It was a shot heard around the world.
On Saturday, a gunman whom the FBI has identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks fired a burst of rifle shots at former president Donald Trump, grazing his ear and nearly killing him. The attempted assassination is an historic, and perilous, moment. We’ll get commentaries and investigations, and the government will announce reforms.
But amid all the chaos weaves the thread of another story, one that reveals a mounting problem in our political life. A surprising number of the Secret Service agents protecting the former president were women. And, according to video recordings of the scene, many did not acquit themselves favorably.
Scene one: after President Trump ducks, a group of agents leaps to him and protects him with their bodies. A female agent who rushes to the stage acts bravely, without a doubt, but the point of the “huddle” is to protect the president. The agent was much shorter than President Trump, leaving his head and neck exposed after he stood up.
Scene two: as Trump enters the escape vehicle, a female Secret Service agent fumbles her gun and cannot find her holster; another female agent appears confused and, in the moment of crisis, decides to use both of her hands to put on her sunglasses; a third looks frightened and uncertain.
These agents wear the typical Secret Service outfits—Kevlar vests pressing against white shirts; black blazers with gold pins; dark sunglasses—but to an impartial observer, they do not appear to have the same poise, confidence, and strength as the male agents around them.
The obvious question: Why so many female agents? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as in many other institutions: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted “diversity” as a key priority and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, named to the position in 2022, has pledged to increase dramatically the number of women in the ranks.
This is official policy. The Secret Service openly boasts that it “prioritizes recruiting women candidates” and has formulated an “affirmative action” plan to increase the number of women, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups.
Cheatle herself told CBS News that her goal was to reach 30 percent female recruits by 2030: “I’m very conscious, as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women.” The agency is well on its way. In 2021, for the first time, the special agent training class graduated more women than men.
To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president’s security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That’s just reality.
It’s a reality that the Secret Service is determined to circumvent. The agency itself has published its fitness standards in two parts: one for men, and a separate, less rigorous one for women.
These biological facts should be obvious. Every nightclub owner knows that physicality matters. A bouncer who is six-foot-five, 200 pounds, will provide better security than a smaller woman. Part of it is signal—size and strength act as a deterrent—and part of it is substance. When a fight breaks out, the nightclub owner learns quickly who is capable of maintaining order and who is not. If he makes the wrong hiring decision, he loses money. It is, in its own way, an honest business.
Why has the Secret Service lost sight of such a basic principle? Because large bureaucracies are insulated from consequences. Directors of large corporations and especially government agencies can afford to engage in vanity projects and pay the DEI tax.
Someone like Kimberly Cheatle, who did a stint at PepsiCo before accepting the directorship of the Secret Service, understands how to pursue success in the current environment: tell the story of “diversity” to advance in a career, degrade the quality of personnel by hiring ideologically, and hope that the remaining capable men who still represent the core of the service can make up the difference.
To be clear: I am not arguing that DEI caused the lapse in security at the rally in Butler. It is too early to know this one way or another. But the near-miss assassination reminds us of the stakes: split-second reactions, physical courage, and calm under pressure are all essential to the work of protecting the president. If any of those slip, even by an inch, the result is death. What we saw on Saturday was luck, not competence.
We can be thankful that President Trump survived. A shift in the winds could have produced a different ending. But the story is not over. What happens at the Secret Service in the coming days will be revealing. In any functional organization, Cheatle and all the agents who did not perform adequately at Butler would resign. But will they?
The problem with DEI is that it dictates decisions based not on performance or on the old virtues, such as honor, but on demographics and ideology. Failure is easily dismissed and blame easily shifted.
Another problem: DEI is hard to roll back. Will the Secret Service jettison its goal of increasing the number of female recruits? Will it reassign the women on the president’s security detail? Will the agency ditch the separate fitness standards and require that women prove as capable as men?
No. There might be symbolic resignations or slight tightening of the standards, but the DEI regime, in force for a half-century, can’t be abandoned without a public fight.
This is where Trump could make a difference. If he is elected president again, he has a chance to rescind affirmative action, reject critical race and gender ideologies, and abolish all DEI programs in the federal government. This would not only improve the performance of the Secret Service but also the functioning of government as a whole.
Neither a president’s life nor a country’s should be gambled on DEI.
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images