Spare me the applause — the latest Trump assassination bid was a Secret Service fiasco

My instant reaction to news of the latest assassination attempt on President Trump was brief.

“WTF??!!” I posted on X.

Those three letters probably summed up what most people felt when they discovered that another lone gunman had gotten a few hundred yards from the former president and current presidential candidate.

How could this have happened again, just nine weeks after a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and came so perilously close to killing him in an attack during a rally?

And the more I learned about this latest incident, the more bewildered and angry I became.

Everyone knows that Donald Trump loves playing golf most weekends when he’s at his main residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

And everyone also knows that he usually plays at his own Trump International Golf Club.

So any would-be assassin would have no problem working out when Trump was playing there, because they could just monitor the very public movements of the lengthy presidential motorcade from his nearby home, Mar-a-Lago.

In fact, it’s the most obvious place for a shooter to plan an attack, isn’t it?

For four hours or so, your target is exposed in the open air, and golf courses have endless places to hide, from large bushes to big trees and fences.

That’s why I would have assumed that after the catastrophic security failure in July, when that shooter was able to lie on a roof 150 yards from a Trump rally stage, the Secret Service would have made damn sure nobody could get that close to their protectee again.

I was sadly, shockingly wrong.

This new gunman was able to hide behind a chain-link fence on a corner of the course, just 300 to 500 yards from Trump, armed with a scoped AK-47 assault rifle and a Go-Pro camera to presumably film the shooting, and wait for his prey to arrive.

Fortunately, a sharp-eyed Secret Service agent, walking one hole ahead of Trump, spotted the suspect’s rifle barrel sticking out and opened fire on him, causing him to flee.

Obviously, great credit should go to that agent for almost certainly saving Trump’s life.

But please spare me any applause for the Secret Service.

The fact this shooter could get that close was another abject security failure of horrifying proportions, and even more inexplicable and disgraceful coming so soon after the last one.

Why wasn’t the whole perimeter of the course being monitored?

The answer is staggering.

At a press conference Sunday afternoon, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said Trump would be receiving more security if he was still in office. “He’s not the sitting president,” Bradshaw said. “If he was, we would’ve had the entire golf course surrounded. Because he’s not, the security is limited to areas the Secret Service deems possible.”

Have you ever heard anything so dumb?

Trump was already a massive target for assassins from his time as president, when he ordered the killing of top Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

That’s before we even factor in the fact that he was recently shot at and is the Republican nominee in an election in just seven weeks.

Yet despite all this, the Secret Service apparently didn’t think him wandering around a golf course for hours on end was a potential death-trap opportunity for assassins, worthy of the same level of security that part-time President Biden enjoys as he lies on the beach.

The Secret Service has one primary job: to protect American presidents and vice presidents, past and present.

The agency is self-evidently failing to do this.

As Eric Trump said on Sunday night: “My father is running out of lives.”

Yes, he is.

And I dread to think what would happen to America if Trump ever does get assassinated.

The last Secret Service director was forced to resign after the rally fiasco, and I believe the new director, Ronald Rowe, must now go too.

As for the political repercussions of this latest assassination attempt, it can only be a massive boost to Trump, as the last one was.

Once again, he showed immense calm in a life-threatening crisis, with witnesses saying his main concern was to make sure others on the course with him at the time were OK — and his biggest emotion, he told Fox News star Sean Hannity, was frustration that he wasn’t able to finish the hole he was playing because he had a birdie putt!

Love him or hate him, Trump has shown balls of steel over these threats to his life, and that won’t be lost on an American public who like their commanders-in-chief to be strong.

The latest incident has also completely supplanted a news cycle that was being dominated by very negative fallout over his debate loss last week to Democratic rival Kamala Harris, especially his unsubstantiated and racially incendiary claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating neighbors’ pets, his self-harming friendship with far-right conspiracy-theorist loon Laura Loomer (You need WAY better people around you, President Trump) and his ill-advised decision on Sunday morning, before his golf round, to post the words “I hate Taylor Swift!” on his Truth Social online media platform.

There’s an incredible irony that right when he was enduring the worst week of his presidential race, Trump has been handed an election-winning lifeline by another attempt on his life.