The Trump campaign shooting puts a spotlight on Secret Service leadership, and the women serving in its ranks

Originally published by The 19th

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has put a new spotlight on the U.S. Secret Service and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, with prominent conservatives also raising questions about the fitness of women serving in the agency tasked with protecting current, former and would-be presidents.

Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, announced late Saturday that he had asked the Secret Service for a briefing and would call Cheatle to testify before the panel later this month.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, a military veteran and the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Cheatle calling on “all those responsible for the planning, approving, and executing of this failed security plan to be held accountable and to testify before Congress immediately.”

On Saturday evening, a man on a nearby rooftop fired shots at Trump’s outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was injured, and one attendee was killed and two others were wounded before Secret Service agents fatally shot the suspected gunman. As of early Monday, there was no known motive for the gunman’s actions. At the time of the shooting, Cheatle was in Milwaukee, preparing for the Republican National Convention being held there this week.

On Monday, Cheatle said in a statement: “Since the shooting, I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania who worked to maintain the integrity of the crime scene until the FBI assumed its role as the lead investigating agency into the assassination attempt.” 

She added that the Secret Service is working with other law enforcement agencies to “understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. … We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”

Neither Cheatle or the Secret Service’s communications office have weighed in on criticism of women in the agency more broadly.  

Cheatle served in the Secret Service for nearly three decades before leaving in 2019 to serve as PepsiCo’s senior director of global security for two years. She returned to the law enforcement agency when President Joe Biden tapped her to be its 27th director — the second woman in the role — starting in September 2022, as the agency continued to contend with the fallout from the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. 

Before PepsiCo, Cheatle served on Biden’s detail when he was vice president and  was a member of the Secret Service team that evacuated then-Vice President Dick Cheney following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  

The Secret Service describes Cheatle’s director role as “leading a diverse workforce composed of more than 7,800 Special Agents, Uniformed Division Officers, Technical Law Enforcement Officers, and Administrative, Professional, and Technical personnel.” In her first interview after being tapped to lead the agency, she told CBS News that it was a goal to have women make up 30 percent of recruits by the year 2030. Women currently represent 24 percent of the Secret Service’s ranks, according to the agency. 

“I’m very conscious, as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates, and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities for everybody in our workforce, and particularly women,” Cheatle told CBS News. 

The first women agents were sworn into the Secret Service in 1971. When they were hired, the agency said they would be “expected to do everything that men do and receive equal pay.” The women are trained in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, first aid, and search and seizure. There are different point systems for physical assessments based on age and gender. Men aged 20 to 29 years, for example, must complete 11 chin-ups to receive an excellent rating, while women of the same age must complete four. When the 387th Class of agents graduated 50 years later, it marked the first time that women trainees outnumbered men trainees. 

Some prominent conservatives immediately zeroed in on Cheatle’s gender, along with that of several of the women agents assigned to Trump in Pennsylvania. Many are critics of initiatives that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), frequently blaming problems on attempts to diversify workplaces.  

Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee wrote on the social media site X: “I can’t imagine that a DEI hire from @pepsi would be a bad choice as the head of the Secret Service. #sarcasm.” 

Fox News hosts Jeanine Pirro and Laura Ingraham questioned whether several women agents who surrounded Trump and then helped escort him off the stage and into a waiting SUV had “physical limitations” — such as shorter stature than the former president — that would complicate their jobs. 

Meghan McCain, a former host on the daytime talk show “The View,” and the daughter of former U.S. Senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said the response of the women agents is “why the notion that men and women are the same is just absurd.”

“You need to be taller than the candidate to protect them with your body. Why do they have these short women (one who can’t holster a gun apparently) guarding Trump? This is embarrassing and dangerous,” McCain wrote on X.

Lauren Buitta, the founder and chief executive of Girl Security, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing gender equity in the national security sector, said the criticism of Cheatle, and of women serving in security more broadly, is misguided. 

“The security incident and response will be fully analyzed, and the public will receive more information. In the meantime, spreading gendered disinformation will only serve to incite more vitriol and create conditions for further violence,” Buitta said. 

She said women agents are required to undergo rigorous evaluations and must qualify for their level of security clearance. The immediate attack on DEI after last weekend’s violence will only hamper much-needed systemic change, Buitta added. 

“Our country will continue to fall short of recruiting the talent we need to fully secure our nation, so long as marginalized groups are irresponsibly targeted by political leaders in the aftermath of highly complex security incidents,” she said. 

Comer’s letter to Cheatle officially requesting her “voluntary” appearance at a July 22 hearing commended the “tremendous bravery” of the agents who protected Trump at the rally, saying they “possibly averted more loss of life.” 

It did not bring up gender as it related to the agency’s response to Saturday’s shootings. But Comer in May, after a lapse in the security deal of Vice President Kamala Harris related to a woman agent, wrote in a letter to Cheatle that “years of staff shortages had led the agency to lower once strict standards as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion effort.”

Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, both of New York, announced Sunday that they would soon introduce legislation that would provide enhanced Secret Service protection to Trump and Biden, along with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Mariel Padilla contributed reporting.