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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   38867 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Okay, I'd really like TheMotte to talk me down from crazy-town and conspiracy-ville.

Exhibit A: Secret Service was warned of an Iranian (or Iran-backed) assassination threat against Trump (Source)

prompting a surge in resources and assets, according to the officials

Which means that the Saturday shooting represents a high-water mark in Trump's security detail.

Exhibit B: Secret Service snipers spotted Thomas Crooks in position on the roof 20 minutes before the assassination attempt. (Source) Per the article's timeline:

5:10 p.m. Crooks was first identified as a person of interest

5:30 p.m. Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder

5:52 p.m. Crooks was spotted on the roof by Secret Service

6:02 p.m. Trump takes the stage

6:12 p.m. Crooks fires first shots

Which means the Secret Service knew there was an active threat, 10 minutes before they allowed Trump to take the stage. This is separate from the 2-minute 'crowd pointing at guy with gun on roof' warning where the Secret Service failed to move Trump off the stage.

Exhibit C: Secret Service has stated that 'local police' were supposed to be responsible for covering the American Glass Research (AGR) building. However, both the county (Source) and city police (Source) have denied that they were so assigned.

Apparently, there were local police -- including snipers -- inside an adjacent or conjoined building in the complex (Source), but no one's been identified as responsible for the building itself or the roof itself. I've heard unsourced rumors that a SWAT team was supposed to be assigned to the specific roof the shooter used, but instead congregated within the building due to the heat (Source) but there's been no confirmation.

<><><><><><><><>

I know my Hanlon's Razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

However, at this point I'm gaining an appreciation for Grey's Law:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

If the wildest conspiracy theories and worst nightmares were true, if US Secret Service did deliberately set out to create a hole in Trump's security to allow him to be assassinated... what would they have done differently? How much more could the USSS have f***ed up their protection before we'd be comfortable drawing a line between 'smoke' and 'fire'?

And if Hanlon's Razor does bears out and it was in fact merely incompetence... then we apparently live in a world where this is the best the US Secret Service can do while on high alert, actively preparing to defend their protectee against an Iranian-backed assassination attempt. Which leads me to wonder, how vulnerable are the rest of US leadership to enemy agents?

If there are this many layers of "they dropped you on your head as a baby, didn't they?" when the Secret Service has direct warning of a major threat, what the hell kind of protection does the President have, or the Vice-President, or any of the other notable names with a USSS detail?

If the US Secret Service was 'security theater' in the same vein as the TSA, what happens when the curtain is pulled back and everyone sees that the Wizard of Oz is just a sad little man in a booth? Should we expect to see more -- and more successful -- assassination attempts with actual muscle behind them in the near future?

And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!

Could the concerns about Iran have distracted from Crooks? That is, he's clearly not Iranian, so maybe don't waste too much time and effort on him if that'll cause you to miss out on the Iranian threats? Combine that with general incompetence, and that seems not a crazy explanation, maybe?

I totally agree that for practical purposes, the rally was supposed to be a high water mark of security, at least according to the standards of the time. It's not good at all.

From Exhibit B:

Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Slupe told ABC News that he was informed by other law enforcement officials that a Butler Township police officer searching for the suspicious person was vaulted onto the AGR building's roof and briefly confronted the gunman, who turned his weapon to the officer, causing him to retreat back down. Shots rang out moments later.

This is consistent with one of my speculations I mentioned a few days ago -- that the police did not have a shoot-first mentality and were expected to be point on security outside the perimeter due to outsourcing. I also talked about communication challenges. Most everything so far is still consistent with this framework, which is an incompetence one (gross incompetence to be sure, but perhaps not willful). To be fair, I say mostly consistent because:

Investigators believe that could have led to confusion as Secret Service snipers were trying to determine whether there was a threat to Trump and where it might be coming from, according to the sources.

Secret Service counter snipers positioned on buildings close to the rally stage were aware the AGR building was being used as a staging area by law enforcement, sources said. Investigators believe that could have led to a delay in the Secret Service sharpshooters' reactions because they had to first figure out whether the suspect was a threat, sources said.

But once shots were fired at the former president, the Secret Service snipers could not wait any longer and took out the gunman, sources said.

... Secret Service agents were listening to radio traffic about a suspicious person police were looking for and heard local law enforcement talking about some sort of confrontation involving police, the sources said.

These quotes are sending mixed messages. The first part of the quote and the last quote makes it sound like there were some communication challenges and clear confusion. Did the Secret Service know he had a gun? One sniper team clearly oriented themselves in the right direction, but I would direct you to this analysis that states the slope of the roof was such that the snipers did not have line of sight until the last second. However, the second part of the quote seems to suggest that maybe the Secret Service hesitated to take a shot, and THAT would be malicious, or incompetent enough to be malicious, and in that scenario I'd say that we are into conspiracy land as totally worth considering.

And if Hanlon's Razor does bears out and it was in fact merely incompetence... then we apparently live in a world where this is the best the US Secret Service can do while on high alert, actively preparing to defend their protectee against an Iranian-backed assassination attempt.

I kind of do think this is the case. It's worth noting that despite possible claims otherwise, I think candidates, even of a major party and even ones projected to win, are never going to be Secret Service protected the same as a sitting president. Or at least, are not currently protected the same. I think this is bad, and should change. Because obviously one of the two people are going to be President soon for all practical purposes, but I'm not convinced that the system is set up to reflect that properly.

However, for that matter, I'd also guess with fairly high confidence that the Vice President's protection even worse than Trump's. That might matter when it comes to questions of fairness. (If this is not the case I'd be interested to know). So if the question is "how vulnerable are the rest of US leadership to enemy agents" I'd say the answer is at least moderately vulnerable, yes! After all, in theory and in practice, most of the deterrent effect, at least for foreign nations, is supposed to be a combination of norms and most importantly the threat of traditional retaliation when it comes to assassinations. The system is not currently run that way. Cost cutting happens even at the highest levels, after all. And we are considered to be in peacetime. Obviously standards are different if we are actually at war, and funding is too. Most of the other-people protection is for regular-level crazy people and not dedicated-level crazy people, and I guess normally that is enough? Otherwise we'd see Nancy, not Paul Pelosi being attacked, or things more like that. I don't know any random crazy who would go out of their way to assassinate Vice President Kamala Harris... attention is normally drawn straight to the top.

It also depends on how specific the attack warning is. At times, the US clearly has high specificity intelligence, and the evidence is that they do usually act. Hell, we even warned Russia, practically our global enemy, that they were going to have a terror attack at specifically a concert venue, warned our own visiting citizens of such, and we were right. The reporting hasn't been super clear about how specific or "actionable" the Iranian threat was, AFAIK.

One thing is very clear however...

And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!

Biden should have fired her almost immediately, quite frankly. Absolutely crazy incompetence even in the best-case scenario. And the buck has to stop somewhere.

What is not a conspiracy theory is that Biden failed to provide Trump with adequate protection in spite of the security detail begging for more manpower. Biden needs to answer for why this happened, and how refusing to protect political rivals is compatible with democracy.

The absolute best case scenario for the administration is that they're running a Secret Service that's so incompetent that it fails at basic tasks. This doesn't exactly make a compelling reelection case either. We're not trying to get our opponents killed, we just degrade institutions to the point where security teams don't bother to secure roofs.

I think it was like bullies in the playground playing keep away. It’s not about the ball, it’s just about proving you can’t do anything about it. Except in this case the ball is life-saving SS protection.

Give her a week, see how the Congressional testimony shakes out.

If the SS was neither incompetent nor malicious, they should be able to provide evidence for what they were thinking. I expect that either 1) they didn’t actually sight Crooks, 2) they thought he was a friendly, or 3) they judged him nonthreatening enough to investigate (or make the locals investigate) rather than shoot.

Having been around right wing rallies, I think people are way underestimating how common and overestimating how actionable "Guy with rangefinder/AR" actually is in retrospect. Obviously should not be allowed anywhere near Trump, but there you are.

I've seen speculation that the snipers were expecting a long-range threat, and so were set up with high-magnification scopes that may have made target acquisition and ID difficult at close range. I'm skeptical, but it's something to consider.

They didn't have spotters due to staffing issues.

Apparently the shooter wasn't as amateurish as originally believed and he stashed the gun near the shooting spot.

Otoh, again, closest possible shooting spot, and they overlooked it.

Not only did they overlook it, they overlooked it while the crowd was pointing and shouting, while the police responded and confronted the shooter, and while the shooter not only aimed, not only fired, but fired repeatedly. Like, it's one thing for them to miss the guy. It's another thing for them to miss the guy, while a significant portion of the crowd is pointing at him and shouting that there's a guy there.

