The second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump while he was golfing at one of his Florida courses on Sunday is forcing the United States Secret Service to further tighten security around the Republican presidential nominee and to reevaluate just how much Trump should be venturing out—whether he should continue to golf and participate in other outdoor activities, according to multiple sources in the Secret Service community.

From the information released so far, it appears that the Secret Service reacted far more aggressively and quickly Sunday than it did on July 13 when a 20-year-old shooter wounded Trump and killed a firefighter attending his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But many questions remain.

Just two months after the first assassination attempt, the Secret Service is again grappling with whether it has the capacity to fully protect the former president in such a heightened threat environment and how far to restrict his movements during the final 49 days of an intense presidential campaign. Members of Trump’s protective detail reportedly were briefed recently about intensified Iranian plots to assassinate Trump in retaliation for his order to kill Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a Jan. 3, 2020, drone strike.

On July 12, the day before the first assassination attempt against Trump, the FBI arrested Asif Merchant, a Pakistani citizen with deep ties to Iran. Merchant had traveled to Iran and plotted the assassination of Trump with an Iranian handler and funding from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s elite military forces, according to an FBI proffer, a detailed write-up of its interrogation of Merchant.

GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley obtained that document from a whistleblower and released it last week. The FBI nabbed Merchant when he was trying to hire hitmen in New York.

A video from Jan. 12, 2022, which Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s religious and military leader, posted on his website, shows an animated scenario in which a robot drone assassinates Trump while the former president is golfing. It ends with the words, “Revenge is definite.” An earlier video that Khamenei posted three days after Soleimani’s death enacts Trump’s assassination during a speech, threatening that “If you begin the war, we will end the war.”

Other more specific security questions remain about whether the Secret Service deployed drones to help surveil the golf course on Sunday after failing to do so at the Butler rally and why it didn’t place better security along the perimeter of both venues.

Multiple sources in the Secret Service community are describing Sunday’s golfing event at Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach as an OTR, which translates to “off the record” in Secret Service parlance.

In Secret Service parlance, an OTR refers to activities or events that are not listed in the internal schedule and are more spontaneous in nature and those in which the Secret Service team that protects Trump has to jump into action to do its best to protect him on short notice.

The campaign had not made the Republican nominee’s schedule public after a West Coast swing that culminated in Las Vegas the night before, though Trump is known to frequent the golf course on weekends.

Trump’s Secret Service detail may have had access to an array of security assets to help protect him at a golf course he regularly plays, but for OTR events, it depends on what headquarters have approved for Trump and what special agents and Uniformed Division officers are available that particular day.

“So more or less, you generally don’t have a massive footprint with an OTR,” one source told RealClearPolitics. “You kind of just show up and then you own whatever happens that day.”

What happened on Sunday was that Trump once again narrowly escaped an attempted assassination. This time, the Secret Service appeared to act decisively and professionally. At a Sunday afternoon press conference, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw recounted how a Secret Service special agent saw the........

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