The shift is easy to miss: a counterfeiting bureau that now guards presidents long after they leave office. And the threat picture keeps moving. In an October 2026 interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Secret Service Director Sean Curran said threats against full-time protectees were “up just over 40%” from the year before. “That’s a massive increase,” he said.
From fake money to presidents
The agency dates to 1865, when it was created to fight counterfeiting of U.S. currency after the Civil War. Protecting presidents came later, in 1901, after William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York. Sitting presidents cannot turn that protection down. It covers their spouses and immediate family too.
Former presidents were a separate matter. Congress passed the Former Presidents Act in 1958, and from 1965 it gave them, their spouses and their children up to age 15 a lifetime of protection. The arrangement has not been steady. In 1994, under the Clinton administration and to cut costs, Congress limited it to 10 years. Ronald Kessler, a Secret Service author, described the thinking as a feeling that “former presidents would not be a target.” Then came the Former Presidents Protection Act of 2012, which restored the lifetime rule under Barack Obama. Richard Nixon remains the one ex-president to give it up: in 1985 he cancelled his coverage, reportedly to save the government money, and hired private guards.
How big a detail does an ex-president get?
It depends on the danger and on how recently the person left office. Kessler told CBC that when George W. Bush left the White House, the threat level was high enough that about 75 officers covered him and his wife Laura around the clock. For a recently retired president, he said, four agents typically go along whenever he steps out. Round-the-clock cover means three shifts plus days off, and the numbers climb quickly.
Advance work never stops. Kessler described agents visiting a restaurant first to check employees’ backgrounds for violent convictions, and sending bomb-sniffing dogs through a convention hall before an event.
Iran and the Trump detail
Trump has been in Tehran’s sights since he ordered the 2020 drone strike that killed Quds Force commander Qassim Soleimani in Iraq. BBC News reported in July 2024 that protection for him had been boosted weeks earlier after US authorities learned of an Iranian plot to kill him. CBS, the BBC’s US partner, said intelligence sources put the increase in June, with extra counter-assault and counter-sniper agents, drones and robotic dogs. The Iranian mission at the United Nations called the report “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
Washington had seen this coming. In 2022 the Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps with orchestrating a plot to kill John Bolton, which prosecutors called “likely in retaliation” for Soleimani’s death. A White House National Security Council spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson, said officials had been “tracking Iranian threats against former Trump administration officials for years.”
The agency says little about specifics. “We cannot comment on any specific threat stream,” spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said, “other than to say that the Secret Service takes threats seriously and responds accordingly.”
Iran is not the only driver of the 2026 numbers. Curran blamed the internet and social media; his deputy, Matt Quinn, named mental health, saying more people are “being pushed over the edge in either direction.” The leaders would not say whether more of the threats came from the left or the right, explaining that they do not weigh threats that way.
Sources
- Secret Service protection for Donald Trump is different than for other ex-presidents (CBC News)
- Trump security boosted weeks ago over Iran plot to kill him (BBC News)
- Secret Service leadership warn of 'massive increase' in threats against the president (New York Post)
