Former U.S. presidents are authorized a security detail from the Secret Service for life. If Trump loses the election and flees the country, does his security detail have to go with him if he requests it?
I imagine this could go down in a variety of ways: He departs the U.S. before he’s sentenced and just never returns, or he attempts to flees or does flees the U.S. after his sentencing. Either way, what happens to his security detail?
If he attempts to flees after he’s sentenced, I would hope the detail would refuse to take part in it (if he can even board a plane/leave the country to begin with), but given all their failings, who knows.
They aren’t assassins. They’ve spent up to a quarter of their career keeping this guy alive, they aren’t going to turn around and shoot him. In the highly unlikely case Trump let it be known that he actually had a photographic memory and wanted to write it all down for Putin the secret service would simply be recalled. And his plane would fall apart mid-air, as they tend to do when the CIA or FIS (Russian flavor) gets involved.
Most likely scenario is we all remember Trump didn’t even read his intel folders and we wave a fond bon voyage while offering free tickets to Russia for any die hard MAGA fans who want to go with him.
To be perfectly honest, I imagine the US government would see it as too big of a risk to just let him go without at least some sort of shadow watching and following his every move, ready to pounce the second he sneezes wrong. This would be if they were to let him leave.
Granted, it would all be speculation, but the possibility does exist.
The government and our laws really aren’t that put together. If he were to defect there would be no visible reaction to us. And the stuff we couldn’t see would be purely defensive, waiting to see what he could actually compromise and then trying to stay ahead of that. That’s what we have systems and procedures for and that’s what the government runs on.