Elsewhere in the thread someone quoted ABC news, in turn quoting the Butler county sheriff, who confirmed the story of Crooks being confronted by an officer just before firing.

To have that confrontation, the "sense" to ignore the cop and make those shots at 150 yards with iron sights--no adrenaline pumping, no jitters? Crooks must have been a crack shot with frozen veins. I guess I assume a second shooter wouldn't miss (+ all the other questions that raises), because otherwise that explanation would make far more sense than "random schizo is as coolheaded as scout sniper."

There's a quote popularized by the Wheel of Time: "Duty is heavier than a mountain, Death lighter than a feather."

Much of fear and anxiety come from uncertainty. He may have come to the mental conclusion he was going to get popped after taking the shot and as a result calmed down immensely, making things easier. This is how some people response to stressful situations by nature. Emergency training of all kinds is designed to get people to this point but some people already have it, and it's not always who you'd expect (ex: I've seen nervous wreck seeming med students respond to their first code and absolutely kill it....and then turn around and start blubbering as soon as the emergency was over).

Yeah, danger does work like that for some people. I'm the calmest, most concentrated and least-panicky in a potentionally violent situation and for several minutes afterwards. I start shaking, sometimes uncontrollably some minutes after.

IRL, I'm pretty absent minded and really not someone who can concentrate well, however, risk of immediate violence does make me concentrate amazingly well for a short while.

Some people be that way. You can train for it and should (and emergency workers of various kinds do) but some people just got it. Unfortunately it often comes with the adrenaline dump afterwards as you note.

Security doesn’t just impose monetary costs on the entity paying for the security. It imposes procedural costs on everyone remotely involved.

You can’t simply say that the Secret Service has ≈unlimited resources and so they should be able to provide ≈unlimited security. The social cost of the TSA is not its $11 billion annual budget. That doesn’t account for the lines at airport security, the pain in the ass of having to buy tiny bottles of liquids to take on the plane, the patdowns, the detainment for “bomb”jokes, or the bodyscans.

In a similar way, if the Secret Service was as trigger-happy as people expected them to be, we would have a lot more accidental shootings. Maybe a nearby business schedules roof maintenance for the day of a Trump rally. What do the agents do when they see a guy carrying a big tool bag up a ladder onto the roof? Shoot?

EDIT: Along similar lines, here’s a story that sounds plausible to me. I doubt Trump himself wants secret service telling him what to do all the time.

What do the agents do when they see a guy carrying a big tool bag up a ladder onto the roof? Shoot?

Surely it wouldn't be too much trouble to send an agent over to ask the guy who he is and what he is doing? Maybe check out the tool bag to verify that it does in fact contain tools and not a gun?

I had heard that they did send someone from local PD to check it out, he peeked his head up on the roof, the shooter aimed the rifle at him and he dropped down, then the shooter started shooting at trump.

We are to believe that he 180 noscoped Trump right after scaring off a cop?

I doubt it was that fast, if it did happen. The AP is currently vague on what exactly happened, writing "Outside, a local officer climbed up to the roof to investigate. The gunman turned and pointed his rifle at him. The officer did not — or could not — fire a single shot. But Crooks did, firing into the crowd toward the former president and sending panicked spectators ducking for cover as Secret Service agents shielded Trump and pulled him from the stage. "

The BBC has more detail: "A local officer with the Butler Township Police Department attempted to check the roof. He was hoisted up by another officer when he "made visual contact with an individual who pointed a rifle at him", Butler Township Manager Tom Knights told CBS. The officer was in a "defenceless position" and couldn't engage the suspect, Mr Knights said. The officer "let go and fell to the ground" then immediately alerted others to the armed suspect's location. Moments later the shooting began."

Seems like the shooter was getting ready, possibly building up his nerve, when a cop's head popped up over the side of the roof. He pointed the rifle, the cop dropped in fear, and then the shooter likely (and quite reasonably) thought "The jig is up, it's now or never" and went for it.

If the SS can’t do basic communications and planning then it tells me that our enemies can assassinate the US POTUS at any time assuming they can find one competent guy willing to die for the cause.

Just show up as a plain clothes guy with a gun or sniper rifle. Print up a couple badges one for the local police and one for the SS. If the local police ask you question tell them your SS and vice versa. Basic Michael Weston spy craft but dumbed down a lot to a guy with 6 months training level. That was suppose to be a tv show.

The one thing I do love about all of this is Project 2025 has credibility now. Our institutions are failing. The Fed took 18 months to figure out inflation was too much money. The military bungled leaving Afghanistan. Universities are led by Hamas (half joking but leadership has sympathies), the SS is incompetent, Fauci told America cloth masks stop viruses. I could rant forever but it’s increasingly clear that the top 10-40k of our beauracracy needs replaced. It’s not just that they are anti-Trump. They are not good at their jobs and need replaced.

Biden hasn’t even fired the head of the SS which would make him look good.

If the SS can’t do basic communications and planning then it tells me that our enemies can assassinate the US POTUS at any time assuming they can find one competent guy willing to die for the cause.

They kind of can? Reagan got shot by a lone nut, it's not actually that hard to shoot at the president if you don't worry about your own personal safety.

I mentioned this previously, but the typical threat model is basically just three things: guy up close with pistol or other concealed weapon, guy far away with sniper, and a bomb. The USSS is always skittish about #1 and can almost never but fully dealt with as you mention (usually it's metal detectors and searches in controlled environments, and luck plus avoiding unplanned mingling otherwise, plus a little bit of distance to give some reaction time in the worst case), #2 and #3 are supposed to be mitigated with careful prep work beforehand. Which, clearly, was not done properly. Also, I pointed out above that the sitting president probably has both higher protection than any given candidate, and furthermore that local-level deterrence is not what any head of state not currently at war relies on. Iran is only considering an assassination because they know we would bomb the hell out of them if they did and we found out, the level of USSS protection is a factor but never the main factor.

My theory is currently:

The shooter was a 20 year old disaffected youth who didn't like the idea of either Biden or Trump being our president. He wanted to do some political violence, so he found the nearest political rally, picked up some bullets, and went looking to shoot up the crowd.

When he got there, he saw a rooftop wide open and undefended, realized he had a shot at the big guy himself, and went for it.

My guess is that he wanted a civil war, and thought this would make one.

My variation of this is that it was essentially suicide by USSS. Reports say the kid was bullied and ostracized. Sounds like a school shooter MO. Except he went after a politician/future president because while most suicidal shooters want swing a sledge hammer at the society that outcast them, this one got the opportunity.

This is very similar to my mental model as well. The mugshots of this kid is one of being a terminally online NEET who was going out with a bang, not one of an ideologue. The failing of SS is gross incompetence of lazy risk-adverse officials quiet quitting to pull a paycheck off a political target they didn't care for.

Trump has been vilifed in media for years. Liberal media has been a painting him up as the next Hitler and all that, have been for years. Laws have been rewritten to allow prosecuting him.

There is an unprecedented failure of security DESPITE there allegedly being some known threat. Suspicious person is apparently spotted with a rangefinder! ,not apprehended, then had a chance to shoot off half a dozen rounds at the 'next Hitler'.

I believed the gun youtuber t-shirt photo had to be fake, because I could not believe cops would have photographed the guy at the rally and not stopped him, questioned him and removed him from the premises. Am pretty sure they can remove any suspicious person from a to be secured area ).

Turns out, they saw him with a rangefinder (no innocent explanation for that), they took a picture of him, he was on the roof of the building they were in.. it's all incredible in the true sense of the word.

terminally online NEET who was going out with a bang, not one of an ideologue.

Terminally online apolitical NEET gives a $15 donation to 'ActBlue'

That doesn't mesh together with 'apolitical', at all.

Also, his classmate was interviewed and said Crooks was very much political and hated Trump and called his classmate stupid when he said he liked Trump.

Watching that video of his classmate being interviewed just gave me the impression that Crooks hated politicians in general.

Since I myself hate Biden and Trump equally, I can very much sympathize with his viewpoint.

A very simple explanation for why Crooks targeted Trump rather than some other politician is that the two most prominent politicians in the US are Biden and Trump, and Trump is much easier to target than Biden because Trump constantly does outdoor appearances whereas Biden mostly stays hidden away.

It's entirely irrelevant. There's always some loner who hates people and would like to kill.

What's interesting is how it is, at all, possible that he was observed, photographed, looked for and yet ended up on a prime firing position, taking shots at the candidate without being stopped by security.

