The Republican Party has released a new campaign ad supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. That ad relies heavily on Trump’s Secret Service detail to present Trump as powerful and confident.
The ad might look good, but the GOP should not be enveloping the Secret Service in partisan politics. Just as President Joe Biden was wrong to use U.S. Marine sentries as props during his darkly partisan 2022 speech in Philadelphia, Trump is wrong to present those who protect him as political operatives.
The avoidance of partisan appearance is a critical concern for the service. After all, with partisan discord at an all-time high, the service must rightly do all it can to retain both public trust and the trust of those it protects. Indeed, this concern underpins why the agency’s motto is “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.” The service is neither an imperial Praetorian Guard nor a well-trained but politicized intelligence outfit such as Vladimir Putin’s SBP protective unit.
Sometimes the agency falls short of its necessarily high standards. That was the case when various agents cavorted with prostitutes in Colombia in 2012. It was the case when Omar Gonzalez breached the inner sanctum of the White House in 2014. It was the case when a confused intruder broke into national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s home undetected last year. And it was obviously the case when John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. The service’s management culture also resists organizational reform.
That said, the agency succeeds far more than it fails. It is a tribute to the service that it leaks far less than other agencies. And that those leaks tend to pertain not to protectees but rather to mission failures or concerns (such as with the recent altercation involving an agent on Vice President Kamala Harris’s detail). Although its protective taskings are excessive against the service’s resource base (too many lower-ranking officials have too much protection), the service is rightly regarded as the world’s premier protective agency. Consider, for example, that the agency has prevented a “near lethal approach” by a prospective assassin for nearly two decades.
The last such incident occurred in 2005 when an attacker threw a grenade near George W. Bush as he addressed a crowd in Tbilisi, Georgia (the grenade failed to detonate). The service has achieved this success via heavy advance work, good intelligence, well-trained personnel, and a healthy dose of good luck. Still, the tactics that the service employs are far more comprehensive than those of most other foreign protective agencies. These tactics are designed to anticipate a vast range of potential threats including diversionary attacks, lone wolf attacks, organized group attacks involving firearms, explosives, or chemical weapons, and even nuclear attacks.
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This brings us back to the 2024 presidential campaign. I understand that Trump is broadly popular with his detail agents, viewed as collegial and at least somewhat personally invested in those assigned to protect him. Biden maintains a cordial but more distant relationship with agents assigned to the presidential protective division. (Former first lady Michelle Obama and the Bush family have the best reputation for being kind to agents.)
Yet if Trump wants to show respect to those who would die to protect him, the least he can do is avoid dragging them into an already bitter election campaign.