In just more than 20 months, an American president has survived three assassination attempts – most recently on April 25, when a gunman reached the terrace level of the Washington Hilton while Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and most of the Cabinet were inside.

Within hours, Trump told reporters that the Hilton "is not a particularly secure building" and pointed to his planned White House ballroom, with a secure bunker underneath, as the answer. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, suggested the Secret Service may need to reconsider putting the president and vice president at the same public events at all. The agency's acting director has told Congress that it faces a "new reality" requiring more resources and more distance.

This seems to be the instinct of the moment: that the answer to political violence is to push the president further from public life. It is an understandable instinct. It is also the wrong one.

The perimeter around the president had been growing

Presidential security has tightened incrementally for over a century. The Secret Service took over full-time presidential protection after an assassin killed William McKinley in 1901. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in........

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