Image Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Stringer / Getty Images 
The President and Melania. We see them through the windows of Marine One as it lands on the White House lawn. They’re sat facing each other. She leans forward, hands raised, talking hard and fast. He points a finger at her, shakes his head. She pushes herself back in the chair. Anger. Exasperation. Could it be? Is Melania leaving him—something we’ve been told is “finally happening” pretty much every week for the last eight years?
I hate to burst your bubble if you’re a BlueAnon holdout, like that Japanese soldier who spent 30 years hiding in the jungle after the War ended, but no—Donald and Melania Trump are not getting divorced. Their exchange aboard Marine One was nothing like “le bitchslap,” when Emmanuel Macron was walloped by his husband Brigitte in front of the world’s press as they touched down for a state visit to Vietnam.
But the Trumps were having a heated conversation, and they both had a right to be angry; although not at each other.
They had just been caught in a stupid, totally avoidable security fuckup that could have ended badly.
How badly?
Butler badly—or worse.
As soon as the President and Melania set foot on the escalator at UN Headquarters on Tuesday, on their way to the General Assembly, the machine jarred to a halt. Melania, standing in front of the President, stumbled.
Paralysis. For a few dreadful moments, with their escort stacked up behind them, unable to move, the President and the First Lady were sitting ducks, caught in what’s often referred to as a “fatal funnel.” A kill zone.
I couldn’t help but think of the escalator scene in Die Hard II, when an entire SWAT team is massacred at the flick of a stop switch.
Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened. No guns were trained on the beleaguered First Couple. Nobody was hurt. The First Lady grabbed the rail and prevented herself from falling.
President Trump was certain it was sabotage. He pointed to a Sunday Times report that UN staff had been overheard saying they might turn off the escalators and lifts to make him walk all the way to the hall.
Melania believes it was sabotage too. The Daily Mail employed forensic lipreaders to decipher what was actually said aboard Marine One as it returned from New York.
“It was unbelievable. How can you do that?” the President asked.
“Donald, look at me,” Melania responds.
The President: “I can’t forgive them. They tried to hurt you.”
Melania: “We can’t do this. We should stay safe. You’re not safe”
The President again: “They’re done. We must challenge them.”
The UN has denied any wrongdoing and said the escalator’s emergency-stop mechanism may have been triggered, by mistake, by a videographer working for Trump.
If the escalator incident was a mishap, it wasn’t the only one to mar the President’s visit to the UN. The autocue stopped working at the precise moment the President was due to begin his speech. He carried on anyway, and gave the Assembly a piece of his mind. The UN has yet to blame Trump for this second malfunction, but may still.
Worse was yet to come at UN HQ. Two days later, on Thursday, one of RFK Jr.’s staffers was physically assaulted and chased into a bathroom by a rabid leftist who had somehow managed to bypass security.
According to White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly, “An HHS official was followed into a bathroom, recorded, physically assaulted and verbally accosted by a deranged leftist at the UN who somehow entered the venue past multiple layers of security,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly.
The official told Fox News that she was walking down a hallway at the UN when a women began shouting at her and shining a bright light—a camera phone—in her face. The woman was calling the official a “fascist” and a “Nazi” and shouting pro-Palestine slogans as she pursued her into a bathroom, where she started filming her over the top of the bathroom stall. Amazingly, the attack continued when the official left the bathroom and returned to the hallway. The attack lasted around ten minutes.
The attacker has now been arrested and charged with assault, aggravated harassment, attempted assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
In the weeks following Charlie Kirk’s murder, there’s been an intense focus on leftist violence and the physical threat towards prominent conservatives and agents of the Trump regime. In recent days, we’ve seen renewed violence against immigration agents. On Wednesday, a man opened fire at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing a detainee and wounding others, before committing suicide. Since then, there have been angry protests and attempts to obstruct operations at a number of other ICE facilities, including in Chicago.
What these events at the UN remind us is that senior members of the Trump administration, up to and including the President, are also under threat, and that this threat appears to be magnified, enabled—whatever you want to call it—by the incompetence of the people who should be protecting them.
There’s a clear pattern and Trump would be a fool to ignore it.
A series of remarkable blunders that don’t need to be rehearsed here made it possible for not one but two attempts on Donald Trump’s life to take place during last year’s election campaign. The first assassin, in Butler, Pennsylvania, came within millimeters of succeeding. But for the grace of God, and a turn of the head at the precise moment the assassin’s bullet would have penetrated his temple, Donald Trump would now be dead. Eight weeks later, a second assassin got within shooting distance, armed with an SKS rifle, while Trump was playing golf at his course in West Palm Beach. He was challenged before he could shoot, but that doesn’t change the fact he shouldn’t have been allowed to get that close in the first place.
Under the tenure of Sean Curran, one of the agents who was there in Butler and shielded the President, we’ve been promised thoroughgoing reform of the Secret Service. We’ve been told the Secret Service will learn from its mistakes. But on the basis of this week’s events, it’s hard to have much confidence that it will, or that it even can.
How deep the rot goes is anybody’s guess, but it’s worth remembering that a Secret Service agent was caught openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder and suspended.
It’s time for a serious rethink. If the Secret Service can’t be relied on to protect the President, somebody else must. I’ve mentioned the name “Erik Prince” before, and honestly who’s to say he’d do a worse job?
That escalator prank, if that’s what it was, was still no joke. It was a wake-up call—as if we needed another.
