An aside this afternoon on more T-Rump era shit, this time with the Secret Service — a new non-fiction book, “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service,” by Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, due out next week, actually covers the protective-agency story back to JFK, the most-recent times, however, are closer in the mind’s eye.

Of course, T-Rump was/is an asshole:

Trump wanted overweight Secret Service agents removed, saying get “these fat guys off my detail” and asking: “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?” —> scoooy details in ?@CarolLeonnig?’s new book https://t.co/QU2tOogrvg

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) May 11, 2021

Leonnig won a Pulitzer prize in 2015 for work on security failures at the Secret Service, and was also part of the Post team which won a Pulitzer for reporting on Edward Snowden’s dust-up with the NSA in 2013. She seems to know her shit.
One review of her new book via the Guardian this morning:

In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.

Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018.
Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.

Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.

Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.

Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment.

Both Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.

Leonnig also reports that it was not clear if Donald Trump knew what Secret Service personnel were saying about his daughter and daughter-in-law.

But she says the president did repeatedly seek to remove Secret Service staff he deemed to be overweight or too short for the job.

“I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump is reported to have said, possibly confusing office-based personnel with active agents.
“How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”

And some bits on JFK, and some other service malfunctions per an assessment  of ‘Zero Fail‘ at The Washington Post, also this morning:

Having first reported on the Secret Service for The Post in the wake of the agency’s 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia — when, as Leonnig writes, “a dozen agents and officers stood accused of turning a presidential trip to a South American resort town into a kind of Vegas bachelor party, complete with heavy drinking and prostitutes” — she devotes a chapter of the book to unspooling vivid details about the incident.

“Take us where the girls are,” one agent directs his taxi driver, and so the night begins, with Leonnig chronicling the escapades down to the minutia (“a mojito and at least eight beers”) and through a dispute about payment (“He vaguely remembered her saying something as they left the club about wanting money for sex. But $800?”) that helped propel the incident into an international scandal and led one member of the Counter Assault Team to later declare, “I woke up to a nightmare.”

Leonnig describes a “wheels up, rings off” culture — wedding rings and vows are removed when the plane lifts up to its next destination — where sex often proves a complicating factor, for the agents and protectees alike.

She writes of how Kennedy repeatedly slipped his detail for dalliances, with his agents standing “witness to a steady parade of secretaries, starlets, and even prostitutes escorted to the president’s bedroom.” (“What happens if one bites him?” asks a nervous new agent, still unaccustomed to the “What happens in the White House stays in the White House” ethos).
And she writes of how agents protecting then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton again willfully ignored the romantic trysts he orchestrated while ostensibly working out at the YMCA in Little Rock — although a Clinton spokesman refuted the claim to Leonnig.
…
There were other tensions during the Trump era, as well. Leonnig recounts how Trump wanted the Secret Service to redesign the black fence surrounding the White House because he thought it looked “too much like a prison,” and proposed a multimillion-dollar renovation “to dig up and replace all the lowered gates, because he hated the bump he felt when his limo drove over them.”
His advisers ultimately kept delaying the expensive project, hoping he would simply forget, Leonnig writes.
…
President Biden’s transition advisers were so wary of Trump’s damaging hold on the agency that they urged the Secret Service to swap out all members of Trump’s protective detail before Biden was officially sworn in, Leonnig reports.

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates called the anecdote “flatly untrue,” saying the Secret Service “is solely responsible for all staffing decisions, not protectees. No request was ever made.”
…
Leonnig ends her book by thanking “the Secret Service agents, past and present, who have given so much to our country” to ensure that “our democracy remains safe.”
But she depicts a neglected agency of “patriots,” understaffed, underfunded and repeatedly let down by their leaders and elected officials.

This, she concludes, “should haunt us all.”

And history most-likely will:

Long ago…

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Agonizing Horse,’ found here),