On Sunday Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested by the FBI as the suspect in the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Authorities suspect Routh, who owns a small construction company in Hawaii, was planning to attack the former President as he played a round of golf on Sunday, with US Secret Service agents firing at a man with a rifle in the bushes near the golf club. He was later apprehended after being stopped on a nearby highway.
According to US media Routh 58, in a report by The Associated Press news agency, he spent most of his life in North Carolina before moving to Kaaawa, Hawaii, in 2018. In Hawaii, he and his son ran a company specializing in building sheds, according to an archived version of the webpage for the business.
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In 2023, Routh was interviewed by The New York Times for an article about Americans volunteering to support the war effort in Ukraine.
During the interview, he revealed that he travelled to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion to recruit soldiers for the war “from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban,” Al Jazeera reported.
He also mentioned visiting Washington, DC to meet politicians to bolster support for Ukraine.
“We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan since it’s such a corrupt country,” he told the NYT.
Routh became animated when writing about Trump, and he frequently weighed in on US and global current events on social media.
In June 2020, Routh appeared to say that he had voted for Trump in 2016, but that he had since withdrawn his support of the former president.
“I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointed and it seems you are getting worse and devolving,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I will be glad when you gone.”
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Routh also mentioned Trump in his book, which appears on Amazon without a publisher listed, and is titled “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity.”
In that publication, he described the former US president’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 as a “tremendous blunder” that drove Tehran closer to Moscow, which it then supplied with drones that have caused devastation across Ukraine.
Routh’s eldest son, Oran, told CNN via text that Routh was “a loving and caring father, and honest hardworking man.”
“I don’t know what’s happened in Florida, and I hope things have just been blown out of proportion, because from the little I’ve heard it doesn’t sound like the man I know to do anything crazy, much less violent,” Oran wrote.
