Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday, a day after facing bipartisan pressure to step down during a House hearing, NBC News reported.
Republicans at the hearing used the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 as a Trojan horse to push their anti-diversity agenda.
Republicans and Democrats at the hearing were largely in agreement that Cheatle should resign over the Secret Service's failure to prevent the attack. Later Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and the committee’s top Democrat, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, signed a joint letter calling on Cheatle to step down.
But ever since the shooting, conservative activists, benefactors like Elon Musk and some lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Johnson have baselessly sought to blame the shooting in part on liberal rhetoric or diversity, inclusion and equity measures. The DEI thing became a talking point among far-right influencers online, after they noticed that some members of Trump’s Secret Service detail on the day of the shooting were women.
For his part, Trump has thanked the Secret Service agents who protected him. His sons have defended the women in their father's detail. And Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita has condemned right-wing criticism of the women, which shows that these attacks are viewed as beyond the pale even for some at the center of the MAGA universe. So it's remarkable that several House Republicans kept pushing that angle during the hearing.
One can detect more than a hint of condescension in Wisconsin GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman’s questioning, for example.
“You’ve spent some time trying to change the makeup of the Secret Service," Grothman said. "OK, you feel there — whatever — too high a percentage are men. Um, does this affect at all who you are hiring for the Secret Service?”
The congressman went on to ask whether Cheatle was ever “not hiring men because of your desire to hit certain targets,” a seeming reference to hiring goals set by some organizations that right-wingers kvetch over in their attacks on diversity efforts. Cheatle said the agency only hires the most qualified candidates. But after briefly deviating from this misogynistic line of questioning, Grothman asked, “Can you elaborate why you want one-third of the Secret Service to be women?” Cheatle denied ever saying this.
Grothman, who told a reporter earlier this week that he feels Democrats are backing Harris "because of her ethnic background," sure seems eager to ascribe someone else's success to their gender or ethnicity, which is quite rich coming from a white man in Congress.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., also appeared to question the diversity and qualifications of Secret Service agents, asking why someone shorter than Trump or incapable of physically carrying him should be allowed to serve on his security detail.
Perry didn’t mention women specifically, but his remarks sounded like an allusion to the female Secret Service agents bashed by bigoted, right-wing social media trolls. Cheatle yet again affirmed that she’s only hired people who are qualified and capable of doing the job, and Perry responded by claiming this was the sign of a “culture” in which “the primary objective here seems to be something other than securing the site, securing the principal, and securing the people at the site.”
Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett was the most overt in his bigotry, calling Cheatle a “DEI horror story” during the hearing. And he told CNN on Monday that he believes Harris was a "DEI hire" by the Biden campaign in 2020.
When asked by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, whether the security failures had to do with DEI, Cheatle said they had “nothing to do” with such initiatives. You can watch Crockett and fellow Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, respond to the baseless, bigoted attack on DEI here.
As I wrote last week, House Republicans are risking dooming their probe into the Trump assassination attempt by politicizing it in the way they already have. Using this investigation to push cheap political crusades undermines its seriousness.