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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
I have seen the conspiracy theory on leftwing subreddits that this was staged to bolster Trump's popularity. If looked at through the lens of it being performative, lax security kind of makes sense. They needed the "assassin" to get close enough that it felt dangerous to viewers.
It is also an argument for the ballroom. If private venues cannot be trusted with security, then you naturally have to make your own. Only for the sake of safety for your guests of course.
More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.
In a certain trivial way you're obviously right, but I increasingly fear that the primary reason it works that way is that this has more to do with the low quality of people trying, as opposed to saying anything about the security.
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OK. I guess someone will have to go there. I’ll ask the question. Does this also have plausibly something to do with the presence of women and other DEI hires in the Secret Service?
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It was intentionally weak so that Trump could justify building a Baalroom
But who's going to supply sacrificial children without Epstein?
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The convergence of memes is too strong for this not to be true.
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Idk, I hear all these people claiming all sorts of things about security and I don’t see whether it means anything. This influencer says security is blah blah blah, this influencer says that it’s actually yadda yadda, they know what exactly? Somebody I’ve never heard of before says something I have no ability to evaluate. Oh he’s an insider. Or pretending to be one. Must be serious.
I’m not sure what good security is supposed to look like. The guy with the gun got caught N layers before reaching the president. But actually it should have been N + 1 layers. Sure I guess. I can believe that. This says something important about society.
The number of people who really know what they’re talking about is probably at least three orders of magnitude smaller than what social media gives me access to.
I’m sure that some of those people are in the White House right now. And they’re making decisions. Maybe they’ll decide security was too lax and needs to be tightened. Maybe they’ll decide it was fine but we need some more theater. Maybe they’ll decide it doesn’t matter and we can take the headlines and build our ballroom and go. I don’t know. I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do.
And it’s always possible that they keep security the same and something happens in the future, but not because anything is wrong with security but because it’s impossible to prevent everything. And it’s always possible we increase useless security theater and nothing happens because of sheer dumb luck and we say, wow, the security theater really worked. I admit I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure most of these Washington “Insiders” can either.
There are ways to solve the security problem, but yes in terms of risk management the question is 'at what cost?'
Are people willing to shut the hotel down for 24 hours to deny guest access to the lobby? Who is paying for that? Are you willing to put multiple people on every single ground floor entrance to the hotel and at every portal on the ground floor before, during and after the event? Who is paying for that?
Are you willing to inconvenience the rich and powerful with tools like turnstiles, metal detectors, x-rays, pat downs and biometric recording the week before to be checked on the night? Who is paying for that (and not just in currency)?
How about shutting down the entire city block, snipers on every rooftop and swapping the chefs and service staff out for Seal Team 6 for the night? Who... well no one would.
The short version is that Security is a game of Risk Management utilizing limited resources deployed against a thinking adversary. Its most basic philosophy is of Defense in Depth, or a series of layered interlocking defenses with the presumption that some of them maybe vulnerable to being breached by certain attack methods while others aren't.
Here the system worked. If you want guarantees that it will work perfectly and that any event will always proceed undisturbed even though attackers are willing to throw away their own lives in the attempt, then you need to pay a significant price for that. Including a lot of inconveniences to the legitimate attendees.
Most of the complaints about how far the attacker got are complete cope (including by the attacker). They have nothing else to clutch onto at yet another failed assassination.
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The perpetrator wrote a PS in his manifesto that he thought security was bad. So that's something I guess. I'm not sure if he's supposed to know what he's talking about either given that, you know, he failed almost instantly. But here it is.
Seems like the competency crisis is hitting everyone hard.
It is difficult to get past your internalized misogyny when the Secret Service is incorporating what looks like an elementary school teacher.
But on the flipside I've internalized so much progressive propaganda I can practically feel the Netflix script they will write about the lone stalwart woman warrior that fought the incompetence of her superiors and coworkers and singlehandedly kept Trump alive through an unprecedented amount of half baked attempts against his life.
Honestly, if they made her full Karen it might even be worth it. As her insistence that everyone follow the rules exactly keeps foiling the ploys of the motley crew of would be assassins that seemingly can't do anything right.
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For context, Allen made his reservation after the President announced he'd attend. Guy checks into the hotel before the event with his weapons, is surprised he's never once searched, and not obviously surveilled.
I get that. But were they supposed to? Is it normal to search every guest staying at a hotel if the president shows up the next day to give a speech?
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We are not at anything. You should not consensus build here...
Politics has increased in heat level with each side increasing the verbal hostility level because hate sells. Unfortunately that has societal ramifications. As the populace is increasingly unmoored from any sort of shared foundational narrative, inevitably tribal conflicts will re-arrise. Accelerationists got what they wanted. Hopefully they enjoy the next 20-50 years of bloody sectarian conflict pitting brother against brother.
