s face even if she wanted to. It’s painful to watch.
Trump is placed inside @SecretService SUV after the assassination attempt…
We can’t help but notice many – mostly female – USSS agents bumbling to holster firearms, spinning in place, bouncing all around… granted, men are also rushing
But this looks very, very unpolished pic.twitter.com/7usSp2B9zM
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) July 14, 2024
And then of course, as the SUV carrying Trump pulled away, the female agents had trouble holstering their weapons, and started messing with their sunglasses. None of them appeared to have any idea what they were doing. It was like they’re cosplaying Secret Service agents. It looked like they had been pulled off the street that morning and recruited into Trump’s security detail without any prior training at all.
I’ve shown all of this footage before, but it bears repeating because the Secret Service is now pretending that none of this is an issue. They’re saying you’re a bigot if you notice the problem. Now, they clearly don’t believe that. They know female agents aren’t as effective. That’s why, when Trump appeared at the RNC, in his first public appearance after the shooting, he was surrounded by men who were actually tall enough and strong enough to protect him from threats. There were no short females in his detail anymore, or any females at all, because they understand that women can’t do the job as well as men. Period.
But the Secret Service is choosing to use the shield of identity politics anyway because, as always, it helps distract from their own failures and mediocrity. This is always the reason that identity politics is deployed, and this is no exception. They’d rather accuse their critics of hating women, instead of reckoning with their own incompetence — which appears more and more to be willful and malicious with each passing day.
And the corporate press, of course, is doing the feds’ bidding.
The Financial Times reported:
Secret Service target of misogynistic backlash after Donald Trump assassination attempt.
The New York Times added:
The rush by conservatives to pin blame for the shooting on women in the protective detail reflects a broader opposition among Republicans to diversity efforts in hiring.
The Washington Post complained:
Right-wing influencers use Trump assassination attempt to attack DEI.
Well, I thought that a former president getting shot was pretty bad. But if it leads to attacks on DEI then it’s way worse than I thought.
The Post singled me out with this paragraph:
Far-right influencer Matt Walsh posted a video featuring female Secret Service agents gathering around Trump after the attack with the caption, ‘There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.’
According to the Post, which cited “experts,” tweets like mine are an attempt to “generate social media attention and outrage.” They also say I’m trying to “undermine” DEI (and that part is true, I admit).
What’s interesting about these attacks is that they’re commenting on my motivations. They’re pretending they can read my mind, and they’ve determined my outrage — over a presidential candidate getting shot — can’t possibly be genuine. So that’s that. They’re not actually addressing what I said, because they know I’m right.
Here’s what none of these articles and valiant defenses of the female agents have done, or can do: actually defend the proposition that Trump was safer with females in his security detail, rather than with only men in his security detail.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that, if one woman agent on stage had been replaced by a male agent, that Trump would not have been shot. I’m not saying that more men would have definitely prevented this from happening, although it’s quite possible.
I’m saying that these female agents constitute an obvious security vulnerability — one among many. And because the Secret Service put them out there on stage on Saturday, it raises obvious questions about their ability to competently protect Donald Trump. I’m not going to just ignore a glaring sign of incompetence that’s front-and-center, on live television. If there’s glaring incompetence to that degree, there’s glaring incompetence at every other layer of the agency, too.
That’s a pretty safe assumption, and the Secret Service has done absolutely nothing to dispel that assumption in the days since the shooting.
Here’s the crucial point: the fact that they are going out of their way to recruit women in the name of diversity shows where their priorities lie. It not only makes them less capable of doing the job they’re supposed to do, but even more to the point, it means they are fundamentally focused on the wrong things.
Consider for example what the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, has been saying since Saturday. She’s best known for her promise that 30% of the Secret Service’s work force would be female by 2030.
