Just hours after a group of Secret Service agents risked their lives to protect Donald Trump from gunfire by a would-be assassin, members of the former president’s own security team were under attack.
“There should be no women in the Secret Service,” said right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote in Xposting a video showing three female officers escorting Trump to a van. “They are supposed to be the best, and none of the best at this job are women.”
Amid intense scrutiny of the agency’s alleged failures in preventing Saturday assassination attempt In Pennsylvania, misogynistic views like Walsh’s have been echoed by several influential right-wing voices.
Elon Musk, owner of X aware who believed the women on the team were too “small” to cover Trump and had not been selected on merit, while hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman suggested so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies contributed to the incident.
The backlash wasn’t limited to the loudest voices on social media. Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who rose to notoriety for saying “we’re not going to fix it” after a school shooting in his state, told Fox News that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was a “DEI person” and suggested that “this is what happens when you don’t put your best players in.”
He and other commentators have pointed to Cheatle’s pledge to ensure that 30 percent of the agency’s staff were female by the end of the decade.
Burchett sits on the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, which is scheduled to question Cheatle — the second woman to head the protective agency, who rose through the ranks in a decades-long career — about the assassination attempt at a hearing scheduled for Monday.
Advocates for greater diversity in the national security workforce say they are concerned about the impact of such rhetoric.
“People feel safer in groups, and that’s why the more people like Tim Burchett say things, [that is] “It’s so obviously misogynistic and sexist that others who already feel it feel like they can get away with saying it,” said Gina Bennett, who spent 34 years at the CIA and advocates for the inclusion of women in the defense ranks.
“What I think it does is it continues to make sexism, racism and misogyny acceptable, because people just become desensitized to it,” she added.
The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency has previously reported the incident. saying that all agents are held to the same standards. A spokesman for Burchett said: “The congressman has said many times: put the best player in, coach.”
The attacks on the Secret Service’s so-called DEI agenda, which were also backed by former Attorney General William Barr and Republican Rep. Cory Mills, who is a former Army sniper, are the latest front in a long war against diversity and inclusion policies being waged by Trump allies in Congress, the courts and on college campuses.
Despite protests from the Biden administration, the latest National Defense Authorization Act was signed into law with a clause prohibiting the government from establishing new DEI positions within the Department of Defense, employing anyone whose primary duty is to craft diversity and inclusion policies, and measuring the results of such plans.
While the Secret Service has employed female special agents for more than half a century, its recruitment policies have only recently drawn the ire of Republican politicians.
This year, the House Oversight Committee mentioned DEI policies in a letter to Cheatle following an incident involving a Secret Service agent on Vice President Kamala Harris’s protective detail, who was later removed from duty after an alleged attack on his superior.
The matter “raised concerns within the agency about this officer’s hiring and selection process: specifically whether prior incidents in her employment history were overlooked during the hiring process … as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion effort,” wrote committee Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican.
While the Secret Service has been plagued by past scandals involving male colleagues, such as the alleged hiring of prostitutes in Colombia and drunk driving near the White House, the response to Trump’s attack has seen some “appropriations” [on] “You don’t need specific physical traits to incriminate an entire population,” said Lauren Bean Buitta, founder of Girl Security, which campaigns for diversity in security.
Bennett, who now teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, said: “Someone is going to have to show me the medical anatomical proof that being born with a uterus, in one form or another, makes me less able to identify a threat and neutralize it.”
According to Girl Security, despite attacks on diversity and inclusion, there has been a “huge increase” in the number of young women interested in national security careers. Buitta said it would be “extraordinarily shocking” if the leaders of the respective presidential campaigns condemned sexist comments, which she warned could “spark more hate.”
But the vitriol poured on the women on Trump’s team may already be having an effect. As he entered the Republican convention grounds in Milwaukee on Monday night, the former president was flanked by a dozen Secret Service agents, all men.