Despite the best efforts of Google and the mainstream media to “memory hole” the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, each day brings fresh — and inevitably appalling — information about what happened in Butler, PA. Most recently, texts from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit offered fresh evidence that Thomas Crooks had been spotted early enough to allow for timely intervention, leading yet again to the simple question “how could this failure have occurred?”

When I wrote of this last week for The American Spectator , I argued that “business as usual,” formally, something called “normalcy bias” likely accounted for the failure, a problem compounded by lack of training, lack of coordination, and, above all, lack of management emphasis. Perhaps now that Kimberly Cheatle has become the former Secret Service Director, the management issue can be decisively addressed. We can only hope.

Still, we shouldn’t for a moment let the Democrats and the media off the hook — their unremitting demonization of Trump quite likely gave Thomas Crooks a feeling of “legitimacy,” while also undoubtedly contributing to the frankly half-assed approach taken by the Secret Service to its responsibility to protect the former President. We must continue to insist on answers, and we must not allow this near catastrophe to simply disappear beneath the weight of media indifference.

Female Agents Not the Problem in Butler

We should also refuse to settle for lame, facile explanations of what went wrong. In particular, I hope that we can put to rest the notion that the protection failure at Butler came down to a reliance on female Secret Service agents, particularly female Secret Service agents who failed to conform to the image of the Hollywood female superheroes.

I have no patience with those who would offhandedly dismiss women in protective services. I’ve known many female agents, and, to a woman, they fulfilled every professional requirement — and some were capable of running rings around most of their male counterparts. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: The Paris Olympics Aren’t Representative of the France I Know)

But even those critics who were not overtly misogynist were quick to dismiss the women of Butler. These women were “too short, or too dumpy,” even if this was sometimes dressed up in kinder euphemisms. In other words, they didn’t look or act like the superwomen we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to expect in action roles.

They couldn’t toss Trump to the ground with a single smooth move, or deflect bullets with Wonder Woman’s magic bracelets. They didn’t look like Brie Larson, or Scarlett Johansson, or Gal Gadot, or any of the legion of women action adventure characters who seem to have wholly taken over the action movie genre.

Even in the relatively down to earth world of TV detective shows, one can count on the female characters to be svelte and outrageously athletic, always capable of running down a fleeing suspect (think of the “Tiffany” character on “The FBI”) and throwing even the burliest man to the ground. But real world professionals, male or female, come in many shapes and sizes. Not all of them work a side job as supermodels, and not all of them are showily buff.

During my career in nuclear security, I worked alongside a number of former Tier One special operators, and few of them resembled TV’s Jack Reacher. Most of them you’d have passed by on the street without remark, and they liked it that way. But if you saw them in context, you saw what real strength looked like. Similarly, when I led an executive protection team into the Peruvian uplands, an area infested by Shining Path terrorists, my Peruvian national police liaison looked more Ernest Borgnine than Clint Eastwood. He was physically tough as nails and strong as an ox — and mentally as grounded as a certain fabled Shaolin monk.

In much the same manner, the women I’ve worked with from the military, from law enforcement, and from security have come in many shapes and sizes. Some were no more svelte than the agents at Butler, some were short, some tall, some visibly athletic, some subtly strong.

The good ones — and, over several decades, I knew many — all had one thing in common, an inner strength and a dedication to being the best. They worked at it, and they insisted on pulling their own weight. None of them were DEI hires, and, without exception, they’d have been insulted at the very notion of being given a place they hadn’t fairly earned.

Hollywood, in its mindless portrayal of female military, law enforcement, and security professionals has done these women — the real-life women — a profound disservice. My American Spectator colleagues Scott McKay and Lou Aguilar have called out these portrayals over and over again in their entertainment commentaries. They’ve never suggested that women have no place in action and adventure, but they have called, repeatedly, for more realistic representations.

Since retiring from the security arena, I’ve taken up a second career as a novelist, and, from the outset, I knew that I wanted no part of this Hollywood mindlessness. In creating the three major female characters in my novel, Letter of Reprisal, I approached them in the same spirit that I approached their male counterparts. Every character, male and female, was inspired in some measure by real people, people I’d known and worked with during nearly four decades of security work. “Inspired,” of course, not explicitly modeled.

