One thing everyone seems agreed upon is that Donald Trump was almost assassinated following utterly inadequate security provision, primarily by the US Secret Service. My attention was drawn to Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the service, by a BBC piece, US professor shocked but unsurprised by assassination attempt (published 09:17, the link is being updated periodically). Earlier in the same link (08:26) the BBC published Secret service director ‘unnecessarily woke’ (J4MB: As opposed to being ‘necessarily woke’?), reflecting the sentiments of Veteran Republican congressman Pete Sessions. From Cheatle’s Wikipedia page:

“During a CBS News interview in May 2023, Cheatle stated the Secret Service, which had a 48% departure rate, needed to “attract diverse candidates and give opportunities to everybody in the workforce, particularly women.” She aims to have 30% women in the agency by 2030.” [J4MB: Utter lunacy, given women’s reluctance to put themselves in the line of danger. We can be very sure that vanishingly few women will be put into the most potentially dangerous situations, but they’ll still earn the same as their male colleagues.]

There are many questions still to be answered in relation to the assassination attempt, including:

• why did the police not respond to members of the crowd who were shouting (apparently for three or four minutes) that there was a man with a rifle on a nearby roof?
• Why did the two police ‘counter snipers’ not shoot the man before he was able to despatch several rounds? In an ABC video (4:19), the moment one of them is startled by those shots is shown after 48 seconds.