I’ve spent time with a would-be presidential assassin, but Ryan Routh is an enigma

The most recent apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump raises a series of absurd questions. How many more assassination attempts on Trump should we expect before the election on November 5th? Will one of them be successful? How much of a factor will such assassination attempts prove to be in the eventual outcome of that election? And has American politics now entered an era where assassination attempts are an indivisible element of any election cycle, like post-Convention polling bumps or televised debates?
It wouldn’t be quite right to suggest that this latest attempt on a former US president’s life is unremarkable – far from it: I myself intend to remark on it here at some length, in a newspaper of record – but, after the comparatively seismic shock of the previous assassination attempt, at a rally in Pennsylvania barely two months ago, this one has seemed to struggle to rise to the level of major event.
For one thing, it might be argued that it was less an assassination attempt than an attempted assassination attempt, because the alleged attempted assassin, in this case, never actually managed to do any shooting. And then there is the matter of setting: the suspect assailant concealed with a rifle in some bushes off the fairway of the fifth hole of Trump International Golf Course at West Palm Beach, on which the former president was playing a round. It lacked the dramatic political charge that was so evident in the Pennsylvania rally assassination attempt, with its instant iconography of bloodshed and defiance.
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At time of writing, the editors of the Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject – which is headed “Trump International Golf Club Shooting” – are embroiled in a dispute over whether it even merits such a page in the first place, or whether it should be covered in a subsection of an existing entry on “Security Incidents Involving Donald Trump”, or even folded into an entry on the golf course itself.
In a speech on Monday, Joe Biden responded to the latest assassination attempt with a doleful recapitulation of the statement he gave last time around. “There is no place,” he said, “for political violence in America. None. Zero. Never. In America, we resolve our differences peacefully, at the ballot box, not at the end of a gun.” This, clearly, was more a description of a wish – a dream of a peacefully democratic polity – than of any recognisable American reality.
I’ve given this subject a fair amount of thought in recent months, not just because of these incidents of violence and near-violence in the current US election campaign, but because, for much of the summer, I was working on a profile of John Hinckley jnr for the New York Times Magazine.
Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1982 in order to impress the young Jodie Foster, has been out of psychiatric hospital for some years now, and is living in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I went to spend a few days in his company last spring. In that piece, which was published shortly after Matthew Thomas Crooks took a shot at Trump, I considered Hinckley and Crooks as avatars of the American archetype of the lone gunman.
Both, in their different ways, are products of that country’s cultural imagination: its structuring mythology of entrepreneurial individualism, and its enduring conflation of heroism and gun violence.
Ryan Routh, the 59-year-old man whom secret service officers found hiding in the bushes off the fairway in Palm Beach, is a particularly sad example of this archetype. He seems almost a parodic version of the “undecided voter”: he voted for Trump in 2016, supported Bernie Sanders in 2020, has donated several small sums of money to the Democratic Party, and is registered as an independent voter.
The political issue by which he is most exercised is the Russian invasion of Ukraine; despite being in his mid-fifties, with no military experience, he travelled to Kyiv in 2022 in a failed attempt to enlist, and then tried to launch a deranged scheme to get fake passports for Afghan army veterans so that they could come to Ukraine and fight the Russians.
Last April, he tweeted at Elon Musk to ask him if he would sell him a second-hand rocket, which he intended to fit with a warhead and use to take out Putin. He also tweeted at the singers Bruno Mars and Dave Matthews, in an effort to get them to record an “emotional tribute song to Ukraine”, the lyrics and music of which he himself had written.
Reading about these tweets, I couldn’t help think of Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose protagonist Moses Herzog negotiates a dire midlife crisis by mentally composing letters to the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Heidegger, along with people he actually knows.
It seems pretty clear that what we’re looking at here is a weird, addled man with fantasies of taking a central role in world affairs. And what better way to be important than to assassinate a former, and possibly future, American president? In terms of political impact, it certainly beats voting.
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The thing I find most remarkable about Routh, though, is that despite the extremity of his alleged actions, his politics, to the degree that it’s even worth decoding them, seem to be more or less moderate. He’s not looking to bring about an anarchist revolution or create a Caliphate in the Florida Keys. He thinks Trump is a puppet of Putin and presents a danger to American democracy: the kind of views you would likely encounter within 10 minutes of turning on MSNBC.
Men like failed Trump assassin Crooks, and Routh, whose actions are being investigated as an assassination attempt, are in some ways an anomaly, but they also reveal the extent to which violence is a form of political expression in American life. The second Amendment to the US Constitution – the one about the right to keep and bear arms – is understood by many Americans as a bulwark against tyrannical government.
Deciding to shoot a presidential candidate is, in some sense, on a delusional continuum with tweeting questions at Bruno Mars and Elon Musk. For a country so characterised by violence of many kinds – by violent political rhetoric, by police who go into death-squad mode over subway fare evasions, by regular mass shootings, by endless foreign wars and proxy wars – it seems inevitable that increasingly acrimonious elections would come to be punctuated by attempts on the lives of candidates.
Despite President Biden’s claims to the contrary, there has always been a place for political violence in America. The troubling question, in a nation with more guns that people, is to what extent it is likely to increase.