In the 2013 movie Olympus Has Fallen, a murderously efficient Secret Service agent played by Gerard Butler single-handedly defeats a North Korean assault team which has captured the White House and taken the president hostage.

That was by no means the sole offering in the genre that year. White House Down, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, followed a similar theme.

Going further back, Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland slugged it out in the 2006 caper Sentinel, while the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire had an ageing Clint Eastwood playing a haggard but determined agent on the presidential security detail.

The plots change but the underlying message is more or less the same: these guys are tough and organised – mess with them, or the VIPs they protect, and you die.

It is, to say the least, somewhat at odds with the spectacle of a chastened and bumbling (now former) Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle explaining to Congress that her agents failed to secure the roof from which Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at Donald Trump because it was slanted and therefore presented a health and safety risk.

We now know that the building, despite its distance from the podium being well within the range of commonly available rifles, was excluded from the security perimeter.

We know that local law enforcement spotted the skinny young man acting oddly and informed the Secret Service.

We know that officers saw him on the roof and shouted “He’s got a gun”, that the counter-sniper team was alerted, and yet the Republican candidate was allowed to stay at the podium.

Experts have been quick to point out that, although shocking, the events of July 13 should not come as a total surprise.

The last 10 to 15 years have seen several security lapses which, but for lucky circumstances, could have turned out even worse than the Pennsylvania attack in which a bystander was killed.

In 2011 a mentally disturbed young man called Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez armed with a semi-automatic rifle fired multiple shots from his car at the White House.

Seven bullets struck the residence, one smashing a window on the second floor close to the first family’s formal living room (President Obama was off-site at the time, although members of his family were present).

At least one agent drew her gun, convinced that the premises was under attack.

Yet the agents in charge were confused, first concluding that no shots had been fired, then putting it down to an unlikely occurrence of gangland violence outside the perimeter.

Even after they began to suspect a direct attack, they failed to inform the first family. A furious Michelle Obama instead found out from a White House usher.

What happened in 2014 was, in a sense, much worse.

Shortly after Mr Obama and his family had taken off for the weekend in Marine One, an Iraq war veteran called Omar J Gonzalez vaulted the fence.

This was not unheard of and the Secret Service supposedly had a rigid system of measures to make sure they got nowhere near the building.

But in this case, Gonzalez not only made it to the White House but got inside and to the threshold of the president’s private lying quarters before he was restrained.

Worse, he was armed with a knife.

The subsequent investigation, which led to the resignation of director Julia Pierson, revealed, in the words of Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig “that every last one of the Secret Service’s defences disintegrated. And officers sworn to tell the truth would lie about the mistakes they made.”

A key radio transmission that would have alerted the wider team did not get through because an officer had his finger on the transmit button at the time.

Meanwhile an agent stationed near the door of the White House, rather than preparing to tackle the intruder, actually got out of the way because he did not want the attack dog he assumed had been unleashed to mistakenly go for him.

The dog remained very much leashed, however, because its handler was taking a personal call.

There were lapses away from Washington, too.

In 2010, while the first lady was staying in a Los Angeles hotel, a disorientated homeless man wandered off the street and made it to just outside the penthouse suite.

The lone agent on duty in the corridor apprehended the individual, but he should never have been allowed in the building.

Major reforms were promised following the 2014 incident. But in 2017 another intruder, Jonathan Tran, also jumped the White House fence.

This time he was only discovered after 16 minutes, just yards from the main building, in which Donald Trump was present at the time.

Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the house committee on oversight and government reform, said of the CCTV footage: “It was painful to watch. Everyone was slow and pathetic and inadequate. This is by far the worst one and most inadequate and scary. They just didn’t respond.”

Lessons from the Obama-era breaches had clearly not been learnt.

Longtime observers of the Secret Service say that far from being the smart, adaptive organisation depicted on screen, there is something in the agency’s DNA which makes it resistant to self-scrutiny.

“Time and time again, the Secret Service has chosen to cover up a problem rather than fix it,” Leonnig, author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, told CBS News in 2021.

The lack of transparency appears to be coupled with a laddish culture that has brought the service into disrepute on several occasions.

