If there’s one thing we can gather from the news surrounding the White House in recent months, it’s that the Trump administration is constantly plagued with chaos and dysfunction. This apparently is also true of the security detail, because yesterday a disembodied leg was able to hop around on the White House lawn for 20 hours straight without being confronted by guards.
Yikes, this is a seriously troubling—and embarrassing—breach of security.
The roving leg gained access to White House grounds early yesterday morning by squeezing through the bars of the fence, which were only designed to stop full human bodies and not single legs that move around on their own accord. Throughout the day, the leg hopped around quietly near the center of the North Lawn, drawing the attention of numerous camera-wielding tourists but somehow not the Secret Service, which was alarmingly delayed in its response time.
You’d think that a loose leg would be immediately detained the second it got past the perimeter fence, but the animated limb was able to jump up and down freely for nearly the entire day. And it wasn’t exactly being subtle. At one point, the leg hopped over to the side of the White house and blindly slammed against the exterior wall over and over again for half an hour before turning around and hopping back into the grass. Later, the leg kicked a soccer ball back and forth with President Trump’s 11-year-old son, Barron, without being detected by the Secret Service snipers stationed on the White House roof.
Finally, just before midnight, a White House kitchen employee noticed the leg hopping on the front lawn and alerted security, at which point a team of armed agents stormed onto the grass and forcefully subdued the leg before leading it away with a single handcuff snapped around its ankle. As the leg was escorted from the premises, a tearful Barron could be seen chasing after the agents in his pajamas, loudly crying, “Don’t kill him! He’s my friend! He came to me!”
Wow. What a truly worrisome lapse in security. Fortunately, the leg did not try to attack anyone, but imagine if it had come with hostile intentions. The leg could have tried to trip the president and then hop on him after he fell down, potentially inflicting painful bruises on the POTUS. The Secret Service is sworn to protect the president from such threats, but clearly they’re falling short, and they need to do better in the future. The White House is supposed to be one of the most secure facilities in the world, but yesterday a single leg made it into a laughingstock.
