Name: Why the Trump Shooting Is Much Worse Than You Think
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:58:33.000Z
Duration: 33 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

On 13 July 2024, an event took place near the small town of Butler, Pennsylvania that would shock the entire world.

The former President of the United States, Donald Trump was very nearly assassinated by a gunman during a rally in his re election campaign.

During Trump's speech, a lone gunman managed to climb up onto the roof of a one story building and position himself on an elevated position roughly 450ft or about 137 meters away from Trump.

Armed with an AR15 style rifle, the gunman had a perfect view of Trump within his sights and before he could be stopped, approximately eight minutes into the start of Trump's speech, the shooter managed to fire out eight shots towards Trump's direction.

One of the bullets fired by the shooter pierced through Donald Trump's upper right ear, missing his brain by merely millimeters, leaving him injured but alive.

Before he managed to duck behind the podium he was speaking in front of and before he was rushed by Secret Service agents who protected him with their own bodies out of the shooter's other fired shots, a spectator in the audience about here in the northeast most bleacher was struck and killed 50 year old Corey Comperatore while two other spectators down in the southeast most bleacher were struck by the shooter's fire and critically injured but survived.

Within seconds of opening fire, the shooter was engaged and eliminated by the Secret Service's counter sniper teams that had been positioned on two of the buildings immediately behind the podium where Trump was speaking and the immediate danger was removed.

Regardless, the attempt on Donald Trump's life by an assassin left him injured and nearly cost him his life, marking the most serious assassination attempt committed against a former or sitting US President since the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life more than 40 years ago now, back in 1981.

The photos taken from the event will no doubt be historic photographs used in textbooks discussing this period of American history decades out from now.

But several very very big questions loom over the entire United States right now.

How did a man get so close to actually assassinating a former president and current major candidate for the presidency?

And how did the organization tasked with protecting current former and potential presidents, the United States Secret Service, fail this catastrophically to begin with?

The US Secret Service did not have a completely spotless record before this attack.

The the organization was originally created by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to combat currency counterfeiting, but

it wasn't given its current mandate of protecting American presidents and other political leaders until after 1901.

Until after President William McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist.

McKinley's assassination that year marked the third sitting US President to be killed in office by an assassin in only 36 years, after Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and James A.

But even after the Secret Service was given its current mandate to protect America's major political leadership, several attempts to get through them proved successful, or nearly so.

Teddy Roosevelt was wounded by an assassin's bullet at a campaign rally while he was running for a third term in office in 1912.

Later, in 1933, another gunman standing in a crowd managed to fire five shots at President Elect FDR during one of his speeches, all of which missed, but

which still came close enough for major concern.

In 1952, armed men stormed the residence of President Harry truman in Washington D.C.

and engaged the Secret Service and police in a gunfight, killing one police officer in the process before being stopped without ever harming Truman.

Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullet while traveling under the Secret Service's protection during a motorcade In Dallas in 1963, the most glaring failure in the Secret Service's entire history.

Five years after that failure, JFK's younger brother Robert F.

Kennedy was also shot and killed by a gunman in 1968 while he was at a campaigning event while he was running for President.

At the time, the Secret Service wasn't protecting major political candidates for the presidency and so RFK's protection was outside of their scope.

And from then on until the current day, major political candidates running for the presidency will also be placed under Secret Service protection within only a few more years, though.

In 1972, George Wallace, a major political candidate who was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, was shot by an assassin at a campaigning event at a shopping center in Maryland.

was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

And it ended his run for the presidency a few years later.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford just narrowly survived two back to back assassination attempts against him while he was in California.

In the first attempt, a woman managed to get within arm's reach of him near the Sacramento Capitol building and aimed a pistol at him and pulled the trigger.

The gun only failed to fire because the assassin hadn't chambered around in it.

Then, only a little more than two weeks later, while in San Francisco, another woman standing in a crowd fired at President Ford from across the street.

Missing his head with a bullet by a mere five inches.

A few years later, in 1981, an assassin named John Hinckley Jr.

Standing within a crowd of onlookers, infamously shot President Ronald Reagan as he walked by him, very nearly killing him in the process, which, up until the attempt on Donald Trump's life this year, marked the most serious failure of the Secret Service since the JFK assassination.

But even though the assassination attempt on Reagan was the last time before Trump that an assassin seriously wounded a president or presidential candidate, there have been many, many attempts and near misses in between that time and multiple scandals on the part of the Secret Service as an organization.

In 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, a man armed with an SKS rifle standing on the sidewalk just outside the White house grounds fired 29 rounds into the White House while Bill Clinton was inside.

Secret Service agents immediately rushed across the White House lawn toward him with their weapons drawn, while local citizens who happened to be nearby managed to tackle the shooter and subdue him before he was arrested.

Nobody was hurt in the incident, while the shooter was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

A decade later, in 2005, when President George W.

Bush was visiting the country of Georgia in that country's capital, Tbilisi, a man stood in the crowd in Tbilisi's Central Liberty Square awaiting a joint speech by President Bush and Georgia's then President Mikhail Saakashvili.

As soon as Bush began speaking, the man in the crowd lobbed a Soviet made RGD5 hand grenade that was wrapped up in a red pattern handkerchief toward the podium where Bush was speaking, which landed a mere 61ft, or about 19 meters away from the President, the handkerchief stayed wrapped around the grenade, which kept it disguised, but

also likely prevented the grenade's striker lever from releasing, which prevented the grenade from ever detonating.

