Public perception of the Secret Service hit its lowest point in at least a decade following the near-assassination of former President Donald Trump in July.
Just 32% of adults surveyed by Gallup earlier this month described the protective agency’s performance as “good” or “excellent,” while 25% said it was “fair” and 36% dubbed it “poor.”
It marks the first time in 10 years of polling that Gallup has found majority disapproval of the Secret Service, after most Americans (55%) rated its performance as excellent or good just last year.
In 2014, the last time the agency approached having such low scores, 43% of Americans rated it “excellent” or “good,” 30% rated it “fair” and 16% rated it “poor.”
Republicans and GOP-leaning independents were especially harsh on the Secret Service, with just 20% rating it excellent or good after 46% did the same last year.
Among Democrats and affiliated independents, the excellent or good rating slipped from 65% in 2023 to 47% in 2024.
The survey was taken after gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired eight shots at Trump, 78, during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa., killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore and wounding the 45th president and two others.
The Secret Service has faced questions about how Crooks had managed to crawl across the roof of a nearby shed, some 130 yards from Trump, with a firearm. Several attendees later claimed to have attempted to alert law enforcement prior to the shooting.
Agency director Kimberly Cheatle resigned later that month amid mounting backlash.
The survey was still in the field on Sept. 15, when an advance agent opened fire on a suspect later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who had set up a sniper’s nest near the sixth hole at Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach.
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe later claimed that the protective agency had limited time to plan for Trump’s golf outing that day and reportedly told the former president privately the agency couldn’t guarantee his safety on sprawling golf courses with its current resources.
“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there. It was not on his official schedule. And so we put together a security plan, and that security plan worked,” Rowe told reporters last week.
In an internal review made public Friday, the Secret Service flagged “multiple operational and communications failures” in the run-up to the July 13 Butler assassination attempt.
Investigators found issues with planning, confusion about coordination with local law enforcement, agents not adhering fully to protocol and a host of other problems.
Of the 15 government agencies Gallup assessed, it found that the Secret Service clocked in at 13th place in public perception, just above the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs. The highest-scoring agency was the US Postal Service, with 59% calling its performance excellent or good, 25% rating it fair, and 15% giving a poor rating.
The Gallup survey sampled 1,007 adults Sept. 3-15, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
