It’s now been two weeks since the end of the 2020 presidential campaign and President Donald Trump still has not conceded to President-elect Joe Biden.
In conversations with Business Insider, former Secret Service agents pondered how agents could work to physically remove the president from the White House grounds if he barricades himself in a room and refuses to leave.
“This is such uncharted territory,” a former Secret Service agent told the publication.
In fact, Business Insider reports that former Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security officials have been talking privately about how they would handle a situation in which the president insists that he is still the president even after Biden is sworn into the office on January 20th.
“If that happens, many government experts predict that Trump’s physical removal from office would come down to the Secret Service — an agency within DHS that’s charged with protecting the president and also with evicting trespassers from the White House,” the publication writes.
Such maneuvers could be complicated because the Secret Service is in charge of protecting the president — and they could be violating their core mission if the president puts up a fight and potentially puts himself in harm’s way.
“We’re not there to evict people; we’re there to protect people,” said a former Secret Service official. “I don’t see the Secret Service going in there and knocking on the door and saying, ‘Time to leave sir, checkout is at 11 o’clock.’ Are they going to physically pick him up and do it?”