Bush didn't even learn about the assassination attempt until after the rally had ended.

The man responsible was later tracked down by the FBI and local Georgian authorities and sentenced to life in prison.

Now, over the past 60 years of history, since JFK's infamous assassination in 1963, the US Secret Service has dramatically expanded in size and scope from a relatively small, compact force of only 300 agents at the time of the Kennedy assassination to a small army of around 8,000 agents today.

While its budget has similarly ballooned in size from only $5 million a year then to $3 billion a year today, roughly equal to half of the entire budget of the New York City Police Department, which currently employs 36,000 officers, meaning that the Secret Service has about four and a half times fewer agents than the NYPD has officers, but

the Secret Service has half of the NYPD's budget.

Part of this is simply due to the expanding scope of the Secret Service over time, which began its protection mandate in 1902 to cover U.S.

has since expanded to also include all former US Presidents and their families as well.

In addition to the families of sitting presidents and Vice presidents, major political candidates actively running for the presidency along with their spouses, all 17 of the individuals in the presidential line of succession, ranging from the speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, to all of the Secretary positions in the President's Cabinet, as well as visiting foreign heads of state and heads of government.

All of which is why the Secret Service has thousands of agents to protect all of these people today.

And yet, despite the massive ballooning in the size, budget and scope of the Secret Service Since JFK's time, some of the organization's greatest scandals and blunders have taken place fairly recently.

Back during the Obama administration, In November of 2011, a man named Oscar Ortega was able to park his car on a Street about 650 yards away from the White House.

President Obama was not home at the time, but his daughter Sasha and mother Marian both were.

At about 8:50pm local time, Ortega then pointed A Romanian made AK47 out of the passenger side window of his car and fired a hail of bullets directly towards the White House across the South Lawn.

At least seven of the bullets he fired hit the upstairs residence of the White House and broke a window.

Several of the Secret Service agents within the White House immediately reported to have heard the gunshots and moved out to respond.

But then a supervising sergeant quickly ordered all of the agents to stand down and stated that there weren't any shots, falsely believing that it was simply construction noise.

Meanwhile, four minutes later, Ortega sped his car away from the crime scene down Constitution Avenue and crashed his car right by the on ramp to the Roosevelt Bridge, where a group of eyewitnesses called 911 to report the crash to the police.

But Ortega managed to run away and disappear within five minutes of the call being made.

Local police and Secret Service agents arrived at the car where they discovered the abandoned rifle and nine spent shell casings on the floor.

But for several days afterward, nobody managed to connect the dots between the abandoned car with a rifle and spent shell casings in the previous incident reported at the White House.

Four days later, a White House housekeeper discovered a broken window and alerted an assistant, who further discovered several bullet holes lodged into them.

And it was only then, four days later, that the Secret Service realized someone had made an attempt on the President's life.

Secret Service agents were reportedly fearful of contradicting their superior's initial explanation of the incident as mere construction noise.

Eyewitnesses of the car crash weren't immediately interviewed, while camera and audio surveillance equipment around the White House's perimeter were absent.

That could have helped investigators solve the assassination attempt more quickly.

At the time, this was all a huge scandal within the Secret Service.

Oscar Ortega himself, the shooter, was tracked down a couple years later in 2013, and

sentenced to 25 years in prison for the crime.

And it was all far from the only major crisis of the Secret Service during the Obama administration.

In 2012, President Obama was scheduled to visit Cartagena, Colombia, for the annual Summit of the Americas conference.

About 48 hours before Obama's arrival, 135 Secret Service agents were tasked with arriving in Cartagena first and preparing the area for the President.

Then, around a dozen of the Secret Service agents involved brought back several prostitutes to their hotel rooms, which exploded into a major international scandal.

And 10 of the secret Service agents involved in the incident were sacked in disgrace.

Then, just a couple more Years later, in 2014, a man named Omar J.

Gonzalez, an Iraq War veteran struggling with ptsd, managed to jump over the fence along Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House's north Lawn.

He proceeded to then run across the entire North Lawn, past a guard booth and a K9 unit, unhindered, and

broke through the unlocked and undefended White House front door.

Once inside of the White House, an alarm box placed immediately to the left should have been ringing loudly to alert security inside of the intruder.

But for whatever reason, on this specific day, the alarm box had been intentionally muted, allegedly because of complaints that it was too loud.

As a result, the guard standing inside of the front door wasn't expecting anything outside of the unusual.

So when Gonzalez, armed with a knife, came bursting through the front door, the guard didn't have enough time to react.

And Gonzales just ran right past him through the White House's entrance hall, just past the stairway that led up to the Obama family's living quarters and into the East Room, where he was finally tackled to the ground by a Secret Service counter assault team.

This, of course, became another huge scandal for the Secret Service during the Obama years.

How did they allow a man armed with a knife to get so deeply into the White House before he was actually stopped?

The scandal mounting on top of the previous shooting at the White House in 2011 that went undetected for days led the House of Representatives to launch an inquiry into the Secret Service's conduct, which quickly led to the then director of the Secret Service, Julia Pearson, resigning from her office.

The 2014 House Commission cited that the Secret Service of 2014 struggled from a catastrophic failure of training and suggested a series of reforms to the agency be made in the aftermath, reforms that included a new policy that Secret Service agents should spend a full 25% of their work time actively in training.