A man accused of bringing a gun to Donald Trump’s golf club in South Florida with in an intent to shoot the former president actually voted for the Republican in 2016 before growing disillusioned with him, according to social media posts that show he went on to support former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, before backing what he saw as a 2024 unity ticket of GOP candidates Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
On Sunday, Secret Service agents opened fire after spotting a man with a rifle on the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, roughly 400 yards from where the Republican candidate was standing. The man, identified as 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, fled the scene and was arrested shortly later without incident.
It is the second time this summer that Trump has been the target of an apparent assassination attempt, raising questions about the Secret Service’s ability to protect their charge. It is also the second time that the accused perpetrator has been someone with unclear motivations and head-scratching politics.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania this past July, was a registered Republican who some peers described as conservative but who also donated $15 years earlier to ActBlue, a clearinghouse for liberal causes.
In a June 2020 post, Routh identified himself as a former Trump supporter, describing the 78-year-old Republican as “my choice” in 2016. But, he continued, “I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we were all greatly disappointment [sic] and it seems you are getting worse and devolving.
“I will be glad when you gone,” he added.
By 2020, Routh was promoting Gabbard, a right-wing Democrat from Hawaii, who is herself backing Trump this cycle. “Tulsi, we need to ramp up our efforts and grow some support so when the field narrows to none, you can win,” he wrote to her on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Let me help.”
Four years later, Routh had pinned his hopes on a pair of non-Trump Republicans. Addressing Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations and rival for the 2024 nomination, he wrote on X: “Please join Vivek Ramaswamy as a team of pres and vp; we must do this now to create a winning ticket now that we can all get behind.”
A Haley-Ramaswamy unity ticket was not Routh’s only harebrained scheme. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022, Routh was apparently inspired to take up the cause of freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe.
“In my opinion, everyone should be there supporting the Ukrainians,” he told The New York Times in 2023, apparently speaking from Washington, DC. Despite having no military experience, or prior connection to Ukraine or Afghanistan, Routh, described as a former construction worker, told the Times he was trying to help send Afghan soldiers to fight the Russians.
On a GoFundMe page, Routh’s apparent fiancee said he was also raising money to send drones and other material to Ukraine, according to The Washington Post.
But it appears he may have soured on the war, or at least the chances of Kyiv prevailing in it, penning a 291-page tome titled: “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity [sic].” A description of the book, posted on Amazon, further suggests the author is not a stable man: “Roosters’ crow and here I sit at 5am; I shot a white rooster yesterday and they normally run off screaming, but this one was paralyzed and could no longer walk and was dragging itself along with its wings.”
It's possible this one-time Trump voter was motivated by the former president's hostility to Ukraine and sympathy for its invader. But perhaps more revealing than his scattered politics and sudden enthusiasms, however, is Routh’s past criminal record. As the Post reported, following a 2002 traffic stop in Greensboro, North Carolina, he barricaded himself for hours in a nearby building, “armed with a machine gun,” before being arrested without incident.
Responding to Sunday’s incident, some Republicans were quick to blame Democrats.
“This rhetoric against President Trump, this narrative that he will be the next dictator, that he is the next Hitler coming, it has got to stop,” Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., told Fox News, falsely claiming that elected officials have said Trump should “be stopped by any means necessary.” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and Tesla, embraced conspiratorial insinuation, publicly wondering why a registered Republican, and then a 2016 Trump voter, had tried to kill the former president while “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”
Democrats, meanwhile, condemned the apparent attempt on Trump’s life, just as they did in July. “Violence has no place in our country,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz posted on social media. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the perpetrator to “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
In September as in July, there is as of yet no simple explanation for why this particular man, at this particular moment in time, wanted to take a shot at the former president, nor do we know why the Secret Service appears incapable of securing a perimeter. What we do know is that poor mental health and easy access to military-grade weapons is a distinctly American formula for violence and infamy.