One starts with someone — or a composite of several someones — in mind, but as characters take life in a story, they inevitably become their own people — but I never asked the characters to do anything beyond the capabilities of their original real world prototypes.

Each of the women in Letter of Reprisal fits the definition of “strong female character.” One is a highly skilled aviator, one a law enforcement veteran, one a dedicated scientist. Each of them shares the same challenges as the male characters, each suffers — one of them dies — and, in their different ways, each shares in the team’s ultimate triumph.

Action thrillers, by definition, are departures from every day experience, but realism, that is, stories in which exhilarating action comes accompanied with pain, suffering, and heartbreak — these are the stories that I believe worth telling. Moreover, you can’t depict strength without measuring it against adversity, and adversity, real adversity, has nothing to do with trading spin kicks with the bad guy.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family in which “strong female characters” played, over the course of several centuries of American history, a powerful role, so much so that they actually became the subject of a scholarly article. In a recent American Spectator article I told the true story of another female ancestor and how she faced down a band of marauders with a shotgun.

These women were not shrinking violets, by any measure, but neither were they woke fantasy figures. Long before “feminism” became a thing, these were women who held their own in any setting. And their legacy gave me a deep appreciation of real-life “strong female characters.”

Which brings me back to the women of Donald Trump’s protection detail. I have made it very clear that the performance of the Secret Service team at Butler PA can only be described as incompetent, indeed criminally incompetent.

Addressing Secret Service Problems

It’s good that Director Cheatle is gone, and it would be better if DHS Secretary Mayorkas was fired. They, after all, set the tone for the team’s performance, with every evidence that protecting Donald Trump was a lesser priority than protecting Biden, or Harris, or the assembled NATO leaders, none of whom were as much the objects of violent threats. Whoever communicated the idea that Trump’s security was somehow a lesser priority for the agency owns a huge part of the responsibility for what failed at Butler. (READ MORE: In My Hometown — Trump the Fighter)

Furthermore, I don’t think it premature to call for disciplinary action against the Secret Service agent in charge at Butler, whoever that person might be — and it’s interesting that this agent has been kept well out of the public eye. But we need not wait for the FBI or a congressional investigation to know that this person utterly failed. I know how hard it is to simply fire a Federal employee, but perhaps the Secret Service field office in Guam might need a new agent. Or perhaps this person might be tasked with setting up a new field office in Thule, Greenland.

Every day, fresh details emerge that tell a story of serial incompetence, of near criminal negligence, of a protection team unprepared for the moment of crisis, evidently lacking in training, unwilling to effectively integrate local law enforcement into the mission, incapable of responding to the threat as it emerged before Trump’s appearance on stage, and clumsily uncoordinated in its actions in the immediate aftermath of shots being fired.

But if we’re honest, truly honest with ourselves, none of this has the slightest to do with the fact that some of the agents were female. Yes, the struggle to re-holster a pistol was a bad look, something that shouldn’t have occurred, but I’ve seen men struggle the same way. This is an issue of frequent practice, of developed “muscle memory,” and this is something that atrophies quickly with lack of rigorous refresher training.

When the inquiries are completed, I strongly suspect we’ll find that this kind of training has been neglected at the Secret Service — perhaps there’s a need to spend less time on DEI and “allyship” and a little more time on the firing range. The issues at Butler ran far, far deeper than one agent’s clumsy weapons handling.

Maybe the agents in question were DEI hires, and if so, it might be time to discard such priorities in favor, once and for all, of hiring strictly on the basis of merit. But we don’t need to hire ex-basketball players to serve as a target screen for the protectee. Willingness in the critical moment to take a bullet is part of the protective services ethos, but simply being expected to serve as a target is ludicrous.

Physical strength is a part of the equation, but moving a protectee out of the line of fire is about trained use of leverage, not muscle mass — and the first rule of protective service work is to ensure that the protectee understands his or her role in getting out of the line of fire.

We don’t need, nor should we want, our protective services agents to be all cast in the Jack Reacher mold, or, for female agents, that of Jennifer Lawrence or Zoe Saldana or Michelle Yeoh. Let’s leave them for the movies or TV. Better still, let’s get away altogether from “strong female characters” cut from the comic book superhero mold. Our real world expectations might become more reasonable, and maybe — just maybe — we’d find that realistic male and female action heroes are just a lot more entertaining.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.