On the night of Saturday January 13 I arrived home from the synagogue, opening the front door and hoping not to cause too much noise. My wife was seated on our living room sofa and had a strange look on her face. "Trump's been shot" she told me. I at first thought she must be pulling a prank on me, but she insisted that it was true and her mom had told her once the Sabbath was out. As my mother-in-law is a huge Trump fan - more so than almost anyone else I know - I actually asked my wife if she was OK after the shooting. The other thought that entered my head was that earlier that evening a friend of mine had analogized the current situation in the White House interestingly, calling Jill Biden the First Lady McBiden in reference to the Shakespearean character Lady McBeth.
I am not going to pretend that my reaction was to pray for the life of the former president, the fact is that he was already confirmed to be in stable condition when I found out about the shooting. But I do think that we're drifting into an increasingly dangerous paradigm as a country when a presidential candidate who has been the target of so many legal attacks has now survived an assassination attempt. The rest of what I have to share hopefully is a little different from what everyone else is saying. Firstly, the security breakdowns at the Butler, PA venue show a dramatic decline in the quality of work from the US Secret Service, but it's not unexpected. When I would do video interviews in the past one of the best guests I had was author and former USSS Uniform Division officer Gary Byrne. Byrne had served in the White House during the tenures of three presidents, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and had been subpoenaed to testify during the investigation by Special Counsel Kenneth Starr into the Monica Lewinsky affair, a milestone as until then no member of his agency had ever been compelled to testify in any legal proceeding regarding a protected person. Both in his 2016 blockbuster Crisis of Character about serving in the Clinton White House and in his 2019 follow-up Secrets of the Secret Service, Byrne outlined how the agency was plagued by a deep morale crisis among the rank and file agents and officers. (Agents are the peopletypically accompanying a protected subject whereever they go seen wearing suits and ear pieces. Officers are, like Byrne, uniformed personnel who are effectively the law enforcement of the White House and around diplomatic missions.) The leaders of the Secret Service are often careerist bureaucrats who are more concerned with logging time to collect a pension or make a lateral move into another lucrative security position than they are with the welfare of the people who actually perform the mission of protecting VIP's or following the law. Byrne writes in his books and mentioned during one of our interviews that the USSS has always ranked last among federal departments in terms of employee satisfaction, and that his own experiences led him to leave and become an air marshal in the wake of 9/11. I encourage you to either watch my last interview with him, or even better pick up one of his books. Gary stands out as one of the most personable and engaging interview subjects I've ever spoken with. Another great perspective from a Secret Service background is Dan Bongino who did an extensive breakdown of the incident on Monday.
Next, I've seen a lot of mockery online of the female Secret Service agents who reacted to the assassination in questionable ways. I even retweeted one by the writer Ian Miles Chong. But I think it's wrong to mock these women, because they were probably genuinely trying to do their duty. There could be many reasons they were not able to smoothly react, including deficient training, event planning, or communication. It's a leadership issue once again. However, there is some merit to saying that this isn't a field that should be open to women. As some of you may have read, I did serve in the IDF in a unit that was mixed between men and women. Unquestionably, given the occupational dangers and requirements that we faced, many of the soldiers that were in my unit had no business standing in the hot sun for 8 hours on a checkpoint in a kevlar vest. I say this based on the health conditions I knew of these soldiers who often had asthma or other debilitating illnesses that precluded them from training for combat, but curiously allowed them to serve in one of the more active combat zones at the time, the Nablus district of the West Bank. For female soldiers the issues were often worse, many of them being five feet tall and being expected to wear and carry the same gear as men who were often towering over them. Sadly, but not surprisingly, many of these women developed severe back pain and other issues, but for our battalion commander it was important enough that we be a unit that opens such roles to women to supersede their long term health after their two years of service. One female soldier who was our dispatch operator when I arrived in the unit had been stabbed in the face when she was serving on the checkpoint and was scarred permanently. One could tell just from speaking to her that she was not meant to be in this role as she had a timid and shy disposition. So in responding to this debacle, I think it is wrong to attack these agents even though clearly their response left much to be desired. Ultimately, the Secret Service must put into the field agents that are capable of doing the job, not prioritize placing them based on their race, gender, or other immutable characteristics.
Lastly, while I hope to keep putting out these newsletters, if they become more rare in the short term be aware that it's because I'm working on a larger project. G-d Bless the USA!
