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So incompetence , facilitated by maliciously denying Trump additional SS resources. As I understand there weren't many trained SS protection detail agents because of some Jill Biden event.
And let's not forget the constant Hitler comparisons in media.
Malicious? Ehhh, maybe? but probably not? We have definitely seen reporting that in general, resources were denied to Trump, and we also know that the USSS just as a policy (probably a stupid one, but it is what it is) simply does not provide sitting-president level support to nominees. Around the time of the event, there was a Jill Biden event, also an upcoming Joe Biden Austin event, but also crucially there were some resources working on the upcoming RNC convention too, and some agents had just come back from the NATO thing in Europe as well. WaPo for example specifically said that "multiple counter-sniper teams and hundreds of agents" were already sent to the convention! They also always have a fair amount of people moving around, but the core details don't seem to change all that much, so for example it's somewhat doubtful that Jill Biden specifically reduced resources for Trump, that doesn't seem to be how their scheduling works according to what I've read (though at the end of the day it is at least a little bit a zero-sum game, but that's just intrinsic to the process).
And in fact, both people in Trump's orbit as well as the Secret Service were, around this same time, apparently tussling to a high and loud degree about how big the security perimeter should be at the RNC, so it's even theoretically possible (I'm not sure how highly to weight this) that his own team's requests for more protection would have reduced, or even did reduce, protection at the Butler event. One thing we know for sure however is that at least for the Butler event specifically, there were no denials. (Still, as I think Jim Jordan put it, "Maybe they got sick of asking"). Examples of denied requests mostly related to wanting more metal detectors and related resources (potentially impactful in this case), and rarely but still occasionally counter-sniper teams, though most of these requests seem to have been centered around bigger, more public/natural appearances like in the middle of a city or at a football game or the like.
One thing I should have mentioned is the updated timeline answers one key question, which was "Why wasn't Trump delayed on taking the stage?" Trump had already been speaking for about a minute when the shooter climbed the roof. So I think most people would think the shooter's status wasn't quite on the level of delaying the event, and it's always a tough call to interrupt Trump mid-speech.
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