Donald Trump has just survived a second assassination attempt. Although many questions are waiting to be answered, the biggest part of it is that the suspect was escorted into custody alive. An important aspect of the would-be assassin’s past is his vehement support of Ukraine. There is evidence to suggest it was indeed a major factor in the perpetrator’s motivation.
On 15 September, the US bookies should have unveiled the betting odds for Donald Trump actually making it to Election Day in one piece as the former president survived the second attempt on his life.
Thankfully, this time the gunman never got to fire a gunshot, though. By the looks of it, he planned on killing Trump at his private golf course, Trump International Golf Club, West Palm Beach, lurking nearby with an AK-47-style rifle. Some reports suggest, however, the authorities recovered an SKS-style semi-automatic rifle.
Luckily for Trump, the would-be shooter was spotted by a Secret Service agent just in time to thwart the attack. According to Fox News, the operative saw ‘the muzzle of his AK-47 pointing through a chain-link fence one hole ahead of where Trump was playing’. The Secret Service opened fire on the perpetrator’s direction but missed him, and those were the gunshots heard by the visitors, including Trump himself.
The sniper dumped the weapon and fled the course in his SUV when he was spotted by an eyewitness. He took pictures of the vehicle and the licence plates and submitted them to the local sheriff. The law enforcement then chased down the suspect and took him into custody alive, which may be bad news for some politicians.
In what was a rare turn of events for such high-profile crimes, Russian connections were almost immediately ruled out. Even though the presumed weapon was a Soviet design, according to The Washington Post, ‘the SKS is a mainstay at shops and gun shows in the United States’.
Conversely, the gunman’s ties to Ukraine are undeniable to the point where even the Democratic-leaning media cannot ignore it. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, is not just a prolific criminal with a solid rap sheet but an avid Ukraine supporter too.
He would take to social media to suggest that ‘we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground’ and even tried to join the Ukraine Armed Forces as a volunteer. After the 58-year-old’s application was spurned citing his age, he turned to recruiting the volunteers to fight on the Ukrainian side that included both the US nationals and the former Afghan troopers who had fled Taliban. Routh also featured in a video ad for the infamous Azov Brigade and would willingly grant interviews. He went on to self-publish a book entitled Ukraine’s Unwinnable War.
In all likelihood, he concluded one of the reasons the war could not be won was because of Donald Trump and decided to eliminate that obstacle.
Some US-based media outlets keep insisting that, if re-elected, the GOP nominee will try to put an end to the war in Eastern Europe and offer a peace deal that will see Ukraine surrender all of the territories claimed by Moscow. By stopping the conflict, he will reportedly shift the government’s focus to opposing China. Since Ryan Wesley Routh was quoted as saying, ‘This conflict is definitely black and white’, he must have thought Trump sided with the former, and set out to salvage the cause he had been investing so much time and effort in.
Sure enough, the next logical step in the media campaign may well be an attempt to shrug off the gunman’s ties to the Ukraine war and the incendiary Democratic rhetoric. After all, Ryan Wesley Routh is just one out of many radical Democratic supporters who have been brainwashed into hating Trump by the liberal media and politicians alike. Following the assassination bid, Kamala Harris alongside the other Democratic heavy-hitters were quick to assure they were glad Trump was doing okay and added that ‘there is no place for political violence in our country’.
It is likely that the suspect will have to undergo the psychiatric evaluation that may deem him unfit to stand trial. After that, the media may turn a blind eye to the story and choose to avoid any discussion of the unprecedented hate-mongering campaign targeting Trump as well as the toxicity of the Ukraine war debate the American public was plunged into.
There is now a growing number of Americans advocating the Ukraine spending cuts. Some even claim the military aid that costs the US a lot of taxpayer money, weapons and personnel and has now imperilled the presidential candidate’s life should be cold-turkeyed altogether.
On the other hand, the Republicans may want to explore a number of avenues in a bid to make the foiled assassination attempt matter.
First, they may argue it was all part of a larger government plot. ‘The State of Florida will be conducting its own investigation regarding the attempted assassination at Trump International Golf Club. The people deserve the truth about the would be assassin and how he was able to get within 500 yards of the former president and current GOP nominee,’ Governor Ron Desantis wrote in his post on X.
The most troubling part of what happened is not even the fact the perpetrator was allowed to set up a lair near the former president’s golf course but the Secret Service actually letting him off the hook.
Secondly, the GOP politicians will be torching the Dems over running a large-scale hate campaign and almost urging the public to take a shot at the Republican nominee’s life as they fear being politically outmatched by Trump. Therefore, they belong in a prison facility rather than the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, the candidate himself is already leveraging the botched attempt to score points with his potential electorate and pride himself on his resilience among the undecided voters. ‘Nothing will slow me down. I will never surrender!’, Trump posted to X in the wake of what happened.