OUR PICKSSecret Service Director Resigns | The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine | American Fury, and more
· Secret Service Director Resigns After Trump Assassination Attempt
Kimberly A. Cheatle gave up her post Tuesday after security failures that allowed a gunman to shoot at former President Donald J. Trump at an open-air rally
· American Fury
For years, experts have warned of a wave of political violence in America. We should prepare for things to get worse before they get better
· How the Trump Rally Gunman Had an Edge Over the Countersnipers
The Times recreated, in 3-D, the lines of sight for three countersniper teams and the would-be assassin.
· The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine
The DOD wants to refurbish ICBM silos that give it the ability to end civilization. But these missiles are useless as weapons, and their other main purpose—attracting an enemy’s nuclear strikes—serves no end
· Seeking Answers, Lawmakers from Both Parties Ask Secret Service Chief to Quit
In a hearing on Capitol Hill, Director Kimberly A. Cheatle declined to answer questions about the lapses in protection that allowed a gunman to fire at former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pa.
· FBI Says Two Former WKU Students Were Terrorists
The university shared the emails with the FBI’s Louisville field office
Secret Service Director Resigns After Trump Assassination Attempt (Hamed Aleaziz, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Kate Kelly, New York Times)
The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned on Tuesday, after security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump and calls for her to step down from lawmakers in both parties.
In an email to Secret Service employees on Tuesday, Ms. Cheatle said that one of the agency’s foremost duties is to protect the nation’s leaders and that it “fell short of that mission” in failing to secure a campaign rally from a gunman on July 13.
The glaring security mistakes before the shooting, however, and the heated criticism that Ms. Cheatle faced in the days since had left her position increasingly in doubt. Officials investigating the matter, including lawmakers in hearings this week, have repeatedly questioned why the building from which the gunman eventually fired was excluded from the Secret Service’s security perimeter and why no law enforcement officer was placed on the building’s roof for the rally. They have also asked why Mr. Trump was allowed to take the event stage when law enforcement was searching for a suspicious person.
Compounding matters, on Monday, Ms. Cheatle faced a contentious group of lawmakers at the House Oversight Committee who were frustrated at her lack of specific answers on what happened that led to the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.
American Fury (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic)
Our experience of political violence—the shock of an assassination attempt, how the smallest details suddenly burn bright with meaning—can obscure its true nature. Violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideology, hatred, or delusions, is broadly predictable. The social conditions that exacerbate it can simmer for years, complex but unmysterious. Again and again throughout history, and indeed today, periods of political violence coincide with ostentatious wealth disparity, faltering trust in democratic institutions, intensifying partisanship, rapid demographic change, an outpouring of dehumanizing rhetoric about one’s political foes, and soaring conspiracy theorizing. Once political violence becomes endemic in society, as it has in ours, it is terribly difficult to dissolve. Difficult, but not impossible. (Cont.)
