Have We Entered an Era of Acceptable Mediocrity and Incompetence?
How Complacency and Poor Leadership Are Undermining Our Institutions
Recent events have sharpened my focus on a persistent concern that first surfaced after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in May 2022. During that tragedy, a large team of armed law enforcement officers waited in a hallway for over an hour before engaging the shooter. How can such a catastrophic failure occur when children’s lives are at stake?
The questions that keep coming up in my mind are: Have we entered an era of incompetence in some of our most vital institutions? Is it simple mediocrity? And are willing to accept that?
Today’s TL;dr will share insights into two significant events: the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the Secret Service’s subsequent communications. Like last week, we’ll be pulling from various news reporting, essays and podcasts.
Breakdown in Security Protocols: A Closer Look at the Trump Rally Incident
A Wall Street Journal July 20 article details the numerous failures of the agencies responsible for protecting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at his Pennsylvania rally. Among them:
Despite an operational plan and coordination between the Secret Service and local law enforcement, Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to access a rooftop with a clear line of sight to Trump. He fired shots, injuring several people and killing one before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.
Crooks had been flagged as suspicious over an hour before the shooting, yet no decisive action was taken. “He had attracted suspicion more than an hour before the attack, when officers saw him pacing around the edges of the rally with a backpack and a range finder.” A range finder is a device like binoculars that measures the distance between you and a specific target.
Earlier on the day of the shooting, Crooks was able to fly a drone to get aerial footage of the event site.
Despite the security concerns and suspicious activity, the Secret Service allowed Trump to proceed with his speech, and the roof was not adequately secured. “Despite the possible threat, the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage. It couldn’t be determined whether agents sought to dissuade him.”
How do trained professionals allow all this happen? It could be as prosaic as a lack of focus on the task at hand, retired FBI agent James Gagliano said in a podcast interview. Gagliano served 25 years in the FBI, including assignments protecting FBI directors. In addition to the obvious planning and operational failures listed above, Gagliano says there’s another factor at play.
I think the other piece of this is complacency. Complacency kills … When you’re protecting a dignitary or a protectee, it’s easy to quote unquote fall asleep at the switch because it is a boring, mind-numbingly mundane task. (Emphasis mine)
As someone who eschews conspiracy theories, this explanation makes the most sense to me. And boy, is that depressing.
Deflecting Blame: Secret Service’s Post-Attempt Response
The Secret Service’s response to the shooting has been disastrous in a different way. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that, rather than taking responsibility, the Secret Service is deflecting blame onto local police, bureaucratic policies, and other factors, with the Biden administration backing the agency. He writes:
A public statement issued by (Director Kimberly) Cheatle on Tuesday [three days after the shooting] said that Secret Service agents were able to “ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump,” not even mentioning that something went wrong. In an interview on Monday, Cheatle said that the incident was “unacceptable” and that “the buck stops with me,” but also said that she will not be resigning.
Much like President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, following the shooting, Washington quickly got to work trying to disabuse millions of Americans from believing what they had just seen. Though the administration says it doesn’t yet know what exactly happened, it does seem to know one thing: that the Secret Service did nothing wrong.
In the ABC News interview linked above, Cheatle explains why agents weren’t stationed atop the building that Crooks shot from.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point,” she said. “And so, 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, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
Said former FBI agent Galliano: “I think she probably wished she could walk that back because the mockery that’s gonna come from that … everyone knows that that doesn’t meet the smell test.”
Indeed, snipers were posted on other sloped roofs near the rally stage. Cheatle’s explanation simply beggars belief.
On Monday, Cheatle stonewalled lawmakers during a contentious House Oversight Committee hearing, where she at least admitted “we failed.” One congressperson observed she was more open in her interview with ABC News. Her non-responsive performance accomplished something few have been able to do recently: unite Democrats and Republicans, who both called for her to step down.
On Tuesday, she did just that, resigning.
‘The reality is we are governed by idiots’
Erick Erickson, a talk radio host who also writes on Substack, argues the blatant spin doctoring in the week after the shooting further strains the federal government’s already tattered credibility. The deceptions, in turn, fuel conspiracy theories across the political spectrum.
On the left, people have speculated that Trump staged the shooting to advance himself politically. Others are convinced Crooks hit a teleprompter and it shattered, cutting Trump’s ear. The reality is a bullet grazed Trump’s ear. The teleprompters were not hit and there are photos to prove it.