Or why his social media are not all over the place. Is the trans angle real or just someone playing around with genAI ? etc.

Simple, but low prior. I got ChatGPT to list 30 notorious modern assassination attempts. Of those, all or almost all that come close to fitting the bill were by people with a history of (severe) mental illness. The only anecdote the classmate gave had Crooks calling him stupid for supporting Trump. Both the fact that he is a Trump supporter and that the target of the attempt was Trump make that fact less conspicuous, but still... maybe the simplest explanation for an assailant risking his life to assassinate one of the most hated candidates ever is that he hated that candidate in particular.

Sounds like he hated all politicians.

The discourse around conspiracy seems like a gift from the heavens for any 'pro-institution' person. What an embarrassing gaff for the Secret Service.

Seeing a bunch of old men and fat assed women who look like school teachers running around the stage was embarrassing enough. But as the details emerge, it seems like it would have been hard to do their jobs worse. I was under the impression that a rooftop was a complete no-go zone when a VIP like this is around. Let alone that a guy with a range finder is allowed to prance around without anyone asking him what he's doing.

If there is no conspiracy I would like the discourse to move away from that and towards a recognition of how bad the Secret Service has to be to let this sort of thing happen.

Let alone that a guy with a range finder is allowed to prance around without anyone asking him what he's doing.

More damningly, he was allowed to draw a bead on president trump. Like the secret service saw him point an AR-15 at Trump and let him shoot before they opened fire.

We don't actually know (as of right now) based on what I've read if the Secret Service actually saw him point a gun and yet did not shoot. It's certainly possible of course. But the language I've seen does not currently imply that (not that we have very precise language in the first place, I'm sure we will in the coming weeks)

I'm surprised there aren't 24/7 surveillance drones hovering-around a presidential security detail. It seems a lot cheaper and more effective than SS operatives manually scouting out these locations.

The USSS does currently have anti-drone tech in its protection detail, I think they have some sort of roughly man-portable radio jammer/wave disrupter kind of deal IIRC, but yeah, using drones for law enforcement could very well be a thing. However, privacy concerns means that local PDs don't usually (and IMO probably shouldn't). It does seem like pretty low-hanging fruit, though. When in doubt, budget might be the issue.

I think part of why is that they already use extensive general-level jamming/GPS stuff at events, and that might mess with their own drones? Plus it's easier to do IFF if literally every drone is a "bad" drone, you can shoot down/react with complete confidence. If you have your own special drones, it makes IFF hard for regular dudes on the ground.

Edit: Reddit turned up this so they at least had one program in progress. They don't use the high-altitude spy drones like we use in Afghanistan over US soil usually at all, partly for privacy and legal reasons.

Give it a few years. In the short term, they're probably focused more on anti-drone countermeasures, and adding IFF to that raises the complexity beyond "shoot down all drones."

On the other hand, I think laser-based anti-drone systems are probably going to start appearing in all sorts of places like this within a couple years.

Lasers can be countered with foil on the drone. Mark Rober has a good video on the state of drone warfare.

Which video?

More than that, any laser powerful enough to knock out a drone at a reasonable distance is going to be too dangerous to use in some sort of automated system in a civilian area.

A laser powerful enough to knock out anything at all is too dangerous to use in an automated fashion in a civilian area unless it has hard stop that prevents aiming the laser at low enough targets to do anything useful against similar snipers.

It’s because the service became looked at the same way special forces is: it’s a trophy that can be used to open doors to other jobs, or bragging rights.

So it becomes something that needs to be equally distributed. That’s why you have a woman running it talking about increasing the number of women she hires, and then the embarrass videos from last Saturday.

USSS members should be 6’5” terrifying meat shields with guns. Yes Brienne of Tarth, no to Caroline Ellison.

USSS members should be 6’5” terrifying meat shields with guns.

Nah, you want someone calm under pressure first, relatively innocuous, so around 6 feet or so. Good with guns and probably combat experience. That will make most of your good candidates men, but you don't want 10 Jack Reacher's. For a start they need to be able to fit inside vehicles with the principal and some to be able to blend into your crowds if needed. 25-35 and if you have a female principal you will also want some female officers, as your principal is likely to try and keep men out of the bathroom with her at least in a lot of cases. The Secret Service is going to have to guard women at some point, so at least a few of them should be women as well. The female close protective officers I met were certainly...butcher than average, but they could still put on a dress for a garden party or ambassadorial function. Not all of your security should stand out.

Okay fair point that there should probably be some people that can blend into the crowd.

But the people literally walking around the President as actual literal meat shields should actually be the hulking beasts I'm talking about.

If 'meat shield' is high on the list of qualifications, hasn't the protection meaningfully failed at that point anyways? Analytically, the ability to 15% more effectively take a literal bullet with your body is less valuable than for example a 10% faster reaction time, so selecting for criteria like that makes more sense. Plus, the amount of people who want to join the USSS... there's a lot of prestige, but I'm pretty sure the job itself sucks ass. Super boring, super stressful, so-so pay, and you can't even party when you go to a foreign country anymore after that last scandal

Do you have any particular evidence that the SS is too…effeminate? It sounds like you’re reasoning backwards from the conclusion, here.

Well, the story their leader is going with for now is that they couldn't put agents on the roof because it was sloped. That's pretty effeminate.

This story is an obvious lie because they put agents on a different sloped roof. Who knows the real reason(although I'd go with laziness).

Do you consider the presence of a Melissa McCarthy lookalike in Trump's personal detail to be evidence? I can't imagine an institution with healthy masculinity allowing this slob to occupy any highly visible position.

I've seen her, and I've seen her failing to get her pistol back in her holster, apparently because of her muffin top. I've seen it in slo-mo while people mocked her.

I'm not confident she actually did a bad job, or that any of the criticism of her is deserved. I think the reports of a quota for female agents are extremely worrying, but I've seen no evidence, other than her shortness, that she's actually bad at her job. I don't see why her less than perfect beauty is relevant; either she can do the job or she can't, and most of the things I'm seeing her criticized for don't appear to be actual failures at doing the job.

What did she actually do wrong? She's pretty clearly not the one making the call on the snipers, nor is she the one making the call on getting Trump off the stage. Near as I can tell, she fucked up her holstering during an insane adrenaline dump, exacerbated by what is either some pudge or her concealed vest, or both. What's the actual complaint?

Isn't this the same broad who was literally cowering behind Trump and the other agents piled onto him instead of forming part of the scrum?

I honestly hadn't noticed that, and it's damning as hell.

Even then, it depends on whether she was even supposed to be jumping in. Close protection officers will have designated roles in the event of an attack. Some will be tasked with covering/moving the principal. Others will be tasked with looking for exits/shooters. It's hard to tell from that angle but she may be looking past the scrum, and be in charge of telling them which way to move. It's hard to do that from inside the scrum itself. And your sniper teams are probably going to be occupied with putting down the target.

Source: I've never been important enough to warrant close protection, but I have travelled extensively with people who have, so I have talked to them a fair bit. Not the Secret Service, but the idea remains similar. Not everyone is supposed to dive on the principal.

Without knowing what her specific task was, we have no way of judging if she was doing it well or not.

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Obesity isn't just "less than perfect beauty", it's a reflection of actual physical vitality and fitness. Having fat women do this job is just an obviously stupid idea whether she personally screwed anything up this time or not. That we're at the point where people justify enlisting fat women in roles that should be done by fit men is an incredible indictment of the discourse. Even if the complaint was strictly aesthetic and somehow her appearance wasn't reflected in physical performance, I would still object to an elite security force being staffed by people that can't be bothered to look the part. This sort of degradation reflects a culture of tolerating sloppiness and not demanding high levels of performance.

Having fat women do this job is just an obviously stupid idea whether she personally screwed anything up this time or not.

Given the "meatshield" aspect of the job, I suppose a case could be made that this lady is not fat enough...

(j/k, i think)

I dunno, it doesn't take much flesh to start a rifle bullet tumbling or fragmenting. Don't they try to dump most of their kinetic energy in the first 12-18" these days?

I actually wonder how much spaced protection you'd need before the exiting fragments would be stopped by whatever lv2 jacket they surely have politicians wearing. Maybe the "box of truth" guys have already tested that

Not applicable if they get hit by a bullet designed to go straight through an elk's shoulder, obviously, but even the world's fattest person wouldn't stop that.

