Secret Service Confronts Historic Surge in Threats, Deploys Drone Defense

The Secret Service was born in blood. On the same day Abraham Lincoln signed it into law in 1865, an assassin's bullet found him. For 161 years since, the agency has evolved from chasing counterfeiters to standing between presidents and the people who want them dead. Today, in 2026, the threats have reached a scale the agency has never confronted before.

Director Sean Curran, who has spent 25 years as an agent and now leads the 28th iteration of the Secret Service, sat down to describe what he called a threat environment unlike anything in the agency's history. The numbers are stark: threats against the people the Secret Service protects have climbed 40 percent in a single year. Since January, there have been 10,000 threat cases—and the year was not yet finished when Curran spoke. He attributed much of the surge to the internet itself. Information moves faster. People are more accessible. The barriers that once existed between a dangerous thought and a dangerous act have thinned.

President Trump has been the target of more assassination attempts than any other sitting president. In the last two and a half years, there have been three known attempts on his life. One came in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, when Thomas Crooks fired eight rounds from a rooftop 155 yards away. Curran was the lead agent that day. He was face to face with the president when the shots came. He became, as he put it, the vest. A congressional investigation later found that the Secret Service had missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt that attack—a massive failure by any measure. The then-director resigned. Trump, newly re-elected, put Curran in charge.

When asked if he could assure the American people that something like Butler would not happen again, Curran said simply: yes. He was convinced. But conviction alone does not stop bullets or drones. The agency had been dangerously understaffed for years. Since Butler, that has begun to change. Where there were roughly 200 people in training the year before, there are now 942. The president's limousine, known as the Beast, has been upgraded with new ballistics protection and defensive countermeasures. It weighs up to 10 tons. A medical response truck with a trauma unit and field surgeon now travels with the motorcade—a direct response to what Curran witnessed in Pennsylvania. An armored personnel carrier, new to the detail, provides mobility for teams during civil disturbances. The motorcade has become a small army.

But the threats are evolving faster than the defenses. The Secret Service is now preparing for a threat unlike any in its history: autonomous attack drones. Deputy Director Matthew Quinn leads a multimillion-dollar program to develop both offensive and defensive drone capabilities. Teams have traveled to Ukraine to study how drones are being used on the battlefield, learning lessons they believe will soon arrive on American soil. The agency has tested counter-drone ammunition. They have deployed a weapon called the drone hunter, which uses artificial intelligence and radar to lock onto hostile drones and capture them with a net. A small amount of explosives—just a few ounces of C4—attached to a rudimentary drone could cause serious damage at a concert, sporting event, or campaign rally. The Secret Service took down a drone using electronic jamming equipment at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore last December, where the president and members of Congress were present. That incident was not widely reported.

The concern about swarms—multiple drones attacking simultaneously—remains unsolved, Quinn acknowledged. Yet he insisted that the White House itself is the safest place on Earth, with new equipment being deployed everywhere it makes sense. The question of whether all of Washington D.C. needs to be militarized to protect one person remains unanswered. Quinn said the goal is maximum protection without the appearance of overwhelming military presence, a balance that grows harder to maintain as the threats multiply.

The threats come from multiple directions. Research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies showed that in 2025, left-wing attacks outnumbered right-wing attacks for the first time in 30 years. That trend has reversed this year, with more attacks coming from the right. Curran said the Secret Service does not weigh threats by political direction—they investigate each one. But his deputy director pointed to mental health crises as a primary driver, with more people being pushed over the edge in either direction by social media and the fractured information landscape. Eight months into a war with Iran, threats from outside the country are also growing. Iranian officials have vowed revenge. Banners at funerals in Tehran have called for the president's death.

Even the presidential aircraft has become a security concern. A 747 donated by Qatar underwent nearly $400 million in security enhancements. Yet when intelligence reports suggested an Iranian plot to fire a missile at the presidential jet as it left Turkey in July, the Secret Service made an extraordinary decision: they used a decoy plane. The president was smuggled out in a catering truck. Cabinet members, staff, press, and Secret Service agents were left on the decoy aircraft. Curran acknowledged this was not the first time such a tactic had been used, though he seemed to regret that the public now knew about it. When asked if he was comfortable leaving his own agents behind on the decoy plane, Quinn responded with a clarity that cut to the bone: the priority is the president. Everyone else—staff, agents, media—is not the priority. Not even the Secret Service's own personnel. As hard as that may be to understand, the mission is singular. The president must survive.