WASHINGTON – After Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a sniper on Saturday, he stood tall, pumped his fist three times and yelled at the crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!” before being escorted off the stage by guards.
The photo quickly became iconic, striking many supporters as heroic and drawing plaudits from speakers at the Republican National Convention. Commemorative Trump-related sneakers are also available for sale for $299, featuring Trump’s raised fist and bloodied face with the words “Fight, fight, fight” underneath.
But Trump’s extra few minutes onstage was a major operational failure by the Secret Service, further endangering the lives of the presidential candidate and the agents protecting him, former Secret Service agents and other experts said.
According to several former Secret Service agents, standard procedure is for a person being protected – in this case Trump – to be escorted off the stage bent over, with his head lowered and with agents fully surrounding him to avoid being hit by additional bullets.
“The coverage of the attempt to rescue him was absolutely awful,” said former Secret Service director John Mageau, who has reviewed every frame of the video.
“It should have been done sooner,” said A.T. Smith, who served as deputy director of the Secret Service from 2012 to 2015.
The CIA is already grappling with questions such as how a sniper got onto the roof and shot the former president, and why they didn’t find him sooner after reports of a man acting suspiciously.
The former officials say they are not doubting the courage or integrity of the guards on the scene that day, but that their actions after the shooting did not follow established procedures.
Current and former Secret Service agents acknowledge that the best laid plans often go awry in the chaos, especially when those they are protecting act unexpectedly. That’s exactly what happened after Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire, shooting Trump in the right ear, killing one person and wounding two others in the crowd.
Some things went according to plan: Trump first went prone, as per protocol, and was quickly assisted by agents. An anti-sniper on the roof shot and killed Crooks with one shot. Agents on the ground dove on Trump and held him down on the stage while examining his wounds.
But a USA Today analysis of available video and interviews with experts and current and former Secret Service agents raises questions about the Secret Service’s actions in the minutes that followed.
“Bend him over, then your ass goes at him.”
Some former officials say Trump’s security personnel appear to have broken the rules in the so-called “extrication” process, a crucial task of evacuating protected persons from follow-up attacks by individuals who may be conspiring with the initial assassin. Such one-two punches, including those in which the initial shooter merely distracts from a more deadly attack, are so common they are a central part of training for the personnel and those protected by them themselves, the former officials said.
Smith and other former agents said Secret Service agents were expected to do whatever was necessary to make their subjects bend over, including punching them in the stomach or pulling their belts backwards, so that their heads and torsos could be wrapped around by a group of agents sworn to take a bullet for them. According to Secret Service legend, when he was shot in an assassination attempt in 1981, President Ronald Reagan reportedly thought the pain in his ribs was not from a bullet fired at close range, but from agents trying to knock him down.
In Trump’s case, after agents pick him up and circle him as trained, Trump can be heard saying “get me your shoes” four times.
Then, as people began to move him away, Trump appeared to stop again, turned to look at the crowd, pumped his fist in response to growing cheers and began saying “fight” three times.
“Secret Service training procedures dictate that when they practice this and attempt a mock assassination, the (escort) unit leader or agent will wrap their hands around the subject’s torso, crouch them down and rush them to a secure location or to a parked vehicle nearby,” said Smith, who also served as the agency’s training chief for part of his 29-year career.
“That’s in an ideal world, but it’s something that actually happens in training scenarios,” Smith, who now runs his own global security consulting firm, told USA Today.
But Smith, like other current and former Secret Service agents, was reluctant to criticize them, saying they acted heroically in a chaotic environment with a large and temporarily uncooperative protector in Donald Trump.
“As Mike Tyson said, ‘Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit over the head,'” Smith said.
“I agree that it goes against convention,” Keith Gessner, a former Secret Service security veteran who now works with Crisis24 PSG, said of agents’ failure to crouch, hide and move Trump to a secure location quickly.
But Gessner added: “I believe the investigators did the best they could under the circumstances, as they were trained to do. Anxiety and confusion are always going to be heightened.”
Agent placement is wrong and exit route is bad
But there were other complications, according to a video analysis and interviews by USA Today.
Trump lay on the ground for a long period of time while investigators considered what to do.
