The man who was arrested for apparently plotting to assassinate the former president Donald Trump at one of his golf courses in Florida last Sunday, told Iran in a self-published book last year that it was “free to assassinate Trump.”
His book, Ukraine’s unwinnable waralong with other social media posts and public statements by the suspect, Ryan W. Routhreflected his intense desire to fight for Ukraine. He also had a bad opinion of Trumpreferring to him as “silly”, “idiot” and “jester”.
“Democracy has rapidly dissolved before our eyes,” Routh wrote, describing the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as a catastrophe “perpetrated by Donald Trump and his anti-democratic gang.”
It is unknown how Routh –a nomadic activist and construction contractor with an extensive criminal record– got a semi-automatic riflebut when he knew where Trump would be this weekend he waited for him at the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Clubin West Palm Beach, Florida.
A review of public records and Routh’s writings, coupled with interviews with people who knew him, seems to indicate that he saw himself as an active and influential participant in crucial world events. He became estranged from some of his family and nearly became destitute.
Routh has been a champion of causes large and small since at least 1996, when he made campaign against graffiti in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he lived for decades. In July, via the social media platform X, he urged President Joe Biden already the vice president Kamala Harris to visit victims of the attack on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, writing that “Trump will never do anything for them.” “Show the world what compassion and humanity is,” he wrote on July 16.
In other social media posts, he tagged world leaders and celebrities as Elton John and Elon Muskoften providing their phone number and email, as if expecting a response.
A paladin with a criminal record
Routh appears to have spent much of his life in Greensboro, a city of about 300 thousand inhabitantsalthough in recent years he had lived in Hawaii.
In December 2002, he was convicted of a felony charge of “possession of a weapon of mass death and destruction,” according to the criminal complaint. That year, he was arrested in Greensboro after barricading himself in a building with an automatic weapon, according to a local newspaper and Tracy Fulka former police officer who stopped her car andI have a weapon in his truck before he fled. “He acted like he had some kind of mental health problem,” she recalled.
Routh has other criminal charges in North Carolinaincluding possession of a stolen vehiclepossession of stolen goods and various traffic violations. However, records show that he was a citizen interested in local causes.
In the 1990s, he appeared in the pages of a local newspaper as a family man who decorated his 1840s log cabin for Halloween, and a good Samaritan who won a “law enforcement Oscar” for chasing down a suspected rapist in his neighborhood.
In 1996, a Greensboro newspaper published a letter in which Routh denounced “the increasing amount of graffiti“in the city as a “constant reminder of the moral disintegration of our United States.”
And two decades ago, he supported his teenage son’s efforts to create a skate park in Guilford County, North Carolina, which includes Greensboro. Routh helped to teenagers to get a permit to use land owned by an oil company. One of the young men, Will Milsun, now 36, recalled in an interview Monday that Routh had taught the boys how to bend plywood to build ramps.
Milsun said Routh was an active father who wanted his three children to be self-sufficient and productive. Routh’s daughter ran a small T-shirt printing business. He wanted his son, who was a skateboarder, “to be more involved in doing things for himself and be productive,” Milsun said.
Milsun also worked alongside Routh’s son at his roofing company. He recalled that he had about 70 employees and three project managers. “I didn’t think it was really political,” Milsun said after hearing of Routh’s arrest.
He was a supporter of Trump but became disillusioned
His social media posts seem to indicate that In 2016 I was a Trump supporterbut that backfired in 2020. Records show he voted in North Carolina’s Democratic primary this year. Routh’s family did not respond to requests for comment.
This year, Routh and her daughter sold their “dilapidated” house in Greensboro for about 175 thousand dollarssaid David Hagaman, a real estate agent who helped his partner purchase the property.
In HawaiiRouth built storage units and tiny houses. Tomas Baggio, 32, praised Routh for quickly building an 11-square-meter home for himself and his wife in 2021. 14 thousand dollarsjust a fraction of what other contractors had quoted them. “If it weren’t for him, my wife and I wouldn’t have a place to live,” Baggio said.
Saili Levi, a vanilla farm owner, hired Routh to build what he called a small “shop on wheels” so he could more easily transport his produce to farmers’ markets. Levi found Routh to be a “scattered” man who seemed incapable of accepting responsibility.
Levi said Routh’s work was of poor quality and that after a verbal argument about it, he received an email filled with insults and references to Routh’s involvement in international conflicts.
“I spent five months in Ukraine last year,” Routh wrote, “and three months there this year, and two weeks in Washington and two weeks in Taiwan, volunteering and trying to supply thousands of Afghan soldiers to help win the war.”
“Maybe I’d be happier dead on the front than dealing with rich people in fancy cars while I drive old, broken-down vehicles and hope to keep my account in the black and hope to have food to eat,” he added. “At this rate, China and definitely Russia will win.”
Many of the 291 pages of Routh’s book are filled with graphically violent images and bloodshed of soldiers and civilians from various conflicts. In one rambling passage, Routh apologized to Iran for Trump’s dismantling of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal, then wrote that the country was “free to assassinate Trump.”
The Associated Press first reported on the book.
Willing to die for the war in Ukraine
Weeks after that Russia launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine In 2022, Routh posted on social media that I was willing to die for the cause and shortly after he left kyivthe capital of Ukraine.
Shortly after his arrival, he was told that due to his age and lack of military experience It would not be useful at the fronthe said last year. He then changed tack, hoping to recruit foreign