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Show me evidence that the fitness standards have been lowered. Show me evidence that she would have failed the old standards. I'm ready to believe it, and condemn it, but I'm not going to presume it. And to be clear, I think it's entirely possible that they have been. It's just not obvious to me based on the video. Maybe that means I'm bad at estimating bodyguard performance, but in my defense, any lack of capability on the part of the bulletcatchers is completely overwhelmed by the part where a sniper was allowed to get seven shots off at the principle.

All US military, police, and firefighter physical fitness standards are lower for women than for men. That, if nothing else, is the lowering of the standards. They're supposed to be doing the same job so the standards should be the same, but women can't do the physical parts of the job as well because of biology. So, like so many other things in our society, the standards are lowered for women so that the outcomes are "equitable".

You can see the standards here and they are a joke.

If you don't think her physical appearance demonstrates a lack of serious physical standards, I really don't think I can convince you of this though. Contra the saying, you can pretty well judge a book by its cover when it comes to fitness.

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Brienne of Tarth is like 99.995th percentile in size when it comes to women. Absolutely not a demographic you can rely on for security agents unless you start cloning them or shoot up preteen girls with hormones so they grow up taller.

Sounds like there won’t be very many female USSS agents.

I mean, Muammar Al-Gaddafi’s Amazon guards worked pretty well until he lost the war, and it seems like ‘Arab dictator’ is a job that probably runs into more assassination attempts than presidents of the USA.

A sudden surge in personnel could cause exactly the kind of organisational chaos that allows for gaps in oversight, especially when multiple organisations are involved.

To me, at least from the outside perspective, the organizational chaos is the big unreported story. It appears that the cops were given some autonomy in how they guarded that building without having to tell the USSS what they were actually doing there. Which not only opens up the roof as a vantage point, but creates chaos exactly where it could have been lethal — until they confirmed that the guy on the roof wasn’t a cop in a t-shirt acting on orders, they can’t just assume the guy on the roof isn’t a cop. So they’re trying to get in contact with every unit near the building to find out. That takes too much time.

What should have happens that they should’ve put any locals directly under the command of one USSS agent, no one deviates from the plan without clearing it first or at least telling the central command. Then you plan for everything within gunshot range, putting someone at every access point and on the roofs. But also removing the delays necessary when you don’t know who’s doing what and thus have to waste precious time trying to contact every independent agency involved to make sure it’s not one of their guys.

I think mismanaging a sudden surge in personnel could cause that kind of organizational chaos, but the cause would be the mismanagement, not the surge in personnel. Everyone knows that a sudden surge in personnel, especially when multiple organizations are involved, is likely to be messy and cause unforeseen complications. Thus anyone in charge of such a situation has the responsibility to account for that chaos by preventing it, mitigating it, circumventing it, etc. So all this explanation would do is to raise the question of how/why the director of the Secret Service behaved so incompetently as to allow this kind of organizational chaos to occur. Perfection is impossible, but the level of failure that occurred here isn't in the realm of "they just can't reach the impossible standard of perfection" and closer to "it'd be difficult to make the failure look more intentional if you'd tried."

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!

It's scenarios like this which make me notice.

Imagine you had a primary care doctor, who hated you, and just more or less entirely quit giving a fuck. Ran test to pretend they were doing something, but then largely just ignored the results and took a very "Whatever happens happens, fuck that asshole" approach. How much culpability would they have when they just passive aggressively ignored that you had a fetal, but treatable disease that goes on to kill you?

Women are far more passive aggressive than men. And everything we learn about the failures around this Trump assassination feed into the stereotypes of vengeful passive aggressive women. Cheatle committed gross negligence of her duties tantamount to pulling the trigger herself.

I think this is exactly it. No conspiracy, just a person who was slightly past not caring.

She's several layers of hierarchy above Trump's security detail head.

If she was 'past caring' that wouldn't mean much for how his detail was being run.

Not if she was the one who diverted agents to her personal sponsor Jill Biden at the expense of the hated Donald Trump.

Not if she was responsible for the number of agents on each detail, and keeping Trump's so threadbare that everyone is working every day with no breaks.

This is my opinion of the incident. A full conspiracy has too many moving parts. Willfully being bad at your job and leaving an opening a child could find is my default assumption.

DEI SS being this incompetent seems like a stretch. Willfully not giving a shit because you think Trump is Hitler makes sense to me. Somehow you need to get to the hive mind doing its thing without everyone being coordinated. Cheedle being a neverTrumper type gets you one part of the hive mind working in concert.

This incident further highlights to me how important project 2025 is going to be. Washington is against Trump and either thru direct action or choosing to be lazy won’t work with him.

Trump does way more outdoors events, and events in general, than the average President-tier politician. Having to protect Trump, who both constantly does outdoor rallies and has fewer resources assigned to him than an actual President would, yet is also is one of the most hated US politicians of all time, is probably just really tough for the Secret Service. I can't think of any Presidential candidate or President other than Trump in recent memory who keeps traveling around the country constantly giving outdoor speeches. I think it's plausible that the Secret Service is just out of their depth, they are set up to guard an Obama or Biden type who mostly stays in DC or gives speeches at indoors venues, but they are not set up to effectively guard a Trump.

To add on, funding levels which directly reflect in staffing availability are usually determined far in advance. As we saw with the Capitol police being chronically short-staffed and low-morale even before Jan 6th, these things happen in the federal bureaucracy at least somewhat often.

Why I call the extensive use of local cops at events "outsourcing". It seems to work and save money quite often, and works until it suddenly doesn't, and the bigwigs act all surprised "oh we never could have foreseen this". Seen it way too often.

"I love being a firefighter. The pay is good, the guys are a great team, I really like the support I get from the community. But man, do I hate fires. Every time there's one I feel like quitting, you know?"

Protecting the VIP is literally their job description. It's not like Trump's traveling around Iran or gatecrashing Black Bloc parties. An outdoor speech is something the SS must have a goddamn checklist for.

"Agent Black, you secure building A." Agent Black pulls out a checklist and goes down the list: call the owner, establish the list of people who have access to the building, which ones have to access it on the day of the speech, call them and get their pictures, identify doors which provide access to the windows facing the scene and the rooftop, identify how many ingress points have to be secured, call local police to get more warm bodies, give them their own checklists. On the day of the event do a roll-call, search the premises, seal the doors of the searched rooms and check the seals every X minutes, redo the roll call via radio every Y minutes, identify each person that approaches the building and cross-reference them against the list, turn away those who aren't on the list, escort those who are...

Someone obviously thought they could get away with some corner cutting. Or worse, "presenting a positive image". No, you have to be an asshole. If someone tells you they work there and they forgot their iPad in their locker and they are not on the list of people that have access to the building, they get to ride in the back of a cruiser until you find out why they are not on the list. If they are on the list, but not on the list of people that have to be there today, you tell them to stay the fuck away until the VIP leaves. If they get nervous, they get to ride in the back of a cruiser too, and you go check the lockers just in case their iPad is shaped more like an AR-15.

The Secret Service probably does do this. But the Secret Service was not "in charge" of the building. At least allegedly. And you know that Officer Black is not going to be as diligent. We all know how often a lot of cops sit in their comfy air-conditioned cop car on their laptop... not to be a dick, but it happens. So yes, corner cutting, 1000%. The conversation is about how much and how bad and how foreseeable those cut corners were. We're getting a clearer picture but we haven't seen the report yet, if they've even put it together yet.

I think it's plausible that the Secret Service is just out of their depth, they are set up to guard an Obama or Biden type who mostly stays in DC or gives speeches at indoors venues, but they are not set up to effectively guard a Trump.

This isn't a "just" thing, though. The Secret Service isn't a force of nature or some incomprehensible artifact we found somewhere that we have no control over, either in its competence or its application. If the Secret Service is out of their depth effectively guarding Trump, either the responsibility should have been delegated to an organization that isn't out of their depth, or the Secret Service should have transformed itself into an organization that wouldn't be out of their depth. If they didn't recognize that they were out of their depth, then some decision-maker was incompetent by not doing the due diligence of figuring out if they're actually capable of performing the role they are supposed to perform. If they were not provided the funding and resources to accomplish this, then the mismanagement is by the people who control the funding.

Well put. Agree totally. I'm optimistic we'll get a sense for what level this ends up on in the next few leaks, if we continue to get leaks at the same rate. With enough info I think you can usually tell who is spending their time on CYA

is probably just really tough for the Secret Service.

  1. That still doesn't explain why the prime spot for taking a shot at Trump was left entirely, completely open.

  2. why cops spotted a person of interest almost an hour before, spotted him with a rangefinder 30 mins before, photographed him, let him use a ladder to climb a building and take off shots. He wasn't questioned or tossed out or watched closely, they just let him proceed to the best and about only place from which a not-great shot could kill Trump.

