The man arrested on suspicion of an attempted assassination of Donald Trump has been identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old construction worker with a long history of run-ins with police and the justice system, including a conviction for possession of a machine gun. Routh was arrested after Secret Service agents opened fire after seeing the barrel of an AK-47 assault rifle sticking out of the hedge surrounding Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. A witness saw him flee in a vehicle and photographed the car and its license plate, allowing police to intercept him shortly afterward. The vehicle, according to CNN, was registered in the name of Rouch’s daughter.
The suspect was born in 1966, according to CNN, and lived part of his life in North Carolina, where police records record a 2002 incident in which Routh barricaded himself for hours with a gun in a Greensboro, North Carolina, business while police surrounded him. The man was also convicted at the time of possession of the machine gun. Other incidents include possession of stolen property and a hit-and-run after a car crash.
North Carolina civil courts also have on file lawsuits by contractors and clients against a construction company he helped manage.
In addition to North Carolina, Routh has also lived in Hawaii, where in 2018 he created his own company, specializing in the construction of low-cost housing.
His social media accounts have been deleted since his arrest, but until then Routh had been a very prolific user. His often shocking posts paint a confusing picture. In them, he provides details such as that he voted for Donald Trump in 2016. In 2020, he maintained his support for the Republican. Other posts make it clear that he had since become deeply disenchanted with the former president.
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Since then, his political sympathies have been mixed: He has donated money to both Republican and Democratic politicians. He describes himself as an unaffiliated voter, but he participated in the Democratic primaries this year. At times he speaks warmly about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. At others, he yearns for a Republican tandem that combines the candidacies of Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, the oil and water of that party’s internal politics.
In other messages, he invites Kim Jong Un to visit Hawaii, or suggests that he could send thousands of Afghan soldiers “trained by NATO” to Haiti to solve security problems in the Caribbean country.
What appears to be his X account, the old Twitter account, contains a flood of messages condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and urging volunteers from around the world to enlist to fight for Kiev. Routh had apparently travelled to the occupied country in 2022 to take part in the war effort, although he lacked military experience. In 2023, he told The New York Times from Washington, which interviewed him by telephone for a report on American volunteers in Ukraine, that he wanted to recruit former Afghan soldiers fleeing the Taliban regime to fight for the attacked country.
His son Oran Routh described him as “a loving and caring father and an honest, hard-working man” in a statement to CNN. “I don’t know what happened in Florida, and I hope things have been blown out of proportion. The man I know wouldn’t do anything crazy, let alone violent. He’s a good father and a good person.”