the gala dinner has long been held<\/a>, is a difficult venue for the Secret Service to secure because it is so large, a public space and so many people come and go \u2014 to and from their rooms and the hotel itself. The makeup of the event raises the stakes because it can include the entire line of succession to the presidency in one spot. (The third in line to succeed the president, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the president pro tempore of the Senate, was not at the dinner on Saturday night.)<\/p>\nIn his writings, the suspect noted that he was able to take guns into the hotel and speculated that an Iranian terrorist with more dangerous weapons would have been able to inflict huge damage.<\/p>\n
Video captured the fear and confusion inside the hotel ballroom on Saturday night as Secret Service agents rushed to the dais to protect Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The video shows the security detail for Mr. Vance, which is smaller than the president\u2019s, ferrying him off the dais toward safety about 10 seconds before the president\u2019s. Mr. Eckloff said the disparity reflected, in part, the differences in protective detail, including the fact that the two men are staffed by personnel with slightly different responsibilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have multiple protectees, especially so many in the line of succession of the president, obviously it\u2019s very complicated and real-life events become messy,\u201d Mr. Eckloff said.<\/p>\n
When it comes to rushing someone offstage, age is also a consideration. Mr. Trump is 79, and Mr. Vance is 41.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes moving that person or those three people immediately is a mistake in the moment,\u201d Mr. Eckloff said, adding that depending on the circumstances, a security detail could be moving toward danger instead of away from it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would argue, it was within 10 seconds that the decision was made to move him,\u201d Mr. Eckloff said of the president. That probably felt like an hour inside the room, he said, but a number of tactical decisions have to be made in an instant, including whether to hunker down and shield in place behind the table to determine whether anyone is firing at the dais.<\/p>\n
Since July 2024, when the Secret Service failed to secure a rooftop at a rally in Butler, Pa., where a gunman fired eight shots at Mr. Trump, the agency has faced tough questions about its competency.<\/p>\n
Security experts viewed that assassination attempt during the election campaign as a clear failure by the agency to prepare and secure the area, given how close the 20-year-old gunman came to killing Mr. Trump. Poor communication between the local police and the Secret Service allowed the gunman to climb onto the roof of a nearby building and fire a bullet that grazed the president\u2019s ear. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed the gunman.<\/p>\n
It was the first assassination attempt against a former or current president since 1981. While Mr. Trump suffered a minor injury, one person attending the rally was killed and two others were injured. A shake-up in leadership at the agency followed, and some aspects of presidential security were redesigned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw failure in Butler. We saw excellence of emergency reaction, but the setup, the execution and the shots fired were a failure,\u201d said Mr. Eckloff, who said it would be a mistake to push the security perimeter outside the hotel the next time the event is held. \u201cIt\u2019s not about making a bigger perimeter,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about making the response faster and more precise.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Centrella said that for the Secret Service, success typically looked as if little happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast night, success looked like a dangerous situation being contained before it became a tragedy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The gunman who sprinted through a security checkpoint on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton believed that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[1452,9,24,63,134,136,135,1069,8093],"class_list":{"0":"post-210714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staten-island","8":"tag-donald-j","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-staten-island","13":"tag-staten-island-headlines","14":"tag-staten-island-news","15":"tag-trump","16":"tag-washington-dc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}