On the right, people have speculated the Biden Administration attempted to kill Trump. Perhaps agents were given a “do not fire” order. Someone created a social media post claiming to be the police sniper, in which he said as much. It was fake. The reality is the government would not rely on a twenty year old who got booted from the high school rifle team for being a bad shot. The reality is the government could have concocted a private heart attack instead of a very public shooting.
The reality is we are governed by idiots. The bureaucracy that cannot deliver the mail on time cannot do much competently. The reality is Trump survived by the grace of God against a confluence of incompetence. To restore trust in institutions, people must be held accountable.
Obviously, I don’t believe we are governed by idiots. GGF regularly highlights numerous examples of effective and exemplary governance in our country, especially at the local level, where I frequently witness excellence. However, it’s challenging to convince people the government is competent when such obvious failures occur, and responsibility is then denied.
Facing the Truth: A Call for Honest Accountability
The kind of dissembling we’ve seen in the wake of the assassination attempt does the opposite of what’s intended by those in positions of authority doing the dissembling. They are credibility killers. Yet, there are more and more government officials who believe they can make people believe something other than the truth.
The truth is the public can handle the truth. Most people would have respected Cheatle if she had said, early on, “We screwed up.” It would be a refreshing change in our national discourse if officials would set aside the impulse to work up some kind of favorable narrative and simply provide an honest, straightforward accounting of the facts. That would be a crucial step toward restoring credibility.
Honest accountability and competent leadership are essential for rebuilding trust in our institutions and ensuring effective governance. Got a story about a true profile in political courage? Share it in the comments. For Friday’s deep dive, GGF will be sharing the story of Houston-area public servants performing at their best under intense pressure from the public in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl.
In Other’s Words
For Reason magazine, J.D. Tuccille asked: Could more federalism cure what ails the body politic?
If conflict is found in elections that mutually loathing partisans think they can’t afford to lose, maybe the temperature can be turned down by making contests less important. Vicious rhetoric by candidates may fan the flames of political hatred, recently fueling the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. … If the federal government had a smaller role in our lives, it wouldn’t matter so much who wins control of the White House and Congress. If power is transferred from D.C. to states and localities that are closer to their constituents and easier for dissenters to escape by loading moving trucks, maybe political battles don’t have to be so nasty. … Two and a half centuries on, power has been hoovered up by federal officials who increasingly impose one-size-fits-whoever-is-in-charge policies. That’s a recipe for the political conflict we see around us as people battle to impose their preferred policies and escape those of their enemies.
A variation on that theme was expressed by John Grove in a July 16 essay in Law & Liberty.
One characteristic of today’s disease in the public mind is that it seems to be driven specifically by our political life—not by underlying social conditions. The vitriolic politics we practice is not feeding off already-simmering social tensions. It creates these identities and ‘communities,’ most of which would not otherwise cohere on their own. Rather than managing and mitigating the tensions that naturally arise in any society, our political process actively generates new ones and calls forth the worst in human nature to bolster them.
The final word goes to Rep. Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who ran against Biden in the Democratic primary. In a July 21 interview on the Honestly podcast, Phillips said he ran because he believes in competition and thought Democrats deserved a choice.
What I was really taking on is a culture of silence that I think is the worst, most dangerous affront to democracy. It was a silence that I saw amongst my Republican colleagues when I first joined Congress as they would eviscerate, excoriate Donald Trump quietly, privately in the halls of the Capitol, and then publicly get in front of the cameras and worship him. And I thought it was a disease unique to the right and, lo and behold, I saw that it was contagious and infecting the left as well. … That culture of silence infuriated me. … My mission was to provoke a conversation and ensure that voters had an option. And I think without competition, we’re in trouble. And I believe that is indeed the vitamin of democracy …
But let me make one more appeal to everybody listening and tuning in. The real problem here is that only one in ten Americans participate in primary elections. That’s what the parties want. They don’t want broad engagement and participation in primaries. They want the party faithful to essentially check the box of the coronated person. That’s typically how this works. If more Americans would simply get out and vote in primaries, it is the best way to start affecting change within this system and elevate far more broadly appealing candidates. I think that’s the most immediate call to action that doesn’t take any reformation, just a little bit of inspiration.
Onward and Upward.
Note: We’ll be off next week as GGF takes its annual beach sabbatical.