Mere hours after a cadre of Secret Service agents risked their lives to shield Donald Trump from a would-be assassin’s fire, members of the former president’s security detail were themselves coming under attack.
“There should not be any women in the Secret Service,” rightwing commentator Matt Walsh wrote on X, posting a video showing three female agents ushering Trump into an SUV. “These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”
Amid the intense scrutiny of the agency’s alleged failings in preventing Saturday’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, misogynist views like Walsh’s have been endorsed by several influential voices on the right.
X owner Elon Musk posted that he believed the women in the detail were too “small” to cover Trump and had not been selected on merit, while hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman suggested that so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies contributed to the incident.
The backlash was not confined to the loudest voices on social media. Republican congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who achieved a level of notoriety for saying “we are not going to fix it” following a school shooting in his state, told Fox News that Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle was a “DEI initiative person” and suggested that “this is what happens when you don’t put the best players in”.
He and other commentators have referred to Cheatle’s pledge to ensure that 30 per cent of the agency’s staff was female by the end of the decade.
Burchett sits on the Republican-led House oversight committee, which is due to grill Cheatle — who is the second woman to preside over the protection agency and rose through the ranks in a decades-long career — over the Trump assassination attempt at a hearing on Monday.
Advocates for more diversity in national security personnel say they are concerned about the impact of such rhetoric.
“People feel safer in numbers, and so the more people like Tim Burchett say stuff [that is] so obviously misogynist and sexist, the more others who already feel it feel like they’re going to be able to get away with saying it,” said Gina Bennett, who spent 34 years in the CIA and champions the inclusion of women in defence ranks.
“What I think it does is continue to make acceptable sexism, racism, misogyny — because people just get numb to it,” she added.
The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency has previously said that all agents were held to the same standards. A spokesperson 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 endorsed by former attorney-general William Barr and Republican congressman Cory Mills, who is a former army sniper, are the latest front in a long-running war against diversity and inclusion policies being waged by allies of Trump in Congress, the courts and on college campuses.
Over the protestations of the Biden administration, the last National Defense Authorization Act passed into law with a clause that prohibits the government from establishing new DEI positions within the defence department, and from employing anyone whose primary duty it is to craft diversity and inclusion policies, or measure outcomes of such schemes.
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.
Earlier this year, the Oversight Committee brought up 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 her superior.
The matter “raised concerns within the agency about the hiring and screening process for this agent: specifically whether previous incidents in her work history were overlooked during the hiring process . . . as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion effort”, committee chair James Comer wrote.
While the Secret Service has been plagued by past scandals involving male colleagues, such as the alleged procurement of prostitutes in Colombia and drunk driving near the White House, the response to the Trump attack has seen some “seizing [on] specific physical features to indict an entire population”, said Lauren Bean Buitta, founder of Girl Security, which campaigns for diversity in the security establishment.
Bennett, who now teaches at Georgetown’s Centre for Security Studies, said: “Somebody is going to have to point to me the medical anatomical proof that being born with a uterus, somehow or another, makes me less capable of identifying a threat and neutralising a threat.”
Despite the attacks on diversity and inclusion, there had been a “huge rise” in the number of young women interested in national security careers, according to Girl Security. Buitta said it would be “extraordinarily impactful” to have leaders of the respective presidential campaigns condemn the sexist comments, which she warned could “stir up additional hate”.
But the vitriol poured over the women in Donald Trump’s detail may already be having an effect. As he walked on to the floor of the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Monday evening, the former president was flanked by a dozen Secret Service agents — all male.