There was a moment on Monday during Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee that brought into sharp focus the unsettling reality of our political situation.
At one point, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, took Cheatle to task for refusing to take full responsibility for the failure of her agency to prevent the assassination attempt on Trump. He said he and others were calling for Cheatle to resign or — and here’s the key part — “for the president to fire you.”
Ah, the president you say?
Congressmen in both parties might be calling for the president to fire Cheatle, but President Biden can’t do that, even if he were inclined to, because he is unavailable, unwell, or otherwise incapacitated. We’re not really sure. No one has seen or heard from him in days, even though he has apparently made the historic decision to end his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in his stead.
That is to say, there is no one to do the firing because we effectively have no president right now.
The danger this poses to America’s national security is obvious. But it’s also dangerous domestically, as we try to make sense of an assassination attempt that came within millimeters of killing President Trump last Saturday. At a moment when the relevant authorities have offered profoundly unsatisfactory explanations for their massive failure to protect the presidential front-runner, there is no executive in the Oval Office to which the American people might appeal