Having Trump stand up sometimes left gaping holes in the agents’ defenses – their “last line of defense” against a potential second shooter – exposing Trump’s head and body.
One reason for this is that one of the agents is much shorter than Trump, said Magaw, the former administrator of FEMA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
To make matters worse, Magaw said, “when they tried to move him, they didn’t get around him properly. The big guys were on either side, the smaller one (the agent) was in front because he was turning left, and the two big guys should have been in the back, but they messed it up.”
And at least one agent compounded Trump’s vulnerability by bending over twice to retrieve his sunglasses.
“I was naked from the waist up,” Magaw said, adding of the agent’s sunglasses, “If you lose something, you don’t pick it up.”
Some former Secret Service officials say the escape route effectively made Trump an easy target because it was a narrow staircase to the side of the stage, rather than a wider escape ramp at the back that would have allowed him to disappear quickly.
“The staircase was only about a quarter of the width it should have been because we had to get all the cover agents and protected people down at once,” Magaw said. “As soon as I saw it, before anything happened, I knew we needed a ramp, and it needed to be wider.”
Video footage showed some agents having to jump off the stage to greet Trump at the bottom of the stairs, and that a security perimeter had to be dispersed to get down to Trump.
And how did Trump respond?
“He doesn’t dictate what happens.”
Smith, the former deputy director of the Secret Service, said subjects receive specific instructions and training on how to crouch, stay crouched and act as instructed. President-elect Barack Obama spent more than five hours there while Smith was running the Secret Service training academy, running through a variety of emergency scenarios so he knew what to do.
“When you make an extra stop, when you pump your fist, when you say, ‘I’ve got to go get my shoes,’ you’re not only putting yourself at risk, you’re putting our agents at risk,” said Michael Duffy, a former federal law enforcement officer and founder of Solutions Group International, a global security company that contracts with the U.S. government.
“At the end of the day, this is a life-and-death situation and the president doesn’t get to dictate what happens,” Duffy said of Trump. “This is a national security issue and it’s up to the national security professionals to dictate what happens. The president now has to act on the plan. The president is no longer in charge.”
President Trump thanks Secret Service guards
After the shooting, Trump thanked the Secret Service, calling the agents “amazing people” who “put themselves at risk” to protect him during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.
Sensing the anxiety of his rally audience after the shooting, Trump told the audience at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, “I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people waiting with bated breath, and began to yell, ‘Fight, fight, fight!'”
A Trump campaign spokesman declined to answer questions about the shooting, including whether the Secret Service or Trump himself took any action that could have delayed his evacuation and put Trump at further risk if more assailants were identified.
“Are they apologizing and making excuses for the assassin? If so, that’s terrible,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chang said in a text message.
more:What went wrong? Why did the Secret Service allow the shooter to get so close to Trump?
The investigation is looking into “all aspects”
The FBI has said it believes Crooks acted alone, but experts say it’s virtually impossible to tell for sure so soon after a shooting.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told USA Today that there is an “independent investigative committee that will look into all aspects of this matter, including the evacuation process.”
Amy Westercamp of the United States Secret Service Association, an advocacy group for agents, said she couldn’t answer questions about whether agents had engaged in misconduct and referred them to the Secret Service. “The association does not comment on matters related to policies, procedures or operations implemented by the United States Secret Service,” she said.
According to Mageau and other former law enforcement officials, video and audio of the incident show agents on stage surrounding Trump and waiting to move him away until they received a radio call that the gunman, later identified as Crooks, had been shot dead by a counter-sniper.
The video also showed heavily armed Hawkeye counter-attack forces being deployed to eliminate the threat before Trump was evacuated.
Smith cautioned against criticizing the actions of investigators or President Trump in the adrenaline-fueled and chaotic moments immediately following the shooting.
“When the Secret Service tries to do what they’re supposed to do, there’s a human factor that comes into play,” Smith said. “I mean, I understand what the former president intended to do in what he did, and it was clearly a success for him. But in terms of whether it was necessarily textbook, no, they probably should have acted sooner.”
Smith said the agents were keenly aware of Trump’s vulnerability on stage, saying: “One of the agents kept raising his arm or hand, so they were clearly aware to some extent that they were still vulnerable and they were taking full advantage of that.”
