Political assassins, successful or otherwise, are almost always young men. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, were both 24. Jean Bastien-Thiry, who fired dozens of bullets into Charles de Gaulle’s presidential car in 1962, was 34.
Thomas Matthew Crooks – Trump’s first would-be assassin – was a little on the young side at 20, but very much in keeping with the profile of the young, enraged male loner. As we age, we tend to calm down, whatever our political affiliations, but not in the case of Routh, who has at least three adult children and was married at least once.
He has a sporadic criminal record but doesn’t appear to have been mentally ill, based on current evidence.
His 35-year-old son, Oran, said his father was “loving and caring … an honest, hardworking man”, in media interviews after the older Routh was apprehended. It’s typically wrong to blame individuals’ violent actions on the political rhetoric of others, but perhaps not in this case: Routh appears to have been thoroughly propagandised by Democratic slogans, which any fair-minded observer must concede are virulently and sometimes violently disparaging of Trump.
This week, the Trump campaign released a list of 50 quotes from top Democrats, from President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris down, which stressed the supposedly existential threat the former president posed.
“I mean this from the bottom of my heart: Trump is a threat to his nation,” Biden has repeatedly said.
Democrat congressmen and women have urged that Trump be “eliminated” or even “shot – stopped”, as Stacey Plaskett once suggested.
As recently as April, Routh had posted: “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose” on social media, repeating a boilerplate Democratic claim word for word. He had a Biden-Harris bumper sticker on his car. He’d donated at least 19 times to the Democratic Party and related organisations.
“They are still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump,” once urged Democratic Party surrogate Rick Wilson on the ruling party’s network or choice, MSNBC, watched by millions of Americans daily.
He posed in one-on-one photographs with World Central Kitchen celebrity chef Jose Andres, who had cooked with the Clintons and Kamala Harris.
On no other issue, it seems, was Routh more exercised than Ukraine and Russia, where he appears to have totally imbibed years of propaganda, which is now championed not by Republicans but Democrats, and promoted relentlessly by the vast bulk of US media.
Indeed, Routh moved to assassinate Trump the week after the former president during his debate with Kamala Harris said he would move to end the war through negotiation, becoming the first would be neo-con assassin in history. So much for crazy peace activists!
In his book, Unwinnable War, Routh urges the US to assassinate Vladimir Putin, and “instigate” a nuclear war with Moscow in a “quick and decisive and powerful blow”. “It all may be horrible but we have to be able to manage the clean up … Why do we even have nuclear weapons if we are not afraid to use them,” he writes in a book available on Amazon and published in early 2023.
In the same book he also revealed himself to be a champion of women’s rights: “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.”
The US media establishment didn’t find any of this beyond the pale; indeed, Routh was interviewed and profiled by The Guardian, The New York Times and CBS as an oddball “warrior for freedom” since the war began in early 2022. In short, Routh and his reckless, contemptible actions appear to have been the product of relentless political exaggerations.
To be sure, Republicans and Trump engage in similar apocalyptic rhetoric about Democrat opponents. Democrats have naturally been at pains to distance themselves from Routh, although can you just imagine if the circumstances were reversed!
Time Magazine, which ran a front page hagiography of Harris last month, declared Routh had an “unclear political ideology”.
It’s natural to lament the polarisation of US politics and society that could lead to such a near tragedy, but it’s also an opportunity to note the extraordinary rarity of such incidents. Here is a nation of more than 330 million people, with more than 400 million guns, whose population is bombarded daily by extreme propaganda, 24 hours a day, at work and home.
After Trump’s first brush with death at the hands of a would-be assassin in July, Reuters found 79 per cent of Americans believed their country was “spiralling out of control”. That same poll also found 6 per cent of Democrats thought it was “acceptable for someone in my political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal”, double the share of Republicans who believed the same thing.
That’s millions of people, on both sides, who consider violence acceptable, yet very few of them have taken such actions. Thankfully, the vast bulk of Americans appear immune to extreme contemptuous rhetoric, which should hopefully become less effective the more commonplace it becomes.
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The thing that stands out about Ryan Wesley Routh – the man who was allegedly waiting to kill Donald Trump on the sixth hole of the former president’s golf course on Sunday (Monday, AEST) – wasn’t the fact he waited in the bushes for 12 hours in the hope of taking a shot at Trump. It was his age – 58, almost a boomer.