The multiple assassination attempts against President Donald Trump during his re-election campaign last year exposed the shortcomings of the U.S. Secret Service's efforts to keep him secure from potential harm.

In retrospect, however, according to a forthcoming new book, the failures of the Secret Service had become evident to some in several ways even before the unsuccessful attempts to end Trump's life occurred, Fox News reported.

That includes questionable security arrangements during a courthouse appearance and while traveling in a motorcade, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, and various outdoor campaign events.

Secret Service shortcomings

"Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power" is a new tell-all book from Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt that will be released later in March and purports to give a "fly-on-the-wall account" of President Trump's re-election campaign and the "seemingly insurmountable challenges" he overcame to achieve victory and a second term in the White House.

Vanity Fair recently published an excerpt from the book that covered the shooting incident at a July campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and its immediate aftermath along with a revealing look at other previously unknown incidents that raised concerns about the level of security provided by the U.S. Secret Service.

Those concerns began at home for Trump, his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida, which was described as a "fishbowl" constantly "crawling with visitors," only some of whom were thoroughly screened by the Secret Service, even though anybody who gained access to the property could potentially have approached the president at his club.

Several close-call incidents

According to the "Revenge" book, there were concerning signs of the inadequacy of President Trump's Secret Service protection roughly one year prior to the Butler shooting, including Trump's appearance for an arraignment hearing in August 2023 at a Washington D.C. courthouse, in which it was belatedly realized that public access to the elevators had not been denied.

That led to Trump and his entourage being exposed to unchecked crowds of onlookers as the elevator stopped at each floor, but that wasn't the only security shortfall that day, as was soon revealed when Trump's motorcade left the courthouse and soon found out that local police had not cleared the roads for the drive to the airport, forcing the motorcade to share the space with unknown drivers and unpredictable vehicles during rush hour traffic.

Another close call occurred later that same month when Trump attended the Iowa State Fair and wanted to meet and greet other attendees on the main street but was ultimately kept confined to areas where the Secret Service could conduct better crowd control after it was determined that the fair's security measures were insufficient to guarantee the president's safety.

Yet another example took place about a month later when Trump returned to Iowa to attend a major college football game and first visited a packed party at a fraternity house where, just one day earlier, agents had found dozens of firearms owned by the college students, who had simply been advised to put them away and not have them around when the president came to visit.

Fast-forward nearly a year to the immediate aftermath of the Butler incident and the pre-planned Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which Trump's Secret Service detail pleaded with agency leadership to expand the convention's security perimeter and provide additional resources but were denied by D.C. headquarters and told that the original security plan would remain in place.

Real fears of an Iran-sponsored assassination attempt

In an article for Axios last month, Isenstadt revealed from his "Revenge" book that the rumored concerns among the Trump camp and his protective detail about an Iranian plot to assassinate President Trump -- retaliation for the Jan. 2020 airstrike he ordered that killed top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani -- were far greater than was publicly known.

There had been credible threats that Iran-linked terrorist cells armed with surface-to-air missiles were present in the U.S., which prompted the Trump campaign to occasionally use decoy planes and motorcades to transport Trump while some of his aides and staffers were effectively exposed as "bait" or "collateral damage."

Thankfully, and despite the concerning security failures, Trump survived the two known assassination attempts and innumerable other unknown incidents, and hopefully, those prior inadequacies have been fully addressed now that he is the president once again.