The most notorious incident came in 2012 when 11 agents in an advance party of a presidential delegation to Cartagena, Colombia became embroiled in a row with as many as 20 prostitutes they had brought back to their hotel after an evening of heavy drinking.

But there were others, notably a 2015 incident in which two inebriated agents, including a senior member of Mr Obama’s protection detail, crashed their car at the White House following a raucous leaving party.

Their supervisor was then alleged to have prevented local police from arresting them.

By the middle of the last decade there were growing signs that the service was extremely badly run.

In 2015 the house oversight committee published a damning report which described an agency “in crisis”, “systemic mismanagement”, chronic underfunding, and an “extraordinarily inefficient hiring process”.

That last criticism pointed to what was arguably an over-correction following several racism scandals and a recognition that the agency fared poorly in recruiting and promoting non-white agents.

For decades recruitment had been led by field offices. Operating without much oversight, recruiters tended to allow through applicants in their own image.

Despite the obvious unfairnesses, it was relatively efficient at singling out recruits who were likely to make the grade further down the process.

Skip vital training

In 2010 director Mark Sullivan overhauled the system, forcing all applications through a centralised US government website with reduced discretion for pre-interview sifting.

Officers were suddenly in the position of having to skip vital training in order to interview hundreds of candidates, many of whom were terrible.

According to Zero Fail, one weighed 400lbs while another had a prosthetic arm. From one cohort of 35,000 candidates, the agency hired just 18.

It was against this background that Republican congressmen made their recent “diversity hire” jibes following the shooting in Pennsylvania.

Then, in 2016, along came Donald Trump.

For an agency already severely undermanned, the arrival of the showbiz 45th president and his complicated family entourage was a logistical nightmare.

He demanded close protection for no fewer than 18 members of his family, many of whom travelled abroad regularly.

The agency was so stretched that for one period Betsy DeVos, a female education secretary who was receiving a stream of death threats, had to temporarily hire her own security.

Top White House aides were occasionally forced to ride with their bodyguards in the agents’ private cars, such was the strain on the vehicle pool.

It is no wonder that within weeks of Mr Trump entering the White House, the agency was seeking a $60 million increase in its budget.

However, that would be swiftly eaten up by his passion for playing golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Swiftly dismissing Camp David, which is guarded by the US Marines, as a place you like “for about 30 minutes”, Mr Trump quickly reverted to weekending at his sprawling Florida property which presented a security nightmare.

Each occasion is estimated to have cost the US military, coast guard and Secret Service a combined $3.2 million, requiring 70 agents for even the most pared-down visit.

High-powered golf carts

Tens of thousands was spent hiring high-powered golf carts to keep up with the president as he played.

Mr Trump was also entitled to designate a private property to be permanently guarded. But unlike the Obamas’ suburban house in Chicago, he designated Trump Tower, a 58-floor skyscraper in Manhattan.

It is estimated that, at any one time, this alone diverted a third of the manpower in the New York field office.

Despite many agents reportedly sympathising with Mr Trump politically, such was the strain they were under that employees regularly rated the service as the most miserable place to work in the US government.

Staffing decisions were put under further pressure by Mr Trump’s hatred of portly agents.

“I want fat guys off my detail,” he told advisers. “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”

The agency was embroiled in accusations of corruption when it emerged it had spent millions of taxpayer dollars putting up staff at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC and other Trump properties.

There were also accusations that it harboured sympathisers of the far-Right Oathkeepers militia, plus a continued lack of transparency over its actions in the run-up to the Jan 6 2021 insurrection, with allegations of deleted text messages.

President Biden replaced the director but did not meddle much beyond that.

Tristan Leavitt, who wrote the 2015 report for the house oversight committee, said in July 2024: “Almost a decade later, it looks like the Secret Service is suffering from some of the exact same problems it did 10 years ago.”

He called for Ms Cheatle to be replaced by someone from outside the agency.

Whether or not that happens, if Hollywood producers are tempted to re-enter the genre any time soon, it might have to be Secret Service, The Disaster Movie.