On the one hand, this was less of a screwup than the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. On the other hand, an assassin once again appears to have gotten closer than he should have been able to.

Sunday’s incident occurred while Trump was golfing at his course in West Palm Beach, Fla. Following the usual security procedure, a Secret Service agent moved one or two holes ahead of the former president, 300 to 500 yards away, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.

Around 1:30 p.m., between the fifth and seventh holes, the agent noticed a rifle muzzle poking through the tree-lined chain-link fence surrounding the golf course, Bradshaw said. The agent opened fire and Trump’s detail rushed him to a holding room.

The agent didn’t hit the assassin but did scare him away. And the response of the Secret Service was…

“The threat level is high,” Rafael Barros, the special agent in charge for the Secret Service, Miami field office, said during the Sunday news conference.

“We live in danger times,” he added.

Stuff happens in other words. And it seems to be happening to one man. No one’s scouting Delaware beaches or Bay Area fundraisers with sniper scopes, but Trump still can’t seem to get security. But hey, we live in “danger times”.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at the press briefing that because Trump is not a sitting president, the Secret Service was “limited” to “the areas that the Secret Service deems possible.”

“The golf course is surrounded by shrubbery, so when somebody gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight,” Bradshaw said.

“If he was [the sitting president], we would have had this entire golf course surrounded,” Bradshaw said.
He added that the “Secret Service did exactly what they should have done.”

And that’s what the Secret Service did.

The agency repeatedly denied requests from the Trump campaign for additional security measures at his public events, with officials citing limited resources.

Now there can be a new task force to investigate why this assassination attempt nearly went forward.