Being a Secret Service agent is a tough but sexy job packed with action, intrigue, and the occasional call to escort a president through a White House swarmed by armed terrorists. Everybody who’s ever been to the movies knows that. But, John Oliver asks on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, that badass image ignores a host of inconvenient realities of what is often a tedious, overworked, underpaid slog of a job.
Unsurprisingly, as Oliver presents in an extra-long main story, the realities of Secret Service service are beset with the same institutional failures, funding issues, and workplace screw-ups as your average office environment, only for a workplace tasked with protecting the most powerful people in the country. After a little jaunt through the organization’s history (Lincoln signed the Secret Service into law just hours before he was assassinated), and a more alarming history of agency screw-ups (like the guy in 2011 who scaled the Obama White House fence with a knife and just walked in the unlocked front door), Oliver homed in on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
You know, the one where (all conspiracy theories aside for the moment) the actual facts are pretty damning for the Secret Service. Like how a “secured” area saw someone walk in with a high-powered rifle and set up on a rooftop within shooting range of where a president was speaking. Or how the shooter flew a drone around the site for 11 minutes before the attempted assassination, which agents were unable to track because they were on with tech support for their drone-tracking software. Oh, there was also a guy literally pointing and yelling about someone sneaking on top of a building, but he looked like “he took fourth in a Guy Fieri lookalike contest” while holding a beer during his news interview, so Oliver gave the agency a pass on that one.
As ever, Oliver concluded with a helpful series of suggestions. Paying agents better and eliminating forced overtime is a good start, along with transforming what Oliver says is a promotion culture based on connections rather than skills. But his real contribution came in the form of a gung-ho recruitment ad.
No, not the flashy, Michael Bay-directed one the government ran during last year’s Super Bowl (which still features images of three famously shot-at presidents). But a Jon Hamm-narrated commercial featuring comedian pals like The Good Place‘s Eugene Cordero, What We Do In The Shadows‘ Mark Proksch, Abbott Elementary‘s Courtney Taylor, Workaholics‘ Anders Holm and Adam DeVine, Rob Riggle and Mike Mitchell all showing a more realistically overstretched Secret Service. Their agents do things like taking a creepy potential threat to the movies to remove him from the suspect list (actual Secret Service practice), waiting outside rooms where philandering presidents cheat on their wives, getting playfully whizzed on by the Chief Executive (LBJ, allegedly), and sometimes getting attacked by an unruly First Pet. (Looking at you, Commander Biden.)
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