President Joe Biden is concerned that suspected “MAGA sympathizers” are embedded in his Secret Service security detail, according to an upcoming book.
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, which is authored by journalist Chris Whipple and set to be published January 17, reportedly says the president is distrustful of the Secret Service due to some of the agents supporting former President Donald Trump.
“A bigger problem was Biden’s discomfort with his Secret Service detail; some of them were MAGA sympathizers,” Whipple writes in the book, according to The Hill. “He didn’t trust them.”
Whipple writes that Biden has expressed concerns about the Secret Service being dominated by “white ex-cops from the South” who are “deeply conservative.”
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP; Alex Wong/Getty Images
The president’s assessment of the law enforcement response to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and subsequent congressional testimony, purportedly made him suspect that the agency was “both incompetent and politicized.”
“Surrounded by a new phalanx of strangers, Biden couldn’t help but wonder, Do these people really want me here?” Whipple reportedly wrote.
According to the book, Biden also “wasn’t buying the details” concerning a claim that his dog Major bit a Secret Service agent, insisting that “somebody was lying.”
Major reportedly bit both a Secret Service agent and a National Park Service worker in March 2021. The dog received training after the incidents but left the White House the following December after the “collective recommendation” of experts.
The Secret Service declined Newsweek’s request for comment on the president’s remarks in the book about the agency.
Biden has increasingly spoken about dangers from “MAGA Republicans” during his presidency.
The president argued that Trump-supporting Republican extremists could set the country on a “sliding path to oblivion” during a fiery Labor Day speech in Pennsylvania.
Biden warned that MAGA Republicans who refuse to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election and “support violence when [they] don’t like the outcome of an election” could eventually destroy democracy.
The president also said that MAGA Republicans who reject his victory over Trump only make up a “minority” of the GOP. In fact, polls have consistently shown that a majority of Republicans do not accept the election result.
Biden’s criticism of Trump’s MAGA movement received some predictable backlash from conservatives, prompting the president to clarify that he does not consider “any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country.”
However, some have credited Biden’s anti-MAGA stance for helping Democrats achieve a better-than-expected result in the November midterm elections, while suggesting that the rhetoric should continue.
“For three election cycles, Americans have had the chance to vote for the MAGA agenda, and unequivocally the agenda has failed,” political analyst Fernand Amandi told Newsweek in November.
“It would be dumb for Democrats not to use the term MAGA Republicans because it has been so successful,” added Amandi.