‘There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,’ said Winston Churchill who survived at least three assassination plots thanks, in particular, to the sterling work of his long-term bodyguard Walter Thompson who wrote four books about his 18 years of perilous service foiling the myriad threats Churchill faced. These included mediating with the Arabs while insisting on a Jewish homeland in the 1920s, being trailed by the Sinn Fein, plotted against by Indian nationalists, targeted by a lone gunman in the US, and surviving an assassination attempt by the Luftwaffe, which shot down the plane they thought he had boarded killing 13 people. Of this attempt, Churchill wrote contemptuously in his memoirs, ‘The brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents. It is difficult to understand how anyone could imagine that with all the resources of Great Britain at my disposal I should have booked a passage in an unarmed and unescorted plane from Lisbon and flown home in broad daylight.’

No one contemplating the 13 July attempt to assassinate the once and probable future president (if he survives) Donald Trump could doubt the stupidity of the agents tasked with protecting his life. It beggars belief that a lone gunman was able to drive to a Trump rally with a 1.5-metre ladder, was photographed twice by agents as a suspicious person over a half-hour period, and was still able to climb onto a roof with a direct line of sight to the former president, armed with an automatic rifle.

Yet even when the gunman was pointed out to police by bystanders, was in the rifle site of a Secret Service sniper, and was spotted by numerous people in the crowd who cried out, ‘He’s got a gun!’, nothing was done to prevent the would-be assassin firing eight shots, tragically killing a volunteer firefighter, seriously injuring two others, and only failing to kill Trump because the former president slightly turned his head just as the bullet reached his skull piercing his ear instead.

Yet bad as those facts are, it gets worse. There were three police snipers housed inside, yes inside, the building the gunman used as a shooting platform but none on the roof because, as the head of the Secret Service, Kim Cheatle, calmly explained in a television interview, the building had a ‘sloped roof at its highest point and so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof and so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.’ The fact that the building had only four tiny windows, so almost no view of the president and none of the shooter on the roof, seems to have been irrelevant.

Strangely, the Secret Service sniper who took out the shooter after he tried to assassinate Trump risked his life the entire time by standing on a sloping roof as did at least one other agent.

Equally strangely, after the shooter was dead one policeman and two heavily armed agents summoned up the courage to remove his corpse from the sloping roof. It’s a mark of just how reckless the shooter was that despite the hazard it posed to workplace health and safety, he attempted to assassinate Trump on a sloping roof.

Ms Cheatle recently served as head of global security at Pepsi so perhaps she was drawing on her experience guarding cola and Cheetos. Yet she had a long history in the Secret Service – over 28 years – whose fundamental task is not general intelligence collection, as the name suggests, but the specific protection of the US president, vice president, former presidents and presidential candidates, and their spouses and children, as well as visiting foreign dignitaries, and safeguarding financial and critical infrastructure.

Despite the catastrophic failures of her department, Cheatle has said she sees no reason to resign. Indeed, the protection of Trump apparently represents enhanced security as the Secret Service has said that it has recently discovered that Iran is actively attempting to assassinate Trump and had increased his security detail.

But as former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the New York Post after the fiasco, ‘Imagine if the shooter hadn’t been this kid but a well-trained cell? Our enemies are looking at us thinking we can take Trump or anyone out now without a problem.’ He was particularly critical of the use of diminutive female, and male, agents, one of whom struggled to put her gun in her holster, let alone protect the much larger former president.

Cheatle has been concerned with meeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) targets and ensuring the departmental workforce is 30 per cent women by 2030. In an interview with CBS last year she said that, ‘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.’ Among her innovations, is to have agents train with YouTuber influencer and person of colour Michelle Khare. Unfortunately, shoe-horning DEI targets onto the Secret Service seems to have landed the US with agents with the competence of Inspector Clouseau. It gives a whole new meaning to the Pink Panther.

Yet was all the chaos and failure just a case of bumbling incompetence of the highest order? Over the last two terms, we have witnessed partisan politicisation of various branches of government including the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI. The last great effort of the US Secret Service was to conveniently delete virtually all of the text messages of more than a dozen of its agents – including those of Cheatle – that were sent just before, on, and after 6 January, 2021, during the controversial ‘storming’ of the US Capitol. Cheatle said of the mysterious deletion, ‘Our integrity is everything, and there was nothing nefarious attached to that’. Perhaps it was service like this that inspired Jill Biden to urge the President to appoint Cheatle as director of the Secret Service and for President Biden to say that Cheatle had his ‘complete trust’. No doubt she does.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, the Secret Service has finally agreed to provide protection to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Junior who up to now has been forced to pay for his own security. That’s nice. But after this latest fiasco, can Mr Trump and RFK Junior trust Ms Cheatle’s pink panthers to protect them?