The sloped roof meme mocks a comment made by U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Cheatle tried to explain why nobody was stationed on the rooftop near the Trump rally where the shooter gained access and fired several shots at the former president by saying that the surface was sloped and therefore dangerous.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point,” she told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. “And so, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
What is the Secret Service sloped roof meme?
After people got wind of this interview with Cheatle on social media, the mockery started almost immediately and soon cascaded into a meme. Many users found the idea that the Secret Service—a law enforcement agency that is supposed to be one of the best trained and formidable in the nation—could be thwarted by a sloped roof to the point that a former president and current presidential candidate was almost assassinated.
Some posted comparison photos of the roof from which the Pennsylvania shooter attempted to kill Trump with similarly angled rooftops on which police snipers are perched with captions such as “good slope” and “bad slope.” Others have altered quotes from popular films about spies or general badasses to depict them rejecting missions due to sloped roofs.
Sloped roof meme origins
A lone shooter injured former President Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One bullet out of the eight fired grazed Trump’s ear before he was shielded by the Secret Service and escorted from the scene.
The 20-year-old shooter, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, gained access to building roof near the stage, ward off local police, and fire towards the stage with an AR-style rifle before he was killed by Secret Service snipers. One bystander was killed and another was critically injured.
The near success of the assassin resulted in heavy scrutiny and criticism of the Secret Service, which is tasked with keeping all former presidents and presidential candidates safe. Director Cheatle’s attempts to explain how this could have happened only turned that criticism to outright mockery, birthing the sloped roof meme.
The related interview with Cheatle seemed to go viral on Twitter after user @KeenanPeachy posted about it on July 16 with a sarcastic note about the roof excuse.
“Guys, stop bashing Kim Cheatle: she totally thought about putting snipers on that roof, but it’s a sloped roof, so she didn’t want anyone to slip and fall, okay? SAFETY FIRST!”
This tweet gained quite a bit of attention, and on the same day, the sloped roof memes began to pop up across the social media site.
Connection to the ‘female Secret Service agents’ meme
Plenty of the mockery around the sloped roof meme is rooted in a sexist attitude around the competency of women in law enforcement. This misogyny also started the “female Secret Service agents” meme, which is entirely based on the idea that women in the agency could not possibly be proficient at their jobs even though they don’t appear to be doing anything wrong or at all different from their male colleagues.
These memes mostly consist of video footage and photos of the female agents doing their jobs while haters who have never been in the Secret Service speculated wildly about what they were doing and how it was wrong. Conservative commenters were quick to declare that all the women were “DEI hires” somehow responsible for the assassination attempt.
This ire naturally spread to Director Cheatle, who is also a woman, and much of the criticism around her sloped roof statement is similarly sexist.
Examples
Related memes:
- ‘This is going to ruin the tour’: Donald Trump’s attempted assassination got meme’d
- ‘My Pillow Minis’: Trump’s ear bandage from assassination attempt is already a meme
- The hottest guilty Trump memes to kickstart your weekend
- Whenever there’s a mass shooting, trolls blame comedian Sam Hyde
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
