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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?
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.
I mean you have credible people making comments. Mark Halperin (who is usually very calm and measured) complaining is why I made this post.
Usually people with knowledge don't publicly comment because you don't want to create -ideas- but this time a lot of people were close by and in the splash zone and are pissed.
I'm willing to treat Mark Halperin as serious for the sake of argument and your reaction to him as same. But it's also possible he's wrong. There are hundreds of influencers with different takes. How am I supposed to know who actually has a piece of the truth? It's not like I actually know much about the difference between real security and security theater.
I mean that's not unfair. Mark is a serious person who has been to many, many of these types of events. On the other hand he's a journalist not a security expert, and security experts usually decline to aggressively comment on these types of events.
I'd say on the face of it it doesn't seem well secured, especially with some of the semi-public details (security started inside the building, movement was restricted to the presence of a generic hotel key sleeve, etc.).
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