To be clear, the article says they did attempt to find him, question him, and watch him after both of the first two incidents, they didn't ignore it. At least as far as we can tell, not totally.

They have unlimited funding and a license to do whatever they want like close down all the roads, jam cell phones, etc.

Tough tiddies Trump is difficult to guard. Figure it out.

Their funding is, ah, not unlimited.

They get around $3B a year, which is about the same as the military if New Zealand.

JUST for presidential/former president protection their budget is about a billion and a half dollars.

Yes that’s not literally unlimited, but it is functionally unlimited, and is also more than they even asked for, which would seem to suggest that it may be literally unlimited as well.

That should be more than adequate to keep a kid from crawling up on top of a roof 130 yards from Trump and shooting at him.

https://rollcall.com/2024/07/14/amid-tense-election-secret-service-working-with-already-boosted-budget/

They also handle anti-counterfeiting operations (in fact that was their original purpose) but I'm not sure how much of the budget goes to that.

Edit: Just checked and the "Protective Operations" budget is about $1 billion

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-03/U.S.%20Secret%20Service_Remediated.pdf

So for all practical intents and purposes, given the small number of people the USSS has to protect (all current and former presidents, the VP, parts of their families, current candidates polling over x%, did I miss any?) there's no excuse for them to be spread so thin. Incompetence and administrative bloat are the only reasonable sounding explanations (other than more conspiratorial angles) I can think of at the moment.

Edit 2: So the Secret Service's budget for protective services is roughly the same as the entire military budget of Latvia, a NATO member with a population of about 2 million doing a massive military build up in response to Russia invading Ukraine.

I don't think the problem is (mostly) money, it's that the job is ass/boring and morale is bad. Which I think is party uncontrollable, but still points to a major leadership failure I think. It looks like (ironically) House Republicans gave them more money in 2021 than they asked for, they made a plan to hire more people, and then... just didn't. At least from what I just now read.

This survey report is pretty damning. USSS ranked 413 out of 459 sub-agencies in satisfaction. To be fair, they've been near the bad end for a long time -- 2016 they were rated the absolute worst of any, bottoming out at a 33.8% "engagement and satisfaction" score, though despite their poor ranking that improved to 57.7% as of last year despite their poor relative placement. They were last in the top half of subagencies in 2005 (first year of data), 2007, and 2011 only. So I don't think the USSS problems are recent, but they clearly are severe. Pay also was bottom quartile at 57.7% satisfaction, so one does indeed wonder where the money went after all.

Worth also noting that this most recent score broke down supervisors (80.1%, still ranked 361 only) vs senior leadership (satisfaction only 49.6%, ranked 406). Literally everything in the bottom 25%, then, but the leadership score still stands out.

I think this data supports the idea that leadership is horrible and should be replaced at the very least.

Man, it’s good to be on top.

Or more accurately—to the be the one doing the protecting, rather than the one being protected.

Obama Biden, and even Romney and Clinton and Dubya, all also strike me as more cooperative, rule following, obedient types. They do what the nice men with guns tell them to do. Trump is notoriously the opposite.

"we've got something suspicious we should pull Trump from the stage"

"Nah he'll never listen"

On Jan 6 when Trump wanted to go to the Capitol after he wrapped his speech, the Secret Service refused to drive him there. Trump ended up not going to the Capitol, even though he could have just walked, as many of the people who watched his speech did.

Had the Secret Service been more willing to accomodate Trump we might have never had rioters breaking into the Capitol.

I wonder if his experience then influenced his instincts to defy the Secret Service so that he could pause and raise a fist for the crowd.

What occurred to me is that despite all the handwringing regarding a violent right-wing backlash to the event, I believe his fist-pump display actually curbed such an impulse in that very moment.

Imagine if Trump had been immediately dragged off the stage, and how ambiguous that image would have been. Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he wounded badly and will bleed out soon? Maybe physically impaired? What the fuck just happened? Is something going to be 'off' if and when he shows up again?

Trump gave 'proof of life' with that act. It wasn't enough to have him merely standing, or to provide a follow-up "I'm fine!" tweet that people may not trust. He snapped back into his usual shape and reassured everybody thay he was OK. And so it ends with cheers and jubilation instead of the wailing and gnashing of teeth. A lot could have happened in those few minutes, and the energy ultimately got redirected to Trump himself.

Anybody bitching about his fist-pump while also shaking in their boots about political violence can't see two feet in front of themselves.

I can't see how anyone wouldn't love that fist pump. It is badass and awesome and defiant in a good way. I can understand people not liking chants of "fight, fight" at the convention, but personally I don't mind it given context.

I saw a lot of comments ranging from the boring "ugh, Trump needlessly showboating again" to "He's making the SS' jobs difficult" and finally to "that he was even allowed to do that means this was staged".

Ignoring the third one since you would have to be insane to keep up that line today, I'll have to admit that they may not even be wrong on the first two. In the fog of it, Trump was exposing himself to further danger for the sake of a visual display. And he was indeed holding up his protection while they did their thing. But in the end, it was absolutely worth it and the correct move to make.

The image is awesome, and I think most Dems are honest enough to admit that. They're just reluctant to give it any credit.

Trump was exposing himself to further danger for the sake of a visual display. And he was indeed holding up his protection while they did their thing. But in the end, it was absolutely worth it and the correct move to make.

In fact, him doing this in the heat of the moment amid gunfire is largely the reason why it was the correct move. It was a display of masculine bravado. Perfect contrast, not only to the sitting president, but to pretty much every other politician. The resulting photographs alone are invigorating. Trump is effectively an avatar of masculinity in a culture which largely degradates it.

Exactly what I was thinking of.

Man, from the depths of my memories of Supreme Court cases comes Wood vs. Moss, where Bush the Younger made a last-minute change in his plans, up and deciding to have dinner somewhere that wasn't on the schedule. They were going to eat on the outdoor patio, to boot. The only problem was that protest areas had already been approved for two groups (one of supporters, one of opponents), and the SS thought that the opponents' location was too close for them to be able to secure it. Rather than be all, "Sorry, Mr. President; you can't eat here tonight," they decided to move the protesters. This led to a lawsuit which claimed that the real, hidden, motivation for moving the opposing group was to discriminate against their viewpoint in favor of the supporters.

I imagine the SS has to deal with stuff like this all the time. They probably have to be carefully selective about when they actually choose to tell the President, "No." Most of the time, they probably just scramble and try to hold on. Of course, heat of the moment, credible threats, etc. all end up smashed together in a horrible, subjective scale for what type of action you take. They probably have to be pretty careful in trying to manage the relationship, too, where, similar to what you're saying, different VIPs may have different preferences/risk tolerances. They don't want to piss off the President by saying no too often, but if you end up with a dead President, you don't want to be left only being able to say, "Yeah, but this guy always got pissed when we said no or took some conservative action, so we just got into a habit of accepting more risk for him." It'll never play well, especially if anyone is looking to blame you for not being cautious enough in the aftermath of a tragedy.

Of course, no one on TheMotte is going to have any insight whatsoever on what Trump's relationship to the SS actually looks like, similar to how there was all the haranguing in his first term about how he was engaging in the PDB. Some folks wanted to skewer him, and others were saying that they worked toward productive, engaging meetings, and others yet were sure that the bureaucracy was intentionally being intransigent and sabotaging the relationship. Only the tiniest percentage of people actually know, and they're generally not talking unless they are doing so to promote some agenda or another.

I mean, relationships with the USSS usually come out to some extent in books, biographies, and memoirs, though still not completely.

I did a quick search of 2015 to 2023 just with google, this claims most of the USSS were pro-Trump and even pro-J6 in some cases, and anti-Biden. Apparently there's a lot of talk that the USSS strongly disliked Hillary specifically. Per rumors, Vanessa Trump even got into a relationship with one officer. Overall I think there's good reason to be skeptical of claims that the USSS deliberately didn't protect Trump, that doesn't seem to match with their actual alignment as far as we know.

But the leadership of course is another matter, not always the same as rank and file. One critical question right now is who exactly was the highest level person who signed off on the plan that lacked USSS on that roof.

Apparently there's a lot of talk that the USSS strongly disliked Hillary specifically.

Can confirm this specifically. This was from Bill's tenure but I had a friend of a friend connection to her Secret Service detail, they fucking hated her. At the time it was emphasized to me "we are so professional and yet I'm willing to bitch about this woman to you, that's how bad it is." Granted I'm not sure how to assess the professionalism given recent events, and this was like 25 years ago.

