Close Calls and Crumbling Foundations

What exceptional events tell us about assuring safety and democratic politics

Figure 1: Jesus Christ!

A single inch. That’s all that separated life from death for former president Donald Trump on Saturday. A 20 year-old man climbed up on a roof of a building near a campaign rally in Pennsylvania with an AR-15, getting off several rounds before succumbing to a secret service sniper’s bullet. Some speculate that Trump only survived, because he serendipitously turned his head at the same instant that the would-be assassin pulled the trigger.

That this moment even came to be is tragically reflective of the times in which Americans are now living. The long history of democratic decline across the world reveals a common pattern: the belief that one’s political opponents are outright enemies of the state and that normal democratic politics are no longer adequate to protect the nation. What starts as polarizing, nasty rhetoric sometimes turns into political violence, assassinations, and coups.

Trump himself has fed into the polarization spiral that has gripped our country with his own apocalyptic political rhetoric, going so far as to call his opponents “vermin”. And Heritage Foundation plans to centralize political power, should Trump be elected, are not heartening.

The debate among the left, whether to frame Trump as an exceptional existential threat or instead beat him with good old fashioned politics, seems to have mostly settled on the former. Although it is unclear what the gunman’s motives are, people on the right are already connecting the assassination attempt with leftist rhetoric that paints the former president as equivalent to Hitler. Whatever the historical merits of making such a comparison, it can almost indisputably be seen as justifying political violence.

A large number of left commentators are convinced that only by declaring Trump “damn close enough” to Hitler can Democrats beat him at the electoral box. What worries me is that they seemed to have never considered the possibility that the strategy might backfire.

One fears that Saturday’s events may only further radicalize both the candidate and the movement behind him, which may only further provoke his opponents among the left as well. The polarization spiral will keep spiraling, so long as far too many of us keep feeding into it.

After the attempt on his life, Trump now says that he wants “to try to unite our country.” One can only hope that he means it, and understands that it would require something very different from what he’s done for the past ten years.

But this isn’t only a post about our increasingly polarized political moment. Rather, I want to focus on what went wrong that day. Already the Internet is abuzz with conspiracy theories. Some on the left have claimed that it was “staged,” that the assassination attempt was a “false flag” event that would serve as Trump’s Reichstag Fire — the burning of the German parliament was used by the Nazis to justify consolidating power. On the other side, some conservatives are declaring it an “inside job.”

Ahh…the 21st century. Now the crazy arguments you’d normally just hear at 2am in the pub can now be broadcast to the world

There are two parts to why these kinds of claims can gain purchase, and, no, the problem can’t be attributed simply to social media turning people into brainwashed dolts. First, it is reflective of the incredibly low levels of institutional and social trust.

Recall a previous post on the radiation leak that affected Brookhaven National Labs in the 1990s. Citizens put their trust in the far out claims of Alec Baldwin and other activists, even tuning into the Montel Williams Show to watch them wheel out cancer-stricken young boy. People fell for conspiracy theories about the lab, not because they were science illiterate or stupid, but because the traditional authorities failed to prove their competence, benevolence, and integrity. Conspiratorial thinking about Saturday’s events are a sign that Americans’ trust of each other and of major institutions is at a new low.

Second, most people don’t realize how counterintuitive the assurance of safety is, nor how surprising people’s behavior in exception situations can be. Internet sleuths are making a big deal about some audience members failing to react “appropriately” to gunshots. But lots of people freeze rather than flee, or even do irrational things like pull out their phone rather than cower.

In any case, much of the conspiratorial claims center around disbelief that the United States Secret Service (USSS) could have allowed something like this to happen. The unfortunate reality is that this assassination attempt was almost successful, simply because serious attempts on the life of a president are incredibly rare. The secret service’s power is more through deterrence, through their visibility and reputation, than anything else.

Exceptional events, whether assassination attempts or nuclear near meltdowns, nearly always arrive at the outer edge of humans’ cognitive capacity. The reasons for this are clear upon reflection. How many completely uneventful rallies had Trump’s USSS team served at prior to Saturday? Success breeds complacency, and even exceptional task can eventually become a dull everyday grind. Spotting extremely rare moments of threat amongst a sea of normalcy is one of the most taxing challenges that we face.

Safety is often understood through the metaphor of layers of swiss cheese. For keeping a president safe, the speed of a USSS sniper is the last layer of cheese. It comes into play only when deterrence, securing the perimeter, and other strategies have failed.

In the video of the shooting, one sees a USSS sniper pull his head away from his scope. Hopefully we learn later what went through his mind, but I could imagine him wondering if he could believe his own eyes. Was there really someone crawling up a roof with an AR 15?

Although some have screamed online that this was irresponsible, it’s not at all an abnormal response. And often it’s the right thing to do. Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States was averted several times by servicemen second guessing the signals they were getting on their radars. Had it really been a maintenance man with a broom rather than a kid with a gun on that roof, the sniper probably would have been commended for his hesitation.

Moreover, it is easy to fail to appreciate the complexity of the interplay between USSS and local police. At some point, secret service has to rely on other policing agencies to secure the space. Some commentators were aghast that USSS hadn’t secured a building 120 meters away, but good marksmen are capable up to a kilometer away. All organizations make tradeoffs on safety based on their available resources, whether its to protect a president or to make sure space shuttles don’t blow up. Certainly USSS will get taken to task for not interfacing better with local law enforcement, and, as the Uvalde shooting showed, local police themselves are often woefully unprepared for extreme events.

All this is to say that USSS strives to be a high reliability organization. And such organizations are rare and already and always at risk of failure. Should the level of political violence continue to rise, I imagine that both the USSS and other policing organizations will more often train with simulated assassination attempts, and will improve how they communicate with the local police securing the far perimeter, which in this case might have stopped the shooter from getting as far as he did.

Unfortunately, those measures won’t quash conspiratorial thinking about the attempt on president Trump’s life (neither will this post for that matter). But, as I alluded to above, if we’re at the point where we’re having to battle farfetched claims about false flag events and inside jobs, we’ve already lost the fight.

Just as high reliability organizations like the USSS can only appropriately respond to a sniper on a nearby roof if the foundational organizational structure is sound, a democracy will only foster sensible public discourse insofar as it stands on a healthy sociological basis. The USSS won’t do better next time simply by firing agents or making public mea culpas. Similarly, America’s political problems are now far bigger than just Trump and Biden. However the election turns out, we’ll still be left with a monumental task to stop our country’s longer term democratic decline.