President Joe Biden said Monday that the Secret Service “needs more help” following the possible attempted assassination of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Biden told reporters as he left the White House that more needed to be done, a day after the agency stopped a gunman who had been hiding at Trump’s Florida golf course, where the former president was playing.
“I want to make one thing clear: The Service needs more help. And I think Congress needs to respond to their need,” Biden said.
The president added that the agency itself would “decide whether they need more staff or not.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday that the House will demand that Trump have “all available resources” as part of his security detail. That included making more resources available if needed, though Johnson cautioned that he doesn’t think it’s necessarily a “funding issue.”
“President Trump needs the most attention of anyone. He’s the most attacked. He’s the most threatened,” Johnson said, attributing it to a matter of “manpower allocation.”
The Secret Service has been under heavy surveillance since the shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in July. A gunman wielding an automatic weapon climbed onto the roof of a building just a few hundred yards from the site of a Trump rally and opened fire, wounding the former president, killing one person and injuring several others.
Republicans shouted that the agency was failing in its duties, and the director resigned days later. Biden subsequently authorized more protections for both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Both Biden and Harris condemned Sunday’s incident.
“Luckily, the president is doing well,” Biden said Monday.
According to law enforcement, officers opened fire after the weapon was spotted along the West Palm Beach track Sunday. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, was arrested a short time later and a citation was expected Monday.
Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