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One Inch from the End
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On the night of Saturday January 13 I arrived home from the synagogue, opening the front door and hoping not to cause too much noise. My wife was seated on our living room sofa and had a strange look on her face. "Trump's been shot" she told me. I at first thought she must be pulling a prank on me, but she insisted that it was true and her mom had told her once the Sabbath was out. As my mother-in-law is a huge Trump fan - more so than almost anyone else I know - I actually asked my wife if she was OK after the shooting. The other thought that entered my head was that earlier that evening a friend of mine had analogized the current situation in the White House interestingly, calling Jill Biden the First Lady McBiden in reference to the Shakespearean character Lady McBeth.
I am not going to pretend that my reaction was to pray for the life of the former president, the fact is that he was already confirmed to be in stable condition when I found out about the shooting. But I do think that we're drifting into an increasingly dangerous paradigm as a country when a presidential candidate who has been the target of so many legal attacks has now survived an assassination attempt. The rest of what I have to share hopefully is a little different from what everyone else is saying. Firstly, the security breakdowns at the Butler, PA venue show a dramatic decline in the quality of work from the US Secret Service, but it's not unexpected. When I would do video interviews in the past one of the best guests I had was author and former USSS Uniform Division officer Gary Byrne. Byrne had served in the White House during the tenures of three presidents, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and had been subpoenaed to testify during the investigation by Special Counsel Kenneth Starr into the Monica Lewinsky affair, a milestone as until then no member of his agency had ever been compelled to testify in any legal proceeding regarding a protected person. Both in his 2016 blockbuster Crisis of Character about serving in the Clinton White House and in his 2019 follow-up Secrets of the Secret Service, Byrne outlined how the agency was plagued by a deep morale crisis among the rank and file agents and officers. (Agents are the peopletypically accompanying a protected subject whereever they go seen wearing suits and ear pieces. Officers are, like Byrne, uniformed personnel who are effectively the law enforcement of the White House and around diplomatic missions.) The leaders of the Secret Service are often careerist bureaucrats who are more concerned with logging time to collect a pension or make a lateral move into another lucrative security position than they are with the welfare of the people who actually perform the mission of protecting VIP's or following the law. Byrne writes in his books and mentioned during one of our interviews that the USSS has always ranked last among federal departments in terms of employee satisfaction, and that his own experiences led him to leave and become an air marshal in the wake of 9/11. I encourage you to either watch my last interview with him, or even better pick up one of his books. Gary stands out as one of the most personable and engaging interview subjects I've ever spoken with. Another great perspective from a Secret Service background is Dan Bongino who did an extensive breakdown of the incident on Monday.
Next, I've seen a lot of mockery online of the female Secret Service agents who reacted to the assassination in questionable ways. I even retweeted one by the writer Ian Miles Chong. But I think it's wrong to mock these women, because they were probably genuinely trying to do their duty. There could be many reasons they were not able to smoothly react, including deficient training, event planning, or communication. It's a leadership issue once again. However, there is some merit to saying that this isn't a field that should be open to women. As some of you may have read, I did serve in the IDF in a unit that was mixed between men and women. Unquestionably, given the occupational dangers and requirements that we faced, many of the soldiers that were in my unit had no business standing in the hot sun for 8 hours on a checkpoint in a kevlar vest. I say this based on the health conditions I knew of these soldiers who often had asthma or other debilitating illnesses that precluded them from training for combat, but curiously allowed them to serve in one of the more active combat zones at the time, the Nablus district of the West Bank. For female soldiers the issues were often worse, many of them being five feet tall and being expected to wear and carry the same gear as men who were often towering over them. Sadly, but not surprisingly, many of these women developed severe back pain and other issues, but for our battalion commander it was important enough that we be a unit that opens such roles to women to supersede their long term health after their two years of service. One female soldier who was our dispatch operator when I arrived in the unit had been stabbed in the face when she was serving on the checkpoint and was scarred permanently. One could tell just from speaking to her that she was not meant to be in this role as she had a timid and shy disposition. So in responding to this debacle, I think it is wrong to attack these agents even though clearly their response left much to be desired. Ultimately, the Secret Service must put into the field agents that are capable of doing the job, not prioritize placing them based on their race, gender, or other immutable characteristics.
Lastly, while I hope to keep putting out these newsletters, if they become more rare in the short term be aware that it's because I'm working on a larger project. G-d Bless the USA!
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