Well, folks, if you thought government incompetence couldn’t sink any lower, think again.
Whistleblowers are now revealing that the Secret Service, tasked with protecting some of the most important people in the country, including former President Trump, is handing out training like it’s a lazy Sunday school class. According to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., the “training” these agents received consisted of a two-hour Microsoft Teams webinar. Yes, you heard that right—two hours, and it was a total train wreck.
Let’s set the scene. Imagine you’ve been reassigned to protect the former president of the United States after an assassination attempt, and your prep is logging into a glitchy Teams meeting with 1,000 other people. The pre-recorded videos keep crashing, the instructor can’t get the audio to work, and they’ve got nothing new to offer because, apparently, they’re still using last year’s material. Incredible.
Oh, but it gets better. These whistleblowers are saying that since the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life, the Secret Service hasn’t updated a thing. So, we’ve got Homeland Security agents—who aren’t even regular Secret Service personnel—going out there with a two-hour “refresher” and a PowerPoint presentation. That’s it. If it weren’t so dangerous, it’d be funny.
Hawley didn’t hold back when he called this out for the disaster it is. He’s absolutely right—this is a nightmare, and the only reason we even know about it is because of whistleblowers brave enough to speak up. The fact that the lead site agent at that rally was known to be inexperienced and failed to enforce basic security protocols just adds insult to injury.
No Secret Service agents were checking IDs, and most of the team on the ground weren’t even Secret Service at all, but Homeland Security agents were thrown into the mix with minimal preparation.
So, what does the Secret Service have to say about all this? They’ve provided over 1,500 pages of documentation to Congress, blah blah blah, and say they’re committed to learning from this “failure.” Well, let’s hope they start learning fast because two-hour webinars and PowerPoint slides are hardly cutting it when you’re tasked with preventing assassinations.
This whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen. Instead of real training, we’re getting virtual classroom time like it’s some corporate compliance seminar. It’s a wonder anything hasn’t gone more disastrously wrong already.
