If Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle will not resign over former President Donald Trump nearly being assassinated at a rally, President Joe Biden should fire her. The fact that he won’t shows there are no consequences for failure in the Biden administration.
Cheatle said after the attempt on Trump’s life that the security failure was “unacceptable,” “something that shouldn’t happen again,” and that “the buck stops with me.” Evidently, that last point is not something she truly believes, because she said she would not resign over the security failure that nearly left the former president and current leading presidential candidate dead on a rally stage.
Having a president come within mere inches of being assassinated should result in a nearly automatic change in leadership in the Secret Service, yet Cheatle intends to stay in her position. If Biden were a true leader, he would fire her for the Secret Service’s failure, especially with Cheatle now justifying the failure by ludicrously claiming the building the shooter was on was too sloped for Secret Service agents to be stationed on safely. But the Biden administration does not punish failure, which is why incompetence runs rampant throughout it.
You can see this most clearly with Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. The administration stranded hundreds of American citizens and Afghan allies to the whims of the Taliban, undermined the Afghan military’s ability to fight the Taliban, left behind $7 billion worth of American military equipment, allowed a suicide bomber to kill 13 U.S. servicemembers, and launched a drone strike that targeted an aid worker and killed several children in retaliation.
Was anyone fired over this? No. In fact, Trump pointed this out during his debate with Biden.
“No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country in Afghanistan,” Trump said. “He doesn’t fire people. He never fired people.”
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This holds true throughout his administration. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is also supporting Cheatle, has not been fired for his border security failures. The only high-profile “firing” Biden’s administration has seen is TJ Ducklo, a communications staffer who launched a sexist tirade against a reporter and threatened to ruin her career. But Biden didn’t even actually fire Ducklo — he resigned. Even worse, Biden brought him back to work on his reelection campaign.
Biden rewards incompetence and failure by allowing the incompetent failures in his administration to remain in their roles. For a man who has been in politics for half a century despite his own failures, this is par for the course. For a president, this is a stunning and embarrassing lack of leadership and an acceptance of mediocrity in areas where mediocrity can prove dangerous, as we saw Saturday.