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Secret Service Told Trump It Needs to Bolster Security if He Keeps Golfing
The acting director of the Secret Service told former President Donald J. Trump that significant additional security arrangements and planning would be needed if he wanted to continue safely playing golf, according to three people with knowledge of their conversation.
The agency’s acting director, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., made the recommendation at a meeting with Mr. Trump on Monday afternoon in the former president’s office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.
The meeting came just 24 hours after a second apparent assassination attempt on the former president in the span of just two months. And it also comes at a time when, behind the scenes, tensions between the Trump campaign and the Secret Service have been escalating.
Mr. Trump asked Mr. Rowe whether it was safe for him to keep playing golf, one of the people said. Mr. Rowe discussed the difficulties of securing sprawling golf courses near public roads and said that some of Mr. Trump’s courses were easier to protect than others, one of the people said.
It is unclear what changes Mr. Trump will make to his golf schedule after the meeting, and some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit are frustrated at any notion he might have to cut back on his weekly activity. They questioned why President Biden was able to visit open beaches but Mr. Trump should have to restrict his golf, especially given that other former presidents regularly play the sport.
However, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden do not receive the same level of security. One of them is a sitting president and one is a former president. Mr. Trump’s level of Secret Service protection reduced after he left the White House. But since the first attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in July in Butler, Pa., both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about the former president’s protection, given the current intensity of threats. Mr. Biden has called on the Secret Service to provide whatever additional resources are required to keep Mr. Trump safe.
Golf remains more than a pastime for Mr. Trump — it’s a major part of his identity as well as a way of socializing and a release valve as he faces a presidential campaign and ongoing legal woes.
The authorities said the suspect in the latest case, Ryan W. Routh, hid for 12 hours on Sunday near the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. After a Secret Service agent spotted Mr. Routh poking the barrel of a gun through bushes on the course’s perimeter, that agent opened fire, leading Mr. Routh to run to his car, officials have said.
Mr. Routh left behind a semiautomatic rifle, a scope, two backpacks and a Go-Pro camera, which suggested he planned to film an intended shooting, officials said. The police pulled him over on the side of Interstate 95 about 45 minutes after a witness, who saw him fleeing, photographed his license plate.
In their meeting on Monday, Mr. Rowe told Mr. Trump that it was difficult to secure his sprawling golf courses because they have so much open space, one of the people briefed on the meeting said.
The courses are close to public roads and the fact that photographers, using long-range lenses, can often capture Mr. Trump on his greens and fairways suggest that a skilled gunman might be able to get a clear line of sight on him. Mr. Trump raised some of these concerns himself in the meeting with Mr. Rowe, one of the people with knowledge of the meeting said.
Mr. Rowe told Mr. Trump that the Secret Service views the golf course at Joint Base Andrews as easier to secure than some of his courses, because it’s a military course, two of the people said. Barack Obama frequently played there during his presidency.
Given Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule, which is expected to be busier as the November election draws near, it is unclear how much golf he will be able to play in the final 49 days, an adviser said.
A campaign spokeswoman, Danielle Alvarez, declined to comment on Monday’s private briefing. She noted Mr. Trump’s Sunday post on social media, in which he praised the Secret Service and law enforcement.
“It was certainly an interesting day!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social-media platform Truth Social, adding in all-caps, “The job done was absolutely outstanding.”
In a private conversation shortly after the assailant disrupted his game, Mr. Trump told Senator Lindsey Graham that his Secret Service team had been “awesome,” Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, later recalled.
But while Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised the agents on his personal detail since the first assassination attempt in July, his team has complained that the agency has not provided the former president with the level of resources the campaign has requested.
A spokesman for the Secret Service said that Mr. Rowe declined to comment on private conversations involving someone the agency protects.
Mr. Trump owns or leases a number of courses, including three in Florida, as well as one in New Jersey, one in Westchester County in New York, one in Sterling, Va., two courses in Scotland and one in Ireland, and a new one in the Middle East. He plays every week and takes great pride in it, describing it as his main form of exercise.
Aides to Mr. Trump have described golf as an important form of relaxation for him. When he was cooped up in a Manhattan courtroom for his hush-money trial earlier this year, his advisers were eager for him to spend as much time as possible outdoors on his golf courses.
