Ryan Routh, the man the FBI says wanted to kill Trump, said he was “willing to die” for Ukraine

The man arrested and under investigation for allegedly trying to assassinate Donald Trump this Sunday at his golf course in Florida is called Ryan Wesley Routh and he is 58 years old. Moved to Hawaii from North Carolina in 2018.

U.S. Secret Service agents stationed a few holes up from where Trump was playing noticed the muzzle of an AK-style rifle poking out from the bushes bordering the course, about 400 meters awayAP reports. An officer fired and the gunman dropped the rifle and fled in an SUV, leaving the firearm behind along with two backpacks, a scope used for aiming and a GoPro camera, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said. The man was later arrested by law enforcement in a neighboring county.

Routh is very active on social media, where he stated that he was willing to fight and die forUkraine. He also said that voted for Trump in 2016 but was disappointed by him, who had voted in the last Democratic primaries and expressed his support forJoe Biden before his withdrawal from the race for the White House.

In a post last April on X, Routh wrote that “democracy is at stake in this election”a phrase repeatedly used by the Democratic Party against Trump. That is why Trump supporters and right-wing media accuse President Biden and Vice PresidentKamala Harristo foster violent rhetoric against his rival.

The detainee has a life story full of ups and downs in his political positions. In a self-published book in 2023 urged Iran to assassinate Trump“You are free to assassinate Trump,” Routh wrote of Iran in the book. “Ukraine’s unwinnable war”in which he described the former president as a “fool” and a “jester” both for the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, and for the “tremendous blunder” of abandoning the Iran nuclear deal.

Judging by his numerous Ukraine-related social media posts, Routh apparently He went to kyiv because he wanted to fightalthough I didn’t havemilitary experience He declared himself “ready to die” but it is unclear whether he took part in the fighting.

Support for Ukraine

He was interviewed by the New York Times in 2023 in an article about American foreign fighters in Ukraine: He said he was in Washington to meet with Congress’s Committee on Security and Cooperation with Europe “for two hours” to push for greater support for Ukraine. But when another American foreign fighter criticized him on Facebook, Routh declared that “he should be shot.”

In an interview conducted in 2022 by Remus Cernea, war correspondent for Newsweek Romania, he said that had gone to Ukraine to fight against Russiabut his lack of military experience disqualified him from doing so.

He said he had gone to kyiv to actively urge people to come from around the world to fight, calling it “the most important thing happening in the world today.”

Routh had attempted to recruit Afghan soldiers to bring them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine, to join the war against Russia, but it is unclear whether he attempted to carry out this plan.

In another message on social media he asked Elon Musk to sell him a missile “to mount a warhead on it in order to use it against Putin’s bunker in the Black Sea and eliminate it once and for all”: “Can you tell me the price, please?” he added, explaining that the rocket could also be “old and used”.

Experts analyze these messages in relation to the level of planning the attack and with the equipment found at the scene: a semi-automatic rifle type Ak-47a plate for a bulletproof vest, as well as a portable GoPro camera to record the attack, mounted on the outside fence where it was parked.

It is not clear how Routh knew that Trump would be between holes 5 and 6 visible from his position: the decision to go play golf in West Palm Beach The trip had not been announced and was taken at the last minute. Among the hypotheses is the possibility that he was following Trump, provided that he had not received a notice about where the former president would be located on Sunday.

Previous arrests

According to CNN, it was arrested eight times in the United States. In one of these cases, in 2002, he was chased by the police and barricaded himself for three hours in a construction company. en Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was found in possession of amachine gun.

This Sunday in Florida, he did not resist arrest: after being discovered on the perimeter of the golf course by a secret service agent who shot him, Routh abandoned his rifle and fled in a black Nissan only to be caught a few minutes later because a witness had seen him emerge from the bushes and had photographed the license plate.

When he was arrested, he was “calm, emotionless, unarmed,” the sheriff said. The car was registered in the daughter’s name. His son Oren said his father “is a kind person, an honest worker. The man I know wouldn’t do anything crazy or violent. I don’t know what happened in Florida.” But he added, in statements to the Daily Mail that father and son had become estranged and were not always in touch. The son also said that Ryan Routh hates Trump “like any sane person.”

From voting for Trump in 2016 to supporting Biden in 2024

In 2016, she voted for Trump, based on the vast amount of information found on the internet, even though Meta deleted her Facebook profile a few minutes after the attacker’s name was announced. In a social message addressed to the former president, she wrote in June 2020: “I and the world hoped that President Trump would be a different and better candidate, but we have been very disappointed and it seems that you are getting worse, that you are retarded. “I’ll be happy when you’re no longer here.”

In 2020, Routh endorsed Tulsi Gabbard, a war veteran and later congresswoman (who is now with Trump), in the Democratic primary. He wrote in X that Gabbard would “negotiate peace deals in Syria, Afghanistan and all conflict zones.”

In 2024, despite voting in the Democratic primaries in March, in his posts he encouraged Republican candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to stay in the race and unite against Trump: “They can’t give up. Why? You have to stay in the field until the end. You have to fight. You have to keep talking until the election, regardless of the results,” he wrote.

Routh has donated almost exclusively to Democratic candidates since 2019 (about $140 in total): Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer.

In a post on X last April, when Biden was still in the race for the nomination, Routh advised him to run an election campaign based on a “democratic and free” United States.

He had argued that Trump wants to “enslave Americans against their master.” “We cannot fail,” he added. “The world is counting on us to show the way.”

On the day of the July 16 attack in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump was wounded in the ear, Routh wrote a tweet directed at Biden in which he advised him to visit the wounded and attend the funeral of the deceased firefighter. “Trump would never do that – he wrote – YOU MUST SHOW THE WORLD WHAT REAL LEADERS DO.”

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