A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Secret Service to publicize its presidential visitor records for Mar-a-Lago. The Secret Service won’t be happy.
They’ll fear that this ruling will weaken Trump’s trust in them. Such is the complexity of protection.
Consider what happened last summer, when Malia Obama attended the Lollapalooza music festival and was recorded smoking marijuana. The photos and videos of the event made it clear that Obama was surrounded by her Secret Service detail.
But why, if marijuana is a controlled narcotic, did federal law enforcement agents allow Malia Obama to smoke marijuana unchallenged? For the same reason the Secret Service doesn’t want to release Trump’s visitor records.
Because at the margin, the U.S. government puts a higher premium on the Secret Service’s ability to protect individuals than it does on its ability to enforce misdemeanor drug laws.
It’s the correct assessment.
The issue here is not that some laws don’t matter but that where misdemeanor laws conflict with the Secret Service’s mandate to protect, protection must come first. And the potential for conflict is real.
Had Malia Obama feared she would be challenged for smoking pot, she might have abandoned her detail. And that would be a recipe for the Secret Service nightmare scenario: a protectee rendered vulnerable to assassination or kidnapping. Fortunately, the Secret Service and Malia made the right choice: trusting each other. As I’ve explained, the Secret Service has an immensely difficult job. They were at Lollapalooza to protect Malia from kidnapping, not to protect her from making poor life choices.
Other protectees make things harder.
Take the twin daughters of President George W. Bush: Barbara and Jenna. During their father’s tenure, the twins were a nightmare for their Secret Service detail. They were deeply uncomfortable with the strictures of protection and frequently ran away from their details.
The dichotomy between Malia and Barbara & Jenna explains why Secret Service agents are trained to do everything feasibly possible to make their protectees trust them. Absent that, the Secret Service cannot do its job.
And while it might seem different, the Secret Service conduct at Lollapalooza helps explain why it does not want to release visitor records for Mar-a-Lago. It fears that if it does publicize those records, Trump may stop trusting his detail. The Secret Service does not, for example, want Trump to get in his golf cart and ride off to meet random people. Doing so would endanger Trump and his office. It’s a special concern in Trump’s case because the president has already shown his deep priority on obedience and trust. For much of the campaign, Trump demanded that his longtime bodyguard, Keith Shiller, be at his side alongside the Secret Service.
Were Trump to lose trust in the Secret Service, he might decide to run away with Shiller. And whatever Trump might think of Shiller’s skills, he is nowhere near as well-trained or equipped as the men and women on Trump’s Secret Service detail.
Ultimately, my point here is not that we shouldn’t know who Trump visits with at Mar-a-Lago — we should. But we should also understand why the Secret Service has alternate interests at play and why its attitude to Mar-a-Lago is both logical and justifiable.
