Greetings from Ukraine, where I am growing increasingly enfeebled and have got to get out of this hellish eastern oblast. Not because of the aerial bombardment, but because of the surly Russian waiter denying me the apple juice he offers to all other breakfast customers and the pretty but charmless Kharkov girls pressing in on all sides and offering to show me the town in exchange for getting them approved for immigration to Canada. War is hell.
But it is also, generally, very clarifying. I stood at my window and watched a drone pass leisurely across the skies from right to left, and felt reasonably sure I knew what it meant: it would hit something and explode. And so it goes. The hotel I was booked into tomorrow night was apparently bombed in the small hours so I shall have to seek alternative accommodations. Inconvenient, but all very simple.
By contrast Washington is ever more like Churchill's riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. My conscience is clear. Almost two years ago, it was perfectly obvious to anyone who examined the facts on the ground in Butler, Pennsylvania that the United States Secret Service had an institutionalised level of incompetence and/or malevolence that was assisting those many persons anxious to kill Trump to do so. Even as mere incompetence, it is murderously so: Corey Comperatore is dead, and everyone in Butler and DC who enabled his death still has a job.
So immediately afterwards I stated the obvious:
The last word from @MarkSteynOnline: "The Secret Service is beyond repair. We have to abolish it and start again. And break up the Department of Justice!"
We will be livestreaming and live tweeting the rest of our Constitution Day celebration tomorrow. https://t.co/5n9qalo70z pic.twitter.com/6e4jKJIEE9
— Hillsdale College (@Hillsdale) September 19, 2024
Instead, the 47th President promoted the chap in charge in Butler that day to head of the entire Secret Service: one Sean Curran. And, on Saturday night, Mr Curran allowed the same thing that happened at Butler to happen all over again. On the incompetence front, look again at the would-be assassin breaching security with his brilliant cunning plan, requiring months of painstaking training and preparation and attention to detail, of simply running through the checkpoint:
The chaps at Kharkiv railway station are more alert than those guys. Yet setting aside the under-performance of the individual agents - close enough for government work, it seems - this ingenious manoeuvre became a critical issue mainly because, exactly as at Butler, the Secret Service had taken the decision to shrink the perimeter of the "secure zone". In Islamabad the other day, the Pakistanis were hopeful that Vance and the Iranians would be jetting in for another round of face-to-face negotiations. So they took the precaution of ordering all the other guests out of the designated hotel: the Tehran delegation, in particular, is concerned that Netanyahu will off them while they're in town by having Mr Moshe Wetwork check in to the junior suite on the fifth floor.
No such worries at the grisly Washington Hilton - even though half the country would be cheering on Mr Wetwork. On ABC TV, Jimmy Kimmel threw a Thursday-night "alternative" White House Correspondents Dinner at which he saluted the First Lady:
You have the glow of an expectant widow.
I have never knowingly watched Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Colbert, whichever is which. But I'm old enough to remember when Johnny Carson in 1981 told Nancy Reagan and indeed when Steve Allen in 1901 told Ida McKinley that they had the glow of expectant widows.
Oh, wait, no. Neither Johnny nor Steve did that. Because, back in 1981 and 1901, America still had sufficient of what the late Roger Scruton called the "pre-political we" to recognise that assassination fantasies are not helpful to a functioning polity.
Alas, the role that in other western nations has to be outsourced to Muslim rape gangs and low-IQ child-stabbers and sundry novelty demographics is in America performed by showbiz bigshots, NPR ladies d'un certain âge, and pajama boys with a quarter mil in college debt.
That, however, is a given. What ought not to be a given is that the Secret Service is on their side. At Butler, Mr Curran and his colleagues shrunk the perimeter so that it excluded an easily accessible roof with a clear line to Trump's head. At the Washington Hilton, Mr Curran and his colleagues shrunk the perimeter to the event room and its immediate approach. In the usual tedious "manifesto", the would-be killer nevertheless noted that the security was so "insanely" bad they must be "pranking" him:
What the hell is the Secret Service doing..?
Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.
What I got (who knows, maybe they're pranking me!) is nothing.
No damn security.
Not in transport.
Not in the hotel.
Not in the event.
Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.
The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.
Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it's corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.
Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.
Actually insane.
So, once he'd run through the security line, he was able to get into the same men's room that the entire cabinet had to use. Had RFK or Pete Hegseth felt the urge before settling in for a night of long speeches, the headlines this weekend would have been very different. Half the presidential line of succession was in there. That's what the geopolitical types call, if you remember, a "decapitation strategy". Except you don't need a bunker buster, just some California doofus willing to take a run at the checkpoint - and bingo, whoever the Secretary of the Interior is winds up like some z-list ayatollah.
As a taxpayer, I'm revolted by the money-no-object crapness. Yet, instead of heads rolling, Sean Curran is congratulating himself on what a brilliant job he did. As Steve from Manhattan writes in our comments section:
I have always liked my fellow Queens County native, and have voted for him, enthusiastically, in three presidential elections. When I worked for him a bit as a real estate lawyer back in the 1990s, I used to tell folks that he was "the most jovial client I had ever represented." The most disappointing thing I have ever heard him say was this, a little after 12 Noon on January 20, 2017:
"Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent."
I was aghast when I heard him say that—and I didn't know the half of it. President Trump's remarks about the Secret Service last night—with the exception of the warm comments about the man who had been shot—were a similar, if less profound, disappointment. I pray for President Trump's safety and success every day. He is the greatest president of my lifetime. But I can understand Mark's focus, and his disappointment, as we reflect on the near catastrophe of last night.
Perhaps it is because I am thousands of miles away in Ukraine, which is a very corrupt country but straightforwardly so. Yet I find it deeply weird that the majority of American conservatives are apparently willing to live with a federal protection service large numbers of whom are trying to get the President killed. The White House ballroom, to which Saturday-night right-side influencers pivoted in an instant with the grace and poise of a synchronised-swimming team, is not the issue. Au contraire, it should be possible on this absurd a protection budget for the chief of state occasionally to venture out and espy long-distance glimpses of what life is like for his fellow citizens. The issue is the corruption undermining the government from within. The United States Secret Service is a national disgrace, and I renew my 2024 call for it to be abolished and rebuilt from scratch.
As the IRA used to taunt Mrs Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once. So it goes for a corrupt Secret Service re President Trump.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column from Kharkiv. Saturday's edition of his weekend music show found him spinning more blasts from oblasts, with a detour to the Polovstian empire, while Rick McGinnis's movie date plumped for Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. On Sunday Mark gave his initial reaction to the White House Correspondents Shoot-Out, and offered a bit of cod Caribbean exotica as his Song of the Week. Our marquee presentation was the latest installment of Mark's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend standing in the Hilton men's room loading your grampa's shotgun between JD Vance and Marco Rubio, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
