Public opinion of the Secret Service has plummeted since the July 13 attack on former President Donald Trump.
New Research from Gallup found the agency’s approval rating dropped by 23% after the first attempted assassination of the Republican presidential nominee. The data was collected before the Sept. 15 assassination attempt in Florida.
Prior to the Pennsylvania attack, 53% of American adults regarded the Secret Service positively on average since 2014. Researchers found that now one in three adults described the Secret Service’s performance as “excellent” (8%) or “good” (24%). The majority of Americans believe the agency’s performance was “only fair” (25%) or “poor” (36%).
The agency’s approval dropped by 26 points to 20% during the last year among Republican and Republican-leaning voters and by 18 points to 47% among Democrat and Democrat-leaning voters.
“The 23-point drop for the Secret Service in 2024 is similar to the largest decrease Gallup has recorded for any agency between measures," researchers reported. “Ratings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dropped by 24 points, from 64% to 40%, between 2019 and 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal Reserve’s rating also fell by 23 points, from 53% in 2003 to 30% in 2009, after the Great Recession.”
The United States Post Office, the Department of Defense, and NASA have the highest approval rating among Americans.
Gallup’s results parallel findings from research conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
“Only around 3 in 10 Americans are extremely or very confident that the Secret Service can keep the presidential candidates safe from violence before the election,” reported AP News on Aug. 2. “The survey also found that about 7 in 10 Americans think the Secret Service bears at least a moderate amount of responsibility for the assassination attempt.”
The Secret Service said last week that an internal report indicated “complacency” among its agents as well as poor planning and communication issues led to security failure at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
“This was a failure on the part of the United States Secret Service,” said Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the Secret Service, per BBC. "It’s important that we hold ourselves accountable for the failures of July 13, and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another failure like this again."
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri had demanded that Rowe respond to allegations made by a whistleblower regarding the agency's failure to secure the golf course where the second would-be assassination was waiting.
“[A]n individual who has in fact protected President Trump at that very location—alleges there are ‘known vulnerabilities’ in the fence line surrounding the course: places that offer a clear line of sight to the former president and others playing the course,” Hawley wrote in a letter on Sept. 19. “The reality is that the would-be assassin should never have been able to linger around the course for that long undetected.”
