Secret Service Sees ‘Massive Increase’ in Violent Threats, Challenging Americans To Restore the Taboos That Bind

The Secret Service is seeing a 40 percent increase in threats to its full-time protectees. Partisans are using the trend as another occasion to cast blame, leaving Americans to wonder who will take up the Constitution’s mandate to “insure domestic tranquility” and restore the taboo against political violence.The Secret Service director, Sean Curran, told “60 Minutes” on Sunday that there have been 10,000 threats to the people his agency safeguards since January, a 40 percent increase over 2025 “and the year’s not over.” He said “a lot of it has to do with the internet” and that “social media changes people,” producing a climate “we’ve never seen before.”Everything from video games and heavy metal to the ‘Satanic Panic” of the 1970s has been blamed for inciting violence. Whatever the current spark, as this columnist wrote for The New York Sun in September 2024, “the assassination fire is burning, threatening to spread across America if not stopped.” Polls by Reuters/Ipsos, Marquette University, and the Public Religion Research Institute late last year found that between 79 percent and 91 percent of Americans opposed political violence. Yet Public Religion found that only 41 percent “completely disagree” with the statement that “patriots may have to resort to” it “to save our country,” down from 57 percent in December 2022.President Trump is rushed offstage during an attempt on his life at a rally on July 13, 2024 at Butler, Pennsylvania. Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesThe “60 Minutes” interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, asked if “more threats come from the left or right.” Mr. Curran said that Secret Service analysts “don’t weigh it that way.” Ms. O’Donnell cited research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies showing that left-wing attacks were “higher than right-wing attacks” last year but “this year, that trend has reversed.”Ms. O’Donnell noted that President Trump “has been the target of more assassination attempts than any” of his predecessors. Pointing to Iran, she noted that “threats from outside the country are also growing.” She called him “one of the most polarizing political figures in American history” and asked if “that is, in some way, leading to the increase in these threats.”Yet polarization is a feature of free societies that acknowledge the impossibility of universal agreement. “About one-fifth of the people,” Senator Robert F. Kenedy told a crowd at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, “are against everything all of the time.” Four years later, an assassin ended his bid for the presidency.In the aftermath of the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life at Butler, Pennsylvania, two Septembers ago, the Napolitan News Service found that 28 percent of Democrats thought America would “be better off” if the president “had been killed” and 25 percent were “not sure.” Overall, just 69 percent of respondents were pleased he survived.President McKinley, around 1900. Library of Congress via Wikimedia CommonsMr. Curran told “60 Minutes” that the Secret Service is “an apolitical organization” and its agents “protect who we’re sworn to protect” regardless of politics. The agency’s deputy director, Matthew Quinn, noted that “there’s people on both sides of the aisle that either love or hate any president.”President Monroe, a Revolutionary War hero, offers proof. Reelected in 1820 with all but one vote in the Electoral College, he ushered in a period of unity known as “the Era of Good Feelings.” As governor of Virginia in 1800, though, he had evoked anger strong enough that the conspirators of Gabriel’s Rebellion plotted to kidnap him until he met their demands.As anarchist violence struck down monarchs across the world at the turn of the last century, Americans dared think themselves immune. Democracy, they were sure, offered a way for people to express themselves that made bullets and bombs unnecessary.That illusion was shattered in September 1901. President McKinley shrugged when urged to cancel a receiving line at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition. “Who,” he asked, having been reelected in a landslide the previous November, “would wish to hurt me?” An anarchist shot him about an hour later.President Lincoln signed the Secret Service into law on the day of his assassination, and, after McKinley’s, it began protecting chief executives. Agents take the standard oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” While citizens aren’t required to recite that pledge, embracing its spirit and rejecting violence is a good way to restore domestic tranquility.

Secret Service Sees ‘Massive Increase’ in Violent Threats, Challenging Americans To Restore the Taboos That Bind

Secret Service Sees ‘Massive Increase’ in Violent Threats, Challenging Americans To Restore the Taboos That Bind

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