Then you drag him off the stage.

The only thing which might have galvanized his base more than an attempted assassination!

I’m not convinced that nobody on the building in question is proof of conspiracy. It’s entirely possible that this is simply bad coordination between agencies — nobody was on the roof because there was no centralized control of who was assigned what and therefore everybody thought that one roof was covered by somebody else’s team. It might also explain why they weren’t too worried about a guy on the roof, as they might well have assumed it was a local cop assigned to the building. And once alerted it might take some time to figure out that the guy on the roof isn’t a cop on the detail.

I could easily imagine a strategist thinking "we don't need someone on that roof, we've already got snipers on two other roofs covering it", without thinking ahead to the snipers' dilemma of "there's someone on that roof now - is it one of the local cops from the building below? did our own plans change? just how suspicious does that guy have to look before I kill him?"

But the trouble is, that's not what the "strategist" reported thinking; her official thoughts were "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," and the trouble with those thoughts are that they are the most obviously false excuses that I've ever heard, and yes I am including all the "gosh he just fell out of that window" stories about Russian politicians. Sometimes people really do fall out of windows; at this point the odds are a quadrillion-to-one but who knows? But if you say you're keeping your teams off of roofs where the slope is too high, after there have already been many photos published of your teams at the same event on roofs with higher slopes, then that is an outright lie.

I still suspect that this lie was an attempt to cover up incompetence, not an attempt to cover up conspiracy - conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story! - but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.

The sloped roof thing sounds like confabulation to me. In the moment she judged that “I don’t know” would be a terrible response and so had to come up with something plausible, but came up with something terribly implausible.

Either that or that’s what a subordinate told her and she’s easily fooled.

conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story!

They planned for Trump to be dead, and their cover stories reflect that.

but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.

The cover-up is often the first, best evidence of the conspiracy.

if i set a barely out of highschool, no training guy up to plink cans off of a fence i dont think i would put all my chickens in the "yeah hes gonna hit one" basket. if dude was some ex marine maybe i could see the angle, but i dont think any type of spooky spies would make a plan that 100% rides on the efficacy of an untrained man to peg a target at medium range with a very short time window and essentially all the pressure you can imagine without being under fire.

I don't believe there was a deep state plot to kill Trump less imaginative than the CIA's innumerable attempts on Fidel Castro's life. But that is a bad argument simply because we don't know that this twenty year old kid was untrained- for all we know, he could have taken professional shooting lessons.

we know he wasnt trained by the millitary, fair enough though that there are more ways to get good at shooting.

If he did, I'm pretty sure there would be a record and we'd find out? Usually people who shoot guns regularly aren't very quiet about the fact. Of course, might depend on how cooperative the parents are. We do know that he had gone to the range with his dad's AR a few times before.

I should further add that he clearly wasn't a pro. If he were always planning on using the roof, why would he have shown up near the metal detectors in the first place?

They planned for Trump to be dead, and their cover stories reflect that.

If Trump were dead, the issue of how the fuck the kid was allowed to be on that roof would be absolutely, red-hot critical and way more than it is now. That there isn't a good cover story indicates that they're either incredibly, unbelievably stupid or that this was really unplanned.

It's somewhat noteworthy that CNN happened to be livestreaming the thing, which apparently is not their normal practice for Trump rallys (probably because there are a lot of them); one would want to check what percentage they have been doing lately.

Also... intriguing is that the NYT sent a multiple-Pulitzer photographer (Doug Mills) who seems to 'get the shot' no matter what (including the 'Bush informed of WTC being hit by jets' one, which is itself the result of a pretty low-percentage assignment) to cover this podunk rally -- now he gets another Pulitzer for capturing a bullet whizzing past Trump's head, but I'd imagine the alternative-timeline photo would have been quite the career capstone as well.

I mean, this rally seemed unusually high profile before the shooting. I knew Trump was going to be speaking in some town in western PA that afternoon.

Eh, that's where conspiratorial thinking starts to assign malign meaning to everything. What would be the theory here, that CNN and the NYT somehow were tipped off beforehand that someone was going to take a shot at Trump, and the photographer even knew where and when to point his camera?

Honestly, I am kind of surprised the photographer hasn't been dragged yet. That photo he took of bloody Trump raising his fist is the sort of iconic image that defines an era and has already hugely boosted Trump's image. If we assume the photographer is not a Trump fan, this was certainly not an effect he intended when he took the shot.

(Now, I think it's more likely that the photographer would have taken the shot anyway because he probably cares more about getting a Pulitzer-winning photo than he does about maybe helping a political candidate he doesn't like. But I'll bet he gets some flack for "helping Trump.")

I've seen a bit of this. Some cable news commentator saying it was so irresponsible for him to not destroy that photo. Doesn't he know this helps Trump?

Time removed the photo from their cover. But that's so little so late.

https://imgur.com/a/z5f85ig

But I'll bet he gets some flack for "helping Trump."

https://x.com/peterjhasson/status/1813292381640249693

Eh, that's where conspiratorial thinking starts to assign malign meaning to everything. What would be the theory here, that CNN and the NYT somehow were tipped off beforehand that someone was going to take a shot at Trump, and the photographer even knew where and when to point his camera?

I mean yeah -- to be clear I'm not endorsing the conspiracy here, but if we are hypothesizing that somebody knew enough to short Truth Social in advance it doesn't seem like much of a further stretch that CNN/NYT were tipped off that this would be a good rally to cover.

Honestly, I am kind of surprised the photographer hasn't been dragged yet. That photo he took of bloody Trump raising his fist is the sort of iconic image that defines an era and has already hugely boosted Trump's image. If we assume the photographer is not a Trump fan, this was certainly not an effect he intended when he took the shot.

I think he did some self-dragging along those lines in an article where (as I recall) he kind of said "well if you look at the rest of my photos he looks kind of drained, not so heroic at all!"

The photo is too good to pass up though, regardless of how helpful it is for Trump.

Last rally before the RNC might have been reason enough to send a high-profile photographer

Particularly since it was entirely possibly that Trump would spring a surprise veep announcement or that the veep candidate would even accompany him on stage.

Before now I thought it would take so many people to be in the loop that someone would turn, but as I wrote downthread it now seems entirely plausible that it would only take 1 person on-site to open the door, or prop up the ladder.

My major questions are these:

  1. Short activity, some of the information in the tweets is wrong but the short interest was shooting up, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for that but not this one, last Friday was there in fact a major put acquisition with a fast expiry? If so, that's investigation-level suspicious

  2. Sniper ROE, my assumption would be they have very broad rules for engagement, so if the rules changed, how long ago was it changed, and is there documentation? If that's wrong and they do have broad ROE, 2a, why didn't they shoot? 2b, why didn't they talk to the detail? Or radio to command? Or hell, if nothing else, why not just shout? Did they radio it in and it was ignored? If so, I would immediately assume conspiracy, and that someone's going to turn

  3. I see people elsewhere saying there was an atypical amount of media presence at the rally, is this true, and if so, why?

  4. Most significantly, allowing Trump to go on the stage. I've seen clips before of USSS being highly proactive about pulling the President. If this guy had been initially identified an hour before, then someone with the USSS confirmed "suspicious guy on roof" at 5:52, what is the minute-by-minute explanation for that information failing to reach his detail?

#1 meaning what? Just a general question if anyone notable made stock bets? #2 is a good question, though I'm not totally sure if they would disclose ROE to the public, for fear of malicious manipulation.

#3: Right in the middle of the veepstakes, battleground state, and near the convention. Also a bigger rally than expected. Specifically, he teased the VP pick in his rally only 2 days before, so I think some media thought it would happen at that rally so people would know going in to the convention. Though Vance wasn't there, so maybe not. Still doesn't seem too odd.

#4 is still being revealed. Per this timeline at least they have two sources including the sheriff who are claiming they didn't know he had a gun yet and the roof attention wasn't until 6:09, with less than 3 minutes to go. That one claims that video of "he has a gun!" and people running was only 4 or 5 seconds before the first shot.

Austin Private Wealth is the group in question, they're a fee-only fiduciary with just over $1B in assets managed. Their filing on Friday 7/12 listed 12,000 puts on $DJT. They put out a statement saying a third-party vendor caused all of their options positions to be multiplied by 10,000, and so the actual position was 12 puts. I don't know enough about the workings of actual investing groups to speak here with any definitiveness, but it seems unusual to me that they would buy 12 puts--assuming a $1 premium, that's $1200. That's nothing compared to their total holdings. Maybe there's a diversified spread and they had like $50,000 or $100,000 of puts, and I'm sure that'll come out if they did. Or maybe it was a hedging move if they have 1200 shares of $DJT, but I think they'd have probably included in their statement if they had such stock. "We didn't have this large short, in fact we hold $DJT." Simple.

