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According to intelligence and security experts who spoke with BI, a potential assassin being spotted and detained showed that the former president’s security detail handled the situation exactly as they were trained to do.
“This is a very good outcome, considering the number of people that they had to handle the situation,” Kenneth Gray, a former FBI special agent, told BI.
The Sunday incident is the second time in two months that Trump’s life was put in danger, underscoring how difficult it is to protect him in an outdoor setting, let alone a golf course, the experts said.
On July 13, Trump was injured after a man fired off several shots during an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The man, who was spotted on a building rooftop about 147 yards away from the podium, was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The agency faced immediate backlash for its handling of the rally security, sparking an independent review of the incident ordered by the Biden Administration.
“Look, all outdoor events are nightmares,” Jeffrey James, a former Secret Service agent, told BI. “That’s how I described the rally where President Trump was shot because when you’re outdoors, sightlines go on for thousands of yards.”
James was a special agent for the Secret Service for 22 years, serving during the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. In an interview, he told BI that a golf course, one of Trump’s oft-visited settings, presents unique challenges for the Secret Service.
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In addition to the blind spots, James added that the Secret Service would never shut down an entire golf course — even for a sitting president.
“It’s not always practical to shut down things like abutting roadways — that could get very extensive. And then you start to interrupt commerce and traffic just for the president golfing, and that’s when it gets tough to justify something like that,” James said.
Instead, the former agent said a security detail would set a perimeter around where the president is golfing.
During his time in the Secret Service, James said that his team usually had an agent walk out one hole ahead along with a “trailing element” to ensure nobody could sneak up behind the president. James said there was also a team that would be in proximity to the president in case he needed to be grabbed and evacuated.
“The agent who was out ahead who saw it — that’s exactly what he or she was supposed to do,” James said.