Who is Ryan Routh, Donald Trump’s would-be assassin?
RYAN WESLEY ROUTH was prepared for a stakeout. The lanky 58-year-old from Hawaii waited behind the fence of Donald Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, for 12 hours, according to mobile-phone records. He had packed a bag of food, a camera, a semi-automatic rifle and a scope. A Secret Service agent spotted Mr Routh’s gun and opened fire before he could attempt to shoot the former president, who was playing an unscheduled round. The agency says Mr Routh did not have sight of Mr Trump, but the apparent assassination attempt was the second in just over two months.
Mr Routh has been charged with two violations of federal gun laws and he could serve up to 20 years in prison. He already has a criminal record, including a conviction in North Carolina in 2002 for possessing a machine gun. His motive for wanting to kill Mr Trump remains unclear. But unlike Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed while attempting to gun down Mr Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, Mr Routh’s biography and opinions can be divined from the public record. Social-media profiles and a self-published e-book (available for $2.99 online) paint a picture of a man with changeable political opinions, hatred for Mr Trump, a predilection for violence and profound naivety.
Mr Routh’s book, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War”, was published in 2023 following what he describes as a five-month stint in the country. After claiming that he failed to join the International Legion, a branch of the Ukrainian army filled with foreign soldiers (the legion denies any association), he says he tried to recruit fighters to help wage war against Russia. The book’s rambling subtitle—“The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen: Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the End of Humanity”—offers a sense of its broad scope and incoherent prose. The 291-page text is something between a diary and a political treatise.
Mr Routh admits in the book that he voted for Mr Trump in 2016. He suggests that he was “fooled” by the “idiot” former president, and felt let down by his foreign-policy blunders, including pulling America out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was brokered by President Barack Obama in 2015. It is on Iran’s behalf that Mr Routh apologises for voting for Mr Trump, and he offers the country a bloody solution that now looks like foreshadowing. “I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologise,” he writes. “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgement …No one here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.”
Mr Routh seems to have abandoned his support for Mr Trump at some point during his first term in office. Posts on X suggest that in 2020 he backed the short-lived presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman, and that he hoped Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy might team up to defeat Mr Trump in the Republican primary earlier this year. He commends President Joe Biden for his support for Ukraine, though not without calling him “frail” and criticising him for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He never mentions Kamala Harris, as the book was written before she became the Democratic presidential nominee. But he does suggest that “we must get to a place where every leader is always a woman so that we can avoid this testosterone driven insanity and macho bullshit.”
While much of Mr Routh’s derision seems reserved for Mr Trump, his book reveals a man disillusioned by politics more broadly and unencumbered by his own contradictions. He condemns the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021 but then advocates for Mr Trump’s assassination and mulls whether Democrats and Republicans are destined to “slaughter the entire opposing party”. He offers to be “kidnapped by North Korea…to show them one by one that Americans are not the enemy”. There is a revealing reference to “Homage to Catalonia”, George Orwell’s memoir about his time on the front lines of the Spanish civil war. Mr Routh seems to fancy himself a latter-day Orwell, wanting to fight for freedom in Ukraine only to feel ineffective in the end.
In 1995 Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, advocated a revolution against industrial society in a 35,000-word manifesto. His bombs targeted people he believed to be complicit in the advancement of technology. Mr Routh may have similarly hoped that shooting Mr Trump could force a reckoning. At the end of his book, he writes that he did not expect to make it out of 2023 alive. “I am certain likewise that my end will go unnoticed…but I will dream and imagine that perhaps it would spark motivation in at least one person to take up arms and fight against the hatred that ended me.” In crafting his dangerous message to others, he may have emboldened himself. “If you want to be one of those action heroes in the movies”, he wrote, “now is your time to shine.”■
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