As president, Mr. Trump often used his Virginia club, and sometimes took lawmakers out on the golf course with him. Since leaving the presidency, Mr. Trump has played his courses with sports figures, donors and supporters, and mingles openly with people in the club dining rooms. The golf courses have been one of Mr. Trump’s steadiest streams of income.
After the first assassination attempt in July, when a 20-year-old man, Thomas Crooks, came within inches of killing Mr. Trump at a rally in Butler, Mr. Trump told allies that the Secret Service had concerns about him playing golf. But Mr. Trump continued to play.
The Secret Service has come under harsh scrutiny over security lapses that allowed Mr. Crooks to crawl onto a warehouse rooftop at the July 13 rally in Butler and fire off eight rounds at Mr. Trump, wounding his ear and killing a spectator in the crowd behind him. The agency appears to have narrowly averted another shooting at Mr. Trump on Sunday by posting agents ahead of the former president to scout out his next holes on the golf course. Agents were able to spot and shoot at the would-be assailant before he could fire his own weapon through the shrubbery.
The alleged assailant, Mr. Routh, has been known to U.S. authorities in recent years. A contractor and occasional social activist, Mr. Routh has a significant criminal record, including a 2002 conviction in North Carolina for possessing a weapon of mass destruction, which court records describe as explosives with a blasting cap and detonation cord.
Mr. Trump has also been the target of foreign assassination plots, particularly from Iran. U.S. officials obtained information about an Iranian plot to assassinate Mr. Trump in the weeks ahead of the Butler rally, although the plot did not appear connected to the shooting that took place.
The former head of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned her post amid widespread criticism of the agency over the Butler attack.
The acting director of the Secret Service, Mr. Rowe, said in a Monday news conference that “the protective methodologies of the Secret Service were effective yesterday,” but he also made it clear that the agency did not search the golf course’s perimeter before Mr. Trump began his round.
“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there,” Mr. Rowe said. “It was not on his official schedule.”
But it is well-known that Mr. Trump frequently plays golf at his course in West Palm Beach when he’s staying at Mar-a-Lago. It remains unclear why no perimeter search was conducted.
Additional work by Jana Tauschinski
Oil and gas tanker location and destination data are from Kpler. The map shows the latest position for vessels with an active AIS signal on April 19–20, filtered by minimum capacity thresholds: crude tankers of at least 50,000 deadweight tonnage (DWT); oil product tankers of at least 55,000 DWT; oil/chemical tankers of at least 40,000 DWT; LNG carriers of at least 150,000 cubic metres; and LPG carriers of at least 50,000 cubic metres. Net fossil fuel import data by country are based on Ember analysis of the IEA World Energy Balances 2023.
A 26-year-old man is facing two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two University of South Florida doctoral students who went missing last week, local authorities said Saturday.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said that evidence presented to the state attorney’s office resulted in the charges against Hisham Abugharbieh, the roommate of Zamil Limon, one of the doctoral students.
Abugharbieh is accused of premediated murder with a weapon. He was arrested on Friday, the same day Limon was found dead.
The family of Nahida Bristy, the other doctoral student, told CBS News that police said she is also likely dead. That is based on the volume of blood discovered at Abugharbieh’s residence, which he shared with Limon.
“Police told us she is no longer with us,” Bristy’s brother, Zahid Prato, said early Saturday.
The family was told her body may never be found and police believe she may have been dismembered, according to Prato.
CBS News has reached out to police for more information.
Authorities said in a statement Saturday they were still searching for Bristy.
Limon’s remains were found on the Howard Franklin Bridge in Tampa Friday morning, Chief Deputy Joseph Maurer with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said. His cause of death was pending autopsy results.
Deputies with the sheriff’s office took Abugharbieh into custody on Friday after responding to a domestic violence call at a home in the Lake Forest Community, a neighborhood near USF’s Tampa campus, officials said. He also faces charges of domestic violence and evidence tampering, as well as a charge of failing to report a death to law enforcement.
Limon and Bristy, both 27, had last been seen in the Tampa area on April 16.
