President Trump ceding the U.S.’s position as the global economic leader to China, while also committing horrifying human rights abuses here at home, is a much bigger deal, but it’s also important to remember he’s an international embarrassment, too. He has zero tact or manners, and he reportedly smells very bad. So it wasn’t exactly surprising to see him riding around in his presidential limo, known as “The Beast,” with the trunk open, but it did get people wondering what the heck was going on.Â
Did the Secret Service forget to close the trunk? Did China hack the presidential limo? Was Trump too cheap to send a different car to pick up that coffee table he found on Facebook Marketplace? Since Trump is known to have a unrequited relationship with the truth, we may never actually know the truth, but our friends over at the Daily Beast did reach out to the Secret Service for an explanation, and officially, the answer is “none of the above.”
According to the Secret Service, Trump’s open trunk can be attributed to mechanical failure and has been fixed. And if that doesn’t sum up the GM ownership experience, I don’t know what would.
Secret Service responds
In a statement given to the Daily Beast, Secret Service spokesperson Matt Fagiana said:
During the motorcade from Mar-a-Lago to Palm Beach International Airport, one of the motorcade vehicles’ trunks inadvertently opened and remained in the upright position for a part of the motorcade route. No items were lost or displaced while in transit. The issue was determined to be mechanical in nature, has been identified, and has since been repaired.
Fagiana, who I’m sure no one in the White House has ever given a derogatory nickname, also reportedly added that the problem with the Beast’s trunk has since been fixed and did not impact the president’s trip (or any of his scheduled McNugget feedings). But while the Secret Service has commented on the Beast’s open trunk, neither Trump nor the White House has addressed it. Nor has anyone said what might have been in the trunk when it flew open.Â
It also isn’t clear whether a peek into the trunk would be of any value to a hostile foreign government. You’d like to think something as simple as an open trunk wouldn’t expose any vulnerabilities, but you never know. Odds are, no one saw anything that valuable, but I’ve also seen enough spy movies to know that’s exactly the kind of thing the world’s top assassin might use to crack a president’s theoretically impenetrable security and send the U.S. into political chaos. Not that we don’t have enough chaos to deal with already. I mean, have you seen some of the stuff the president’s been posting on TruthSocial lately?