First, she came out and said that the roof was too sloped for agents to stand on top of it, which makes no sense for about a million reasons. And she’s really not helping her case for including women in the agency. Looking up at a roof and deciding that you can’t put snipers on it because it’s slightly sloped and someone might slip, is the kind of thing your mom might do. “Hey you boys come down from there! And put those guns away! You’re gonna hurt yourself!” Then, in an interview yesterday, Cheatle defended the security plan that left the roof completely exposed. She also refused to explain how exactly the agency had supposedly beefed up security after an alleged threat against Trump from Iran. Watch:
“The perimeter encompassed the area that we needed to secure for the event that we had on that day.” That’s her response when she’s asked why the secure perimeter didn’t include a building directly across from Trump. But, obviously, the perimeter didn’t encompass the area they needed to secure, because a gunman managed to climb on that roof and fire several shots without anyone stopping him.
She then goes on to completely fail to explain how the agency supposedly “stepped up” its security following this supposed Iranian threat. That’s probably because security wasn’t stepped up in any way.
But for a moment, let’s give this woman the benefit of the doubt. Let’s pretend that the security was indeed stepped up to the max. And let’s recap how exactly this “stepped up” security failed, since the details get crazier with each passing hour.
Now we’re learning that the shooter was at the rally a full three hours before he shot Trump. He was on the radar of the security team three hours ahead of time. Then at 5:10 p.m., authorities identified him as a person of interest. At 5:30 p.m., he was spotted again with a rangefinder. He was then observed “furiously checking his phone and operating the rangefinder,” according to The Daily Mail.
The Secret Service noticed this and kept an eye on him, but apparently they lost track of him when he left the secure area. Then the shooter was caught on film an hour before the assassination attempt, casing the the building he would later climb to shoot Trump. Watch:
1 hour before the shooting Matthew Crooks casually casing the scene. Utter failure in security. #Trump
— Johnny (@tallyman2023) July 17, 2024
So you can see the guy is clearly by himself, acting strangely as he cases the building. Then, forty minutes before the shooting, law enforcement spotted the shooter “appearing to crawl on the ground” while scouring the area. They circulated a photograph, tagging him as a suspicious person. But again, they apparently lost track of them.
And again, that wasn’t the end of it. The Secret Service also saw the gunman on the rooftop at 5:52 p.m. At 6:02 p.m. Trump took the stage. Shots were fired at 6:12 p.m.
In other words, as ABC News reported:
20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president.
To reiterate: This is a suspicious person with a rangefinder who is on top of a roof looking down directly at the stage where Donald Trump is about to speak. And still they didn’t secure the roof, or delay the rally. Even if you ignore the three hours prior to this when they could have detained the shooter, they still had 20 minutes when he was on the roof, and they did nothing. In fact, this guy — who’d already been identified as a person of interest — was on the roof ten minutes before Trump even took the stage. At a minimum they could have delayed Trump coming out until they investigated. But they didn’t.
Then, shortly before the shooting started, people in the crowd saw the man on the roof. I’ve played several of those videos before. The crowd began calling to police officers nearby. Now we’re learning exactly when that happened in the chronology of events that day.
As The Washington Post reports:
The shots began 86 seconds after the first audible attempts to alert police, according to the analysis, which synchronized several clips based on the sound of Trump’s voice over the public address system.
All that needed to happen in those 86 seconds was for the officer to get on the radio and say there’s a suspicious person on the roof, get Trump off the stage. Or he could have directed the counter snipers to look for the person, and identify the specific roof. Instead, once again, nothing happened. No one stopped the shooter until Trump was shot first.
The only explanation for these events — outside of the possibility that the Secret Service deliberately intended for Trump to get shot, which is not by any means a crazy thing to believe — is incompetence of a staggering, historic degree. The only conceivable way this assassination attempt happens, excluding malice, is if people who have no idea what they’re doing — who were not chosen based on merit — were put in jobs they can’t possibly perform.
And through its explicit DEI policies — the dramatically lowered physical fitness standards for women, the hiring quotas, the “special” push for more LGBTQ agents and so on — the Secret Service has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care about merit. Instead, the agency cares about politics and appearances. That’s the reason for their DEI hiring. That’s the reason they’re “appalled” by mean tweets like mine.
And it’s the reason Donald Trump was just shot in the face, and why U.S. history very nearly changed forever.
“}]]