Limon was studying the use of AI in environmental science and was set to present his doctoral thesis this week, his family said. Bristy is studying chemical engineering.
When President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago, his point man was Secretary of State John Kerry. Over 20 months of talks, Mr. Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart on at least 18 different days, often several times per day.
High-level nuclear diplomacy was a natural role for the top U.S. diplomat. Secretaries of state traditionally take the lead on the country’s biggest diplomatic tasks, from arms control treaties to Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
But as President Trump prepares to send a delegation to the latest round of U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan this weekend, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will remain where he often does: at home.
Mr. Rubio did not attend the last U.S. meeting with Iran earlier this month. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha. Mr. Rubio has also been absent from U.S. delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel last October.
In recent months, Mr. Rubio — consumed with his second role, as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser — has not traveled much at all.
During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made 11 foreign trips from January 2024 to late April 2024, stopping in roughly three dozen cities, according to the State Department. So far this year, Mr. Rubio has visited six foreign cities, including a stop in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Mr. Trump has outsourced much of his diplomacy to others, including his friend Steve Witkoff, a wealthy associate from the world of Manhattan real estate, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have spearheaded diplomacy with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Iran, whose delegation they will meet for the second time this month in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
Mr. Rubio’s distance from the trenches of diplomacy reflects his dual role on Mr. Trump’s national security team. For the past year, he has served as the White House national security adviser even while leading the State Department — the first person to do so since Henry A. Kissinger in the mid-1970s.
The secretary of state runs the State Department, overseeing U.S. diplomats and embassies worldwide, as well as Washington-based policymakers. Working from the White House, the national security adviser coordinates departments and agencies, including the State Department, to develop policy advice for the president.
The twin roles reflect Mr. Rubio’s influence with Mr. Trump, and offer him a way to maintain it. For Mr. Rubio, less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.
As Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Kushner and Vice President JD Vance met with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month, Mr. Rubio was at Mr. Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Emma Ashford, an analyst of U.S. diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington. “Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Ms. Ashford said.
Mr. Rubio accepted the national security adviser job on an acting basis last May after Mr. Trump reassigned the job’s previous occupant, Michael Waltz. But officials say that Mr. Rubio is expected to keep it indefinitely.
That arrangement is not inherently bad, Ms. Ashford added. And she noted that previous presidents had entrusted major diplomatic tasks to people other than the secretary of state. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delegated his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to handle diplomacy with Russia and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, for instance.
But she echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr. Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department. “I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, contested such claims. “Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. “We now have an N.S.C. and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”
Mr. Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico last June, Mr. Rubio said he visited the State Department “almost every day.”
While there, he often meets with visiting dignitaries before returning to the White House. Last week, Mr. Rubio presided over a meeting at the State Department between Lebanese and Israeli officials that set the stage for a cease-fire in Lebanon.
His twin jobs “really do overlap in many cases,” he said. “In many cases you end up being in the same meetings or in the same places; there’s just one less person in there, if you think about it,” Mr. Rubio added. “A lot of people would come to Washington, for example, for meetings, and they’d want to meet with the national security adviser and then meet with me as secretary of state. Now they can do both in one meeting.”
Asked about his travel schedule during a news conference last December, Mr. Rubio said he had less reason to travel abroad because “we have a lot of leaders constantly coming here” to visit Mr. Trump at the White House. Mr. Rubio also joins Mr. Trump’s foreign trips in his capacity as national security adviser.
Many national security veterans call the arrangement unwise, saying that both jobs are extremely demanding and incompatible with one another.
It was not easy even for Mr. Kissinger, who had firmly established himself over more than four years as national security adviser before convincing President Richard M. Nixon to let him take on an additional role as secretary of state in 1973. (In a reversal of Mr. Rubio’s approach, Mr. Kissinger was in constant motion, including a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy that kept him on the road for 33 straight days.)
“In general, it’s a mistake to combine those roles,” said Matthew Waxman, who held senior roles at the National Security Council, State Department and the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration.
“That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a dual-hatted Rubio is so offscreen right now,” Mr. Waxman added. “Especially while so much attention is focused on high-wire diplomacy with Iran, someone needs to manage foreign policy around the rest of the world.”
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