I assumed he meant with Iran.
idk why, nothing in his comment is about Iran, its about another lefty taking a shot at the Big Don, and then a reference to Kirk in the same sentence. The clear delineation is a left vs right, that we(the right) are at war and the left is attacking us.
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Yes.
Who is John Galt?
(Context: the question is the focus of the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's meant to be asked with world-weary cynicism, with the undertone of "Why would you expect anything nowadays to not be rotten, falling apart, or incompetently handled?" Nobody in the setting even knows who John Galt is, and they still ask it.)
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Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).
It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.
In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.
Ah yes, the load bearing norms, the same ones Obama used in operation Chokepoint, the same ones the SPLC and the JDL have been using to strangle the discourse. You know if Elon didn't buy Twitter we would still be back in the age where rabid groups of feminists and dangerhair unperson people and get them fired for not eating the communion wafer with enough gusto.
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If Trump is assassinated nothing will happen. Rather, his successor — so JD in this timeline — gets extraordinary political capital to do all sorts of things. Crackdown on antifa, economic free hand, maybe an immigration bill. It all depends on the mix of JD’s temperament (stronger than most suppose) and the GOP’s temperament (weaker than you’re thinking).
But most of what a Trump successor could do is priced in. There would be an extraordinary moment followed by a return to politics as usual. That’s all.
Trump is not politics as usual. Trump is unusual. When he’s dead that tendency will go away. Whatever state he leaves us in is the trajectory we’re likely to follow for some time. An assassination would just give JD Vance a last gasp put some finishing touches on the hot iron shape before it cools into place.
There won’t be civil war. If there are riots they will fizzle out. If MAGA rises to the occasion it will be within the political process. If libs rise up they will playact as revolutionaries and then fizzle out into the political process. That’s all
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I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.
Despite the heat of 1876 Hayes was ultimately accepted because the memory of the Civil War was too near for everybody to go to war. I guess it’s an open question. But I would take the other side of that bet
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Be specific. What norms, dismantled by who and when?
Most of them
The rich and powerful
The last ~50 years
Man, that might be even more vague than the original framing.
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It doesn’t seem like the security was bad but I did see reporting done that the security level for the event was not proportionate to the number of high level leaders there (President and VP and a number of Cabinet members) and so the claim that security wasn’t of the appropriate quality is almost certainly true (and admittedly so, according to the government’s own rules and policies for this sort of thing). So it’s hard to judge the execution itself other than to say that there’s clearly a planning weakness that we can clearly see across all three assassination attempts.
My question becomes: how would a random teacher in California know that this specific event would have unusually-lax security?
How can you say unusually lax? It seems like the random teacher underestimated the amount of security there, considering the actual result.
Were they supposed to search every hotel guest? Can you imagine the kinds of accusations that would've come out of security searching a random teacher from California?
What's your point? Why ask a vague question?
Yes. They search every passenger in every airport, after all. You don't even need to go all the way and force the guests to take off their belt and shoes. "Please place your bag onto the belt, empty your pockets into the tray and walk through the metal detector." You can even have the bellhop take their bags away and scan them discreetly to show some class.
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I guess it does prove the need for a White House event room, because there is no way for the President to hold events in a public space to the level of security you are expecting. You couldn't have preveted the JFK assassaination with more security. The only robust solution is to not drive around Downtown Dallas in a convertable.
I got stuck behind the presidential motorcade in traffic once. The security presense was immense. They blocked-off every freeway entrance on the route for what felt like 15 minutes before the bulk of the motorcade passed by. I had about a half-second of direct line of sight at 60-80 feet on Cadillac One, and that was by pure chance with no advance planning at all.
Every rooftop and every window is a sightline. Every organization that has people in the hot zone is a potential infiltration route.
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Our civic norms under a diadochic presidency... will the mos maiorum actually deteriorate? The 60's were bad, but, I mean, we, you know, survived.
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How exactly was it worse? Did the moron ever have a chance of getting line of sight on the President?
I don’t understand what institutions you think are analogous to the Secret Service.
From what I can tell the Hotel was essentially allowed to go about its business and the security cordon was in the building close to the event. You could get very close to the event itself with a generic hotel keyboard. Minimal access control. Someone could easily have preplanted a surprise or walked close with one and rendered the primary security buffer irrelevant, and then had others follow.
People who have been to similar events before said that the security was rather lacking in comparison to other events.
I certainly have been to places that have been more aggressive in searching my bag or person multiple times further out.
I gotta say I've been hassled more at job sites for municipalities than this; and I've done more hassling as impromptu "Don't bring a fucking gun into the reception, you dingus" doorman than the dude got.
It's so bad I really, really want to believe in false flag theory because if it's real it's dumb enough to make me sad.
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My understanding is a) the Secret Service rot far predates Trump's first term, and b) the shooter was already inside the hotel, as a guest, and that was a bit of a blind spot. Obvious in hindsight, but still.
Making sure the guests at a 1000 person hotel aren't armed or smuggling in materials is obvious in foresight, not hindsight.
...at least I hope so.
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