In the days following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we scoffed at the conspiracy theories coming from both ends of the political spectrum.
The right wing speculated that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee had been set up by the Biden administration and a compliant Secret Service apparatus.
The left wing speculated that the shooting was orchestrated by Trump himself to capitalize on a predictable wave of sympathy that could return him to the White House.
The truth, we said, wasn’t likely to be found in either of these outlandish conspiracy theories. Instead, the near-death experience for the former and possibly future president was most likely a failure of communication between federal and local law enforcement authorities.
Congressional hearings are bearing this out.
This week, Ronald Rowe, who was made acting director of the Secret Service after his predecessor had been pushed into resigning, testified before lawmakers that local law enforcement in Butler, Pennsylvania, failed to communicate to its federal counterpart the gravity of the threat. He said the Secret Service was told that there was concern about a suspicious man, but it was not told the man was armed and on a roof within shooting distance of Trump.
The local law enforcement in Butler might have a different version about what was and wasn’t communicated. Nevertheless, it’s clear that those who were jointly responsible for protecting the president at the campaign rally did not do a good job of communicating with each other or of evaluating the potential risks.
Someone from the Secret Service or local law enforcement agencies — probably both — should have realized that the manufacturing building from which Thomas Matthew Crooks fired his semiautomatic rifle was too close for comfort. That building should have been secured, so that only officers had access to the roof or any windows from which a potential assassin could draw a bead on his target.
It was a monumental error that this didn’t happen, as Rowe and others within the Secret Service acknowledge. But it was an error rooted in faulty assumptions and poor communication, common threads for many human errors.
It was no more sinister than that.
