A bullet grazed Donald Trump's ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, missing his head by millimeters.
Six months later, a man with a rifle waited in the bushes outside Trump's West Palm Beach golf course until a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel poking through the shrubs.
And what a 12-year Secret Service veteran said after Sunday's breach is something every American who voted for Trump needs to hear.
Austin Tucker Martin: The Mar-a-Lago Assassination Attempt the Media Buried
Austin Tucker Martin of Cameron, North Carolina, walked through the north gate at Mar-a-Lago carrying a shotgun and a fuel can after a vehicle exited and left it momentarily open.
Agents ordered him to drop both.
He put the gas can down.
Then he raised the shotgun toward officers.
Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy shot and killed him at the scene.
Trump and Melania were in Washington at the time – but what Martin intended to do with a shotgun and an accelerant at 1:30 in the morning is a question the FBI is still working to answer.
His cousin, 19-year-old Braeden Fields, was stunned.
"He wouldn't even hurt an ant," Fields told the Associated Press. "He doesn't even know how to use a gun."
Martin worked as a golf course groundskeeper, liked to sketch, and came from a family of Trump supporters – his family reported him missing at almost exactly the moment he was breaching the gate.
Investigators believe he drove south from North Carolina and picked up the shotgun along the way – the box for the weapon was found in his car.
Why Trump Is Now the Most Threatened President in American History
Former Secret Service agent William Gage has watched this threat evolve for over a decade, and Sunday's breach did not surprise him.
"It should be quite clear to all of us by now that Trump is the most threatened president in the history of the U.S.," Gage told Fox News Monday.
Unlike every president before him, the threats against Trump are not fading as his term moves forward.
"The longer he's president, the more these attacks keep happening," Gage said.
The most dangerous actors, he explained, are not the sophisticated ones.
They are people like Martin – no criminal record, no ideology, no network behind them.
"If you were standing behind them in line at Starbucks, you wouldn't have given them a second look," Gage said.
That invisibility is the problem.
After 9/11, the Secret Service shifted focus from lone gunmen toward coordinated networks – al-Qaeda, ISIS, state-sponsored plots like the Iranian scheme to kill Trump in 2024.
The low-tech, unaffiliated actor went largely unstudied.
Now those actors are showing up at Trump's front gate.
The Secret Service Copycat Warning Every Trump Supporter Needs to See
Former senior Secret Service agent Don Mihalek confirmed what agents on the ground already knew – the security layers worked, Martin never reached the residence, and the response took seconds.
Gage's warning is about what happens next.
Every time an incident like this goes public, someone else studies it – figuring out what Martin did wrong, where the gap was, how to refine it.
"If it were up to the Secret Service, they would never report any of these incidents ever," Gage said.
They cannot stop the coverage – and the coverage is a recruiting poster for the next attempt.
No president in American history has absorbed what Trump has absorbed – a sniper at a Pennsylvania rally, a rifle aimed through shrubbery on a West Palm Beach golf course, and now an armed man with a gas can walking through his front gate in the middle of the night.
Gerald Ford was the last president to face two high-profile attempts in rapid succession, and both came from fringe actors nobody had on their radar.
Trump's threat environment looks nothing like Ford's – and according to Gage, every news cycle about Mar-a-Lago lights the fuse for whoever is already studying what Martin got wrong.
Sources:
- Morgan Phillips, "Former Secret Service officials warn of low-tech threats facing Trump after latest Mar-a-Lago breach," Fox News, February 23, 2026.
- Fox News, "Family member of armed man who breached Mar-a-Lago perimeter describes personality, politics," February 23, 2026.
- Associated Press via Spectrum News, "N.C. man killed at Mar-a-Lago wasn't interested in politics or guns, cousin says," February 23, 2026.
- "Security incidents involving Donald Trump," Wikipedia, updated February 2026.
- "List of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots," Wikipedia, updated February 2026.
