[imagesource: Leigh Vogel / Wireimage]

There are many Hollywood movies about people falling in love with those that protect them.

1992’s The Bodyguard, starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, is perhaps the most famous of all, and in that case, Costner was a former Secret Service agent.

Perhaps this is more common in the real world than people might expect, given that two members of the Trump inner circle are said to have taken a liking to the agents who protected them while Donald was serving as the 45th president.

Next week, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, written by Carol Leonnig, will be published, but some excerpts have already been made available to media outlets.

Leonnig, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015, says that Vanessa Trump (pictured above), now Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-wife, and Tiffany Trump, Donald’s other daughter, got “inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close” to the agents assigned to them.

The Guardian reports:

…[Leonnig] writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump… “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.

Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.

Image: Tasos Katopodis—WireImage/Getty Images

Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.

Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.

I’m not sure how much her father would have approved of the middle descriptor of those three.

Both Tiffany and the agent denied that anything untoward had happened, saying it wasn’t unusual for agents to spend a great deal of alone time with those they are assigned to protect.

The agent was later reassigned.

Tiffany is now engaged to Michael Boulos, the son of a Lebanese billionaire.

One thing Donald himself couldn’t stand was agents who fell into the ‘stomach out, chest in’ category, says The Washington Post:

…Trump — who had a penchant for surrounding himself with people who looked like they were out of central casting — was consumed with getting overweight Secret Service agents removed from their posts, saying he wanted “these fat guys off my detail” and asking: “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”

The former president, codenamed ‘Mogul’ by agents, is also said to have complained about the White House’s lowered gates, which would make his limo experience a slight bump as he entered or left the residence.

He proposed a multimillion-dollar renovation “to dig up and replace” the gates, which advisers delayed until he eventually forgot about them.

Leonnig’s book contains details of plenty of missteps from agents over the years, and says the agency has been “spread dangerously thin” through 11 presidents.

[sources:guardian&washpost]