Months before he allegedly pointed a semiautomatic rifle into a Florida golf course as former president Donald Trump approached, Ryan Routh described himself as a failure. Nearing 60, he was running a small business building tiny homes and sheds in Hawaii. He had tried to reinvent himself by volunteering to fight in Ukraine but was rejected, the Washington Post reports. According to his writings in an e-book, he had not assets, no retirement savings, no bank account, he said, describing his time in Ukraine that he predicted no one would read. One topic that appeared to preoccupy him: political assassination. In his book, Routh repeatedly wondered why someone hadn’t killed Russian leader Vladimir Putin. And he said Iran should feel free to assassinate Trump.
“No one here in the U.S. appears to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection,” he wrote. Routh’s long and strange journey from running a roofing company in North Carolina to what the FBI has called an apparent assassination attempt in Florida on Sunday left friends and acquaintances mystified. He could be odd, many of them said, and had a history of mostly minor run-ins with police, but wasn’t threatening. Still, in recent years, there were hints of a kind of unraveling, particularly after he went to Ukraine in 2022. While Routh saw himself engaged in a Manichaean battle of good vs. evil, others found his activities there counterproductive and disturbing — so much that U.S. government agencies flagged him, they said. After returning home to Hawaii, he lashed out in unexpected ways, the Post wrote, in its deep profile of Routh.
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