After two years, US President Trump faced another assassination attempt during the Annual Correspondents’ Dinner organised at the Hilton Hotel yesterday. The last serious one occurred during his campaign days in June 2024, when he narrowly escaped with injuries. Modern-day assassination attempts on the US President pose a serious security dilemma for the President’s security detail and strategy. The gaps in the Secret Service’s security thinking were glaringly visible in the last assassination attempt, but it seems that the US’s elite Secret Service’s threat and security assessments still struggle to close micro-security gaps. Perhaps there is a general tendency to treat micro-security threats as low risk, and non-serious evaluation at the leadership level causes a short circuit in the Secret Service’s security grid and their strategic response to threats. A closer examination of history and security assessments of US Presidents’ security details reveals details worth observing that raise serious questions about protective security in general and the US Secret Service in particular.
The last serious assassination attempt was perhaps made in May 2005, when an Armenian named Vladimir Arutyunian threw a live Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade towards the podium where former US President George W. Bush was speaking. Fortunately, the grenade didn’t explode because a red tartan handkerchief was tightly wrapped around it, preventing the safety lever from detaching. The assassination attempt in Georgia that year luckily went off track. However, US Presidents, especially those who steered the US during times of conflict, have had close brushes with assassination attempts. Another serious attempt was planned in 1994 by the then Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden against Bill Clinton. Bin Laden recruited Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to attempt to assassinate Clinton. However, Yousef decided that security would be too effective and instead targeted Pope John Paul II. In 1981, former US President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had developed an erotomanic obsession after viewing her in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.
The threat matrix for US Presidents has always been high, but it reached concerning levels whenever the US was engaged in battle abroad. Many survived, but a few were not so lucky. Threat assessment covers a wide array, and the most difficult part is predicting the exact degree of threat. According to reports and a former Secret Service Director, former US President Donald Trump faced around eight threats per day, averaging about 2,000 threats per year. With increasing developments in the cyber world, threats emanating from cyberspace are becoming increasingly difficult to track and eliminate. However, a brief study was conducted by the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center on evaluating the risk of targeted violence, first in 1995 and again in 1999. The Secret Service, in its monograph titled Preventing Assassination in 1997, concluded that “assassination is the end result of a discernible and understandable process of thinking and behaviour” and perhaps works on micro- to macro-level threat assessments, where micro means individual-level threats, such as those from specific individuals, civilians with psychological disorders, stunt maniacs, extremists, and criminal syndicates, which are not limited to external domains and can even include threats from within. The macro-level threat exists in relation to US national security and its strategic decisions impacting geopolitics or any specific region. The macro level emanates from organisational levels, terror outfits, or another state. The threat scale in the case of the macro level increases, and intelligence gathering and investigations help detect the degree of threat that the US President faces from macro threats, especially when the security environment around the US becomes serious.
In both cases, the common link is leadership behaviour and its decisions, which impact micro and macro threats. The assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli ultranationalist after signing the Oslo Accords is one way to assess the relationship between leadership behaviour and the threat matrix. Similarly, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln also reflects the importance of leadership behaviour. In this case, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a supporter of slavery and an opponent of equality. Booth believed that Lincoln, who supported equality and opposed slavery, would overthrow the Constitution and destroy the South during the American Civil War. In totality, for threat assessment to be close to accurate, it has to go through qualitative intelligence assessment without bias; second, it must include a thorough scan of the security environment; third, it must run an impact test of current leadership decisions and the President’s popularity and hostility, which will help identify micro-level threats. Macro-level threats are typically generated through intelligence agencies and counter-terror setups.
The most startling miss by the Secret Service was the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy, when a former US Marine Corps member who later defected to the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the President as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was shot once in the back, the bullet exiting through his throat, and once in the head. Surprisingly, Oswald was later shot on his way to trial. The Warren Commission thoroughly investigated the assassination and ruled out a conspiracy, placing all blame on Oswald and claiming he acted alone. However, many analysts and even Americans still do not accept that conclusion. A conspiracy theory swamped the narrative, suggesting that elements within the US Deep State, especially the CIA, conspired in the assassination of its own President. The reasoning, to some extent, was tied to factors such as the slashing of the CIA budget, its failure in Cuba, and its troubled relationship with President Kennedy. Many conspiracy theorists still believe that the Secret Service and the FBI withheld intelligence about a possible assassination attempt that day. The Secret Service was heavily scrutinised, and the agency was asked to make several modifications to its security detail. Commission member Richard Russell told the Washington Post in 1970 that Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy, criticising the Commission’s no-conspiracy finding and saying, “we weren’t told the truth about Oswald.” John Sherman Cooper also considered the ballistic findings to be “unconvincing.”
Threat assessment can go wrong and become a victim of intelligence or situational bias, as reflected to some extent in Kennedy’s case. The reason for bias and failed assessment is the overload of threats in an evolving threat landscape. The argument for achieving 100 percent threat accuracy is too far-fetched and nearly impossible, but near or high accuracy is possible, at least for an agency such as the Secret Service. The overload of assessments sometimes forces the agency to overlook micro threats, which may be present domestically regardless of internal or external abetment, including civilians with psychological disorders. An increase in situational awareness and close attention to micro threats, especially during election season, could have prevented Trump’s assassination attempt. Introspection, better threat filtering, and strategic enhancement to increase situational awareness should become priorities for the Secret Service to avoid being caught off guard, as even one mistake can have serious implications.