But that also ignores a worse question, from my cursory research their holdings would be reported under SEC Form 13F. Maybe this is wrong, if it is the following can be crossed out, but if that's true: multiple people from APW should have, and possibly would have needed to sign off on it prior to its approval, so did they all fail obscenely in their fiduciary duty? Or did they fail it by only one person being charged with verifying and then approving. If the financial guy doesn't notice a position worth $1200 has been marked as $1.2 million, should he keep managing your money? Now multiply that by as many options positions as they had. It's insane. They should absolutely be investigated if for no other reason than the claimed lapse in duty, unless it's a regular thing for investment groups to give astronomically wrong filings to the SEC. But there is presumably a lengthy paper trail here, so if they're lying and they did have a 1.2 million share short, I assume it's a matter of time before someone with the proper finance bona fides uncovers what happened.

All this meaning: if APW did in fact have a 12,000 put position, then that combined with their statement now denying it and their attempted obfuscation, is clear evidence of conspiracy.

As for #3, sure, all plausible. #4 yeah remains to be seen. I don't think I emphasized enough, but that is the question above all other questions. When did they know? If people go to prison over this, it will be on that question. The CBS report says at 5:51 they had a suspicious person with a rangefinder, that's enough for me to say someone had a failure in duty worthy of prison. But that's criminal negligence, for failure to protect the President and the people around him, the death of Compertore. Whether it was malicious aforethought is the deeper question, and one that, again, remains to be seen.

Just to provide some counter-narrative evidence, apparently Crook had researched both Trump and Biden campaign schedules and had, for all appearances[1] picked Trump as he passed within 50 miles that week.

Note saying the rest of the post is wrong about incompetence, but as I see it, the guy on the roof there couldn't figure out if the perp was local PD and didn't want to start a friendly fire incident before someone deconflicting them. The fact that local PD was stationed in the building actually makes this narrative more plausible that maybe one of their guys would go out on the roof.

[1] Appearances, reality, etc...

I mean, if all we get is the evidence we have... he searched about "major depressive disorder" in April and "In the days after the rally was announced, he made searches related to Trump, President Biden, the former president's whereabouts on July 13 and the Democratic National Convention."

So if we never hear anything else about motive, my educated guess is that he wanted to shoot either Biden or Trump and chose Trump due to proximity. Would be nice to get more, though.

Right, which means all the (right-wing)-hyperbole-about-the-(left-wing)-hyperbole was completely off the mark.

When we get a full investigation into the guy, and all the evidence gets published, then we can start talking about who was off the mark. I am so over going for mundane conclusions by default.

The fact that local PD was stationed in the building actually makes this narrative more plausible that maybe one of their guys would go out on the roof.

Not only would but quite possibly should have been on the roof.

One has to wonder how often it happens that the local cops don't behave remotely as they're supposed to.

Indeed. Who wants to be the trigger happy sniper that shot a local cop with a wife & kids.

Honestly looks like incompetence to me. The conspiracy would seem to need to be too big to be pulled off. You would have needed to recruit idiot kid to do the shooting and also need local police to be incompetent and not stumble on him.

If you recruited idiot kid to do the shooting then you have to hope local police do not take him alive.

There are too many points of failure and too many people who would need to be in the know for this to have been a legitimate conspiracy to assassinate Trump.

I take this as evidence that our institutions have completely rotted away with DEI and we no longer have institutional capabilities to do anything. Its a nation in decline except that tech scales and we have like 1k smart people in San Fran doing things.

The curtain has been pulled back. The big reveal was Biden at the debate. This is why Trump is unbeatable now. Everyone knows the country is in decline and poorly managed now.

The question of conspirators is how many at the rally would need to be in the loop. My assumption would be as the number goes up, the probability of a defector quickly approaches 100%. If 50, I'd assume someone has already turned. If 25, is it halved, or is 25 still in the >99% territory? What's the necessary minimum? I think it might be a far fewer than 50, even 25.

It could be just 1. Whoever's in charge on-site. Call them SC, site chief.

The cops defer to USSS in these events, so they follow SC's orders and they're neutralized. SC decides to keep USSS away from that building, says the cops will cover, then gives the cops the go-ahead to be inside if it's too hot. If SC's controls all comms, as could make sense to prevent crosstalk, then they can ignore the cop reports and not pass the intel along to the President's personal detail. I'm skeptical of what's been said of USSS sniper ROE, but if they do have such strict rules, then they wouldn't need to be in the loop. They would do their job exactly as expected: wait for the guy to shoot, shoot him back. Loose end is killed, easy.

Had they achieved such a crime, then they use the chaos, bounce around the blame ball, give a few token heads, maybe even big ones, but who cares because they've won. They assassinated an opponent so they'll certainly rig an election, then re/consolidate power.

I agree with this description. I think people overestimate who all is in the know. Some people know that there's some plan to deal with Trump before the election. A smaller circle knows that it's really as assassination attempt. An even smaller circle know some details, but the smallest circle of all are the ones procuring the shooter and arranging for an uncovered rooftop. That could be as little as one or two people, as you've demonstrated.

There are clips of Victoria Nuland smirking and saying Trump won't be President. She also smirked in a similar fashion when talking about the destruction of Nordstream. I take that as evidence that she was in the highest circle, that knew there was a plan to deal with Trump, or in the next one, that knew it was an assassination but not the details.

How the heck does "procuring a shooter" even work? Much less the coordination or the concealment, but I'm still stuck at step 1. Like, if you're going to arrange an assassination, wouldn't you be relying on someone other than someone barely out of his teens, both to be successful as well as to not tell anyone? As a matter of actual fact, assassins get cold feet at least somewhat often, especially random people you don't know, on top of all the honeypots that the government sometimes puts out. Again, step 1 - how do you even find a dude like this, much less decide they are the best option?

Historical example of course is the actual (outside) plot to kill Lincoln. You had an actor, a former soldier, an assistant pharmacist, and a German immigrant all with targets. Respectively they were successful, got into a knife fight and ran away partway into the fight (and was almost caught as a spy before the attempt even started), ran away when said fight started, and the third guy got chickened out and went to the bar instead and got caught the next day.

Plus, if you think of all people Victoria Nuland, at best a mid-level functionary in a massive bureaucracy, knew about some sort of plot, that implies a pretty large web of people that strains credulity.

Well, mostly like this.

When you can identify these people, you have a menu of options. You can find a guy on the Trump campaign trail and egg him on, play into his delusions, and craft yourself an acceptable patsy in a hurry.

How the heck does "procuring a shooter" even work? Much less the coordination or the concealment, but I'm still stuck at step 1. Like, if you're going to arrange an assassination, wouldn't you be relying on someone other than someone barely out of his teens, both to be successful as well as to not tell anyone?

If you are arranging a conspiracy, the man with rifle in book depository (or on roof of the building) is a patsy, his job is to be seen and leave a corpse, the real shooter is professional on grassy knoll (or first floor of the building). Of course, successful conspiracy requires successful marksmanship.

An assassination just smells like 50x less risk averse than the cathedral usually is.

Well, usually they think they can rely on the media to control the narrative, but the emperor has no clothes, and people are talking about it.

It was no coincidence that this happened after the disastrous first debate and before Trump picked a VP (successor).

If the US Secret Service was 'security theater' in the same vein as the TSA, what happens when the curtain is pulled back and everyone sees that the Wizard of Oz is just a sad little man in a booth? Should we expect to see more -- and more successful -- assassination attempts with actual muscle behind them in the near future?

While it is possible this is now true due to the institution being hollowed out, it certainly has not always been. USSS has stopped many people like Crooks in the past, and stopped them often miles away from the target.

We still have a lot of questions, but it seems to me that the most probable answer to the question of how it happened still is something like: Some critical decision maker was indecisive.

The main "protection" that politicians have is that they're highly replaceable. You kill a Senator, they make someone else a Senator. You kill a President, they have a whole other spare President ready to go. So there's not really much point doing it for any serious strategic adversary, and mostly only total dingbats try.

This sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure I agree. Trump is not highly replaceable and this was the first serious attempt on his life.

It seems that the biggest protection that politicians have is that the average crazy person is not competent enough to get past Secret Service. I mean, this would-be Gavrilo Princip didn't exactly have the best plan either.

