When someone who spent more than a decade inside the United States Secret Service says he’s worried about a former president’s safety, it should stop people cold.
This isn’t cable-news hysteria. It isn’t partisan hyperbole. And it isn’t coming from someone unfamiliar with the realities of executive protection. It’s coming from Dan Bongino, a former agent who protected presidents of both parties and understands, better than almost anyone, how threats escalate when politics turns toxic.
“Hard to talk about, but I’m growing concerned about President Trump’s safety,” Bongino said during a recent broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show.
That sentence alone should have set off alarm bells across Washington. Instead, it barely registered in a media environment saturated with legal commentary, partisan scorekeeping, and the daily churn of outrage.
But Bongino wasn’t speculating idly. He was explaining something far more serious: the convergence of multiple, real-world threat vectors surrounding Donald Trump — at a moment when institutional guardrails appear weaker than at any point in modern political history.
A Warning From Someone Who Knows the Terrain
Bongino served as a Secret Service agent from 1999 through 2011, protecting both Democratic and Republican presidents, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. His career spanned the immediate aftermath of 9/11, an era when executive protection doctrine was fundamentally reshaped by hard lessons learned at great cost.
“I’m telling you, this guy’s in real danger,” Bongino said bluntly.
That statement wasn’t rooted in internet threats or overheated rhetoric. It was grounded in what protection professionals call threat convergence — the moment when multiple independent sources of hostility align around a single individual.
According to Bongino, Trump currently faces pressure from at least four distinct threat environments:
- Foreign adversaries with strategic motives
- Domestic extremists radicalized by years of incendiary rhetoric
- Institutional hostility within parts of the federal bureaucracy
- A degraded security culture driven by politicization and optics
Any one of those would be concerning on its own. Together, they create what Bongino described as a “unique witches’ brew.”
Foreign Threats Are Not Hypothetical
Bongino specifically referenced threats from hostile foreign actors — not as conjecture, but as a matter of record.
“You’ve got the Iranian threat out there from his actions against the Iranians,” he said, pointing to Trump’s role in the 2020 strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military commander. That operation, while widely praised by U.S. allies at the time, placed Trump permanently in the crosshairs of Iran’s intelligence and proxy networks.
Iran has repeatedly vowed retaliation. U.S. intelligence agencies have publicly acknowledged ongoing Iranian plots against former U.S. officials connected to that decision.
Bongino also referenced the Chinese Communist Party, which has no interest in seeing Trump return to power given his record on trade, technology restrictions, and strategic decoupling.
Foreign threats don’t require mass mobilization. They require one motivated actor, one exploited vulnerability, and one failure of vigilance.
Domestic Radicalization Is the Wild Card
The domestic environment may be even more volatile.
For years, prominent cultural figures and political activists have normalized violent rhetoric toward Trump. From mock beheadings to onstage “jokes” about assassination, the boundary between satire and incitement has been repeatedly blurred.
Bongino was careful to distinguish between juvenile stunts and something far more dangerous: radicalized individuals who internalize elite cues.
History shows that sustained dehumanization of political figures increases the risk of lone-wolf violence. It’s not the celebrities themselves who pose the threat — it’s the unstable individuals who interpret their language as moral permission.
That’s not a partisan claim. It’s a well-documented phenomenon in threat assessment literature.
The Most Uncomfortable Question: Will Protection Be Politicized?
Bongino’s most serious concern wasn’t about the existence of threats. It was about the possibility that Trump may not receive the level of protection those threats warrant.
“My real concern here is, due to the partisan hatred of Donald Trump, that they may be pressured to not give him the security detail he needs,” he warned.
That is an extraordinary statement — and one that cuts to the heart of institutional integrity.
The Secret Service operates under the Department of Homeland Security, an executive branch agency. By statute and tradition, protection decisions should be threat-based, not politics-based. But Bongino suggested that optics, resentment, or bureaucratic hostility could interfere with best practices.
He framed it bluntly: not wanting Trump to “look presidential” or “different” could become a rationale for reduced visibility or diminished resources.
In protection work, those rationales get people killed.
History Offers No Comfort
American history is littered with moments when threats were underestimated because they were inconvenient.
Abraham Lincoln’s security was dismissed as unnecessary paranoia. James Garfield’s assassin was known to authorities but ignored. John F. Kennedy’s motorcade route was left dangerously exposed due to political and aesthetic considerations.
Every major protective failure is followed by the same refrain: we didn’t think it would happen.
Bongino’s warning is notable precisely because it comes before tragedy, not after.
Legal Warfare Has Real-World Consequences
The indictment of a former president is unprecedented. Regardless of one’s view of its merits, there is no denying its downstream effects.
Legal warfare intensifies emotional stakes. It reframes political conflict as existential. It encourages absolutist thinking. And it increases the likelihood that unstable individuals will view violence as justified or necessary.
Bongino alluded to this when he noted the growing expectation in some circles that “Trump may not be here for the election.”
That language — whether meant metaphorically or literally — is deeply unsettling. Protection professionals are trained to treat such signals seriously, not dismiss them as rhetoric.
This Is Bigger Than Trump
One point must be made absolutely clear: this is not about liking Donald Trump.
The safety of former presidents is a national interest, not a partisan favor. If a former president can be exposed to elevated risk due to political hostility, every future president is vulnerable to the same logic.
Normalize protection as a political tool, and you erode one of the last nonpartisan pillars of the republic.
Bongino’s warning, stripped of all ideology, is a call to remember that some institutions must remain above the political battlefield.
A Test We Cannot Afford to Fail
The United States has survived bitter elections, contested outcomes, and deep ideological divides. What it has rarely faced is the open erosion of shared responsibility for the physical safety of its leaders.
If Bongino is right — and his experience suggests he deserves to be taken seriously — then this moment demands sobriety, not schadenfreude.
Protection failures don’t announce themselves in advance. They emerge from complacency, bias, and the assumption that “someone else” is handling it.
This is not a moment for victory laps or legal theatrics. It is a moment to ensure that security decisions are driven by threat analysis, not politics.
Because once that line is crossed, there is no undo button.
And history is unforgiving to nations that learn that lesson too late.