When a man who spent more than a decade inside the United States Secret Service says he is worried about the safety of a former president, that warning deserves serious attention. This is not speculation from a pundit chasing headlines, nor is it partisan alarmism meant to inflame emotions. It comes from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who protected presidents from both parties and worked during one of the most consequential periods in modern security history. Bongino understands how threats evolve, how political climates affect risk, and how quickly complacency can become catastrophic. When he publicly admitted that he is growing concerned about Donald Trump’s safety, it should have triggered a sober national conversation. Instead, his remarks barely broke through a media landscape consumed by legal analysis, partisan narratives, and endless outrage cycles. What Bongino offered was not conjecture, but a professional assessment rooted in experience: multiple threat streams are converging around a single political figure at a time when institutional trust and restraint appear dangerously weakened.

Bongino’s background lends unusual weight to his warning. He served in the Secret Service from 1999 to 2011, protecting presidents including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and working in the post-9/11 environment when executive protection doctrine was fundamentally reshaped. He has seen how threat environments shift and how rhetoric on the ground translates into real-world danger. His concern centers on what protection professionals call threat convergence, a moment when independent sources of hostility align simultaneously. According to Bongino, Trump currently sits at the intersection of several such threats: hostile foreign actors with strategic motives, domestic extremists radicalized by years of incendiary language, institutional hostility within elements of the federal bureaucracy, and a broader degradation of security culture driven by politicization and optics. Any one of these factors would merit heightened vigilance. Together, they create a volatile and unprecedented risk environment that demands serious, nonpolitical attention.

Foreign threats, Bongino emphasized, are neither abstract nor hypothetical. Trump’s role in authorizing the 2020 strike that killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani placed him permanently in the crosshairs of Iran’s intelligence services and proxy networks. Iranian leaders have publicly vowed retaliation, and U.S. intelligence agencies have acknowledged ongoing plots against former American officials connected to that decision. In addition to Iran, Bongino pointed to the Chinese Communist Party, which has clear strategic reasons to oppose Trump’s return to power given his record on trade, technology restrictions, and geopolitical confrontation. Foreign actors do not require mass movements or public support to act. They need only one determined operative, one exploited vulnerability, and one lapse in vigilance. History shows that these actors are patient, methodical, and willing to wait years for an opportunity, especially when emotions and distractions run high domestically.

On the domestic front, Bongino described an environment he views as even more unpredictable. Years of dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at Trump have blurred the line between satire and incitement. Public figures have joked about violence, staged graphic imagery, or spoken casually about elimination rather than defeat. While most of this behavior is dismissed as performance or protest, threat assessment professionals focus on how such language is received by unstable individuals. History demonstrates that sustained vilification of political figures increases the likelihood of lone-wolf violence, not because elites intend it, but because some individuals interpret repeated cues as moral permission. Bongino was careful not to accuse celebrities or activists of direct responsibility, but he stressed that the cumulative effect of rhetoric matters. This dynamic is well documented in threat assessment literature and has played a role in past political violence across ideological lines.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Bongino’s warning was not the existence of threats, but his concern about whether protection itself could become politicized. He openly questioned whether partisan hostility toward Trump might influence the level, visibility, or aggressiveness of his security detail. That concern cuts directly into the credibility of American institutions. The Secret Service operates under the Department of Homeland Security and is bound by statute and tradition to make protection decisions based on threat analysis, not political preference. Bongino suggested, however, that pressures related to optics, resentment, or the desire to avoid making Trump “look presidential” could lead to reduced visibility or resources. In the world of protective services, such rationales are red flags. History shows that protection failures often stem not from lack of information, but from decisions shaped by convenience, image, or discomfort.

American history offers sobering reminders of what happens when warnings are ignored. Abraham Lincoln’s concerns about his safety were dismissed as paranoia. James Garfield’s assassin was known to authorities but not taken seriously. John F. Kennedy’s motorcade route remained dangerously exposed due to political and aesthetic considerations. Each failure was followed by regret and institutional reform, always too late for the individual involved. Bongino’s warning is notable precisely because it comes before tragedy, not after. It arrives at a moment when a former president faces unprecedented legal pressure, an environment that intensifies emotions and reframes political conflict as existential. Legal warfare, regardless of one’s views on its justification, raises stakes and increases the risk that unstable individuals may see violence as acceptable or necessary. The issue ultimately extends beyond Donald Trump. The safety of former presidents is a national interest, not a partisan favor. If protection can be weakened by political hostility, then every future president is vulnerable to the same logic. This moment is a test of whether the United States can keep its protective institutions above the political battlefield. History is unforgiving when that test is failed.