Trump is not highly replaceable

Of course he is. He's not even president. If he dies the GOP nominates Vance or DeSantis or Rubio or someone and the world keeps spinning.

  • -12

The world keeps spinning if humans launch all their nuclear ordinance all at once.

The world keeps spinning if the moon explodes into dust and blocks out the sun.

If he dies, nothing is ever the same again. Nobody can replace him.

Presidential assassins aren't really all that rational. Famously, Lincoln being killed not only failed to win the Confederacy the war, but made Reconstruction worse for the South. The limited history we have all suggests it's often counterproductive.

What actual policy or other objective would killing Trump uniquely accomplish?

The only reason Trump is so hated is because he was unique and he destroyed the bipartisan consensus of 'let's just pretend to fight' while we let the bureaucracy drive the country into the ground.

He wasn't replaceable, and while Vance might be a good substitute now he is far less popular.-

I'm talking from the perspective of a serious adversary. An Iranian hit squad is not going to care at all about Trump's relationship to the bureaucracy or whatever, their problem is with America and it's not going away. So the only people you actually have to defend against are random kooks who want to impress Jodie Foster or something.

An Iranian hit squad may well care that they’ll get more concessions from a democrat.

Unless they get discovered and then it's like, literal war? Sounds like a bad bet.

Trump is not highly replaceable and this was the first serious attempt on his life.

Trump is relatively unique in this respect, though.

That's part of what makes him not highly replaceable.

What?! If Trump were replaceable, there would be no point in assassinating him.

Crooks doesn't seem to have been a guy with a plan.

I do wonder what would have happened if we'd kept the "vice president of the other party takes over" thing. It's like they were optimizing for presidential assassinations with that one.

Well, until the 20th century even the party might sometimes nominate someone of the opposite party to be VP (as when the Republicans replaced Lincoln's VP Hannibal Hamlin with War Democrat Andrew Johnson). And of course, Lincoln was assassinated, though Booth wasn't trying to replace him with Johnson. (In fact, Booth's co-conspirators were supposed to assassinate Johnson too, but they chickened out.)

There is a reason presidential assassinations are generally done by extremists with bent worldviews, and conspiracy theories notwithstanding, not some cunning plan by the other party. There are way too many points of failure to make "If we send a deranged gunman to remove him from the ticket, we win" a plausible plot.

It could be better; the Speaker of the House succeeds if the President and VP are both assassinated and is frequently of the opposite party (and after him, the President pro tempore of the Senate). Restricting it to executive-branch members only would solve that, since they're all guaranteed to be on the same side (also, the procedures involving the Speaker and Prez pro tem succession are hilariously dumb and would cause a ton of chaos if they actually saw use).

Sure, double assassinations are harder than single ones, but not by that much.

I disagree. If we say that an assassination plan has at best a 70% chance of success, statistics suggests two of those events drop noticeably in probability because you multiply them (now suddenly you're under 50%) if you have the same chance both times. And I really doubt you're ever going to get a plan with over that chance, it's often less. Much less, if we're talking about a single plan/event that would kill both of them at once - that's way harder because they don't get together very often in the same place without way more security than normal (such as in the White House or in a foreign country with other heads of state).

Plus, at least the Speaker is from the party with the greatest popular mandate, because of how House elections work.

I disagree. If we say that an assassination plan has at best a 70% chance of success, statistics suggests two of those events drop noticeably in probability because you multiply them (now suddenly you're under 50%) if you have the same chance both times.

I wouldn't consider that to be "that much". It's certainly way higher than if you assume the likelihood of the second plot succeeding to be equal to the chance of an arbitrary assassination plot succeeding - the chance that a single loaded die of unknown loading rolls two sixes in a row is greater than the square of the chance that a loaded die of unknown loading rolls a six, due to correlation.

Much less, if we're talking about a single plan/event that would kill both of them at once - that's way harder because they don't get together very often in the same place without way more security than normal (such as in the White House or in a foreign country with other heads of state).

A refutation of this sentence would be an infohazard. Discount the lack of such refutation accordingly.

the procedures involving the Speaker and Prez pro tem succession are hilariously dumb and would cause a ton of chaos if they actually saw use

Gerald Ford isn't the most fondly remembered (although we did name an aircraft carrier after him), but managed to serve as President without being elected on a national ballot. Although I believe he was elevated to VP from Speaker and then subsequently to President.

Ford was never Speaker; as you say, though, he was appointed to fill a VP vacancy, and then succeeded to the Presidency.

It's the actual Speaker-succession and Prez-pro-tem succession that are bonkers nuts (well, they're not bonkers nuts under ordinary circumstances, but they'll never be used under ordinary circumstances because of the aforementioned capability to fill a VP vacancy; they'll only be used in a crisis, which is exactly when they're bonkers nuts).

There's a hilarious scenario here.

I know there were discussions during Dubyas first term to move SoS above VP because of concerns about Cheney's health.

Dang, that scenario is gripping. I would watch a film or show about that.

I realize they did, but after being initially interesting it quickly became just another boring political drama trying to be The West Wing but failing. How it got renewed at all, I'll never understand. I'd want a storyline that wallows in the intense and gripping drama of the extreme scenario outlined in that document. It would be an excellent political thriller.

Also, the fact that the senate is more adaptable than the house makes it even more clear to me that the president pro tempore of the senate ought to have outranked the speaker of the house in the order of succession. Or perhaps we could give the senate the ability to select a president in the event of no other officer being able to succeed to the presidency.

Someone shorted over 300 million dollars of Truth Social stock a day before the assassination attempt. Just like the big short on United Airlines stock before 9/11.

One non-assassination-related explanation could be that someone got an inside tip… of Musk announcing he’s going all in for Trump (ie 45 million donated per month) and took it as indication of a quid-pro-quo deal where Trump returns to Twitter, which would of course kill Truth Social instantly.

Do you have the source on that?

Was it one guy? Could it have just been market making activity. I guarantee things like gme get billions a day in short sales when they are memeing. I shorted gme a few times lately. Trump stock is a meme stock and there are going to be guys doing all sorts of things.

If it’s one guy shorted $300 million it would be interesting. Because without a specific catalyst it’s a meme stock and you can lose 10-40x in a couple days.

A secondary catalyst why someone would short is Trump already had a soon to be announced stock offering in the company for 2.3 billion. Could have been front running that announcement if someone got tipped off.

It's being discussed a lot on twitter / x. Search for $djt short. I don't recognize the accounts posting about it and don't have the energy to verify anything right now.

https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1813776823689326660

https://x.com/JHartley2/status/1813355170610266399

https://x.com/JohnnyTabacco/status/1813199373154586889

https://x.com/DiedSuddenly_/status/1813478521676738756

https://x.com/MMATNEWS/status/1813708636687831351

Some of those tweets are very bad. The one person talked about Blackrock and Vanguard ownership in the firm. From what I can tell they are quoting that that firm owns shares in etfs by Blackrock and Vanguard. Which is a nothing burger.

I can’t verify the RIA that supposedly had a big short. It feels off too. 13-F I can find online don’t have show it and was last updated end of June.

Cites I can find on google are not showing the same data on the short increase.

https://fintel.io/ss/us/djt#

And fwiw as I said before there was insider information that would encourage short sales. Trump worked out a deal to sell 2 billion worth of stock.

Edit: seems like firm in question gave an update that a client owned 12 puts and this was a data entry error.

Here's the message-.

That's one funny data entry error. I'd say it's even hilarious. And to someone from a country which isn't as blessedly innocent as the United States of America, it seems like an absolute crock of shit. What are the odds?

For the record, here are the photos of a Bloomberg terminal showing the original (mistaken :D) trade and then it being gone.

/images/17213139248603518.webp

This is a bad look for right twitter. If the guys smart enough to understand a Bloomberg then he’s also smart enough to understand there is no relationship with blackrock other than blackrock making 10 bps on some etfs they put in client accounts. They are actually saying that BlackRock owns this firm.

This is a bad thing when people are willfully lying to people. Especially when you have a lot of real things to fill up your twitter influencer accounts. This makes the right look grade school intelligence.

Yes, 'right twitter' is every random guy even if his bio gives zero indication of being right wing. List of the followers on that guy is absolutely not 'right twitter' either, it's 3 guys who are RW and the rest are various randos.

Most of the comments on twitter on the stocks issue are braindead and notice how I referenced not a single one except the guy who posted the terminal who isn't that bad.

It looks like though the date on the original filing was 6/30.

If thats true, that person just lost a ton of money. Djt shot up the day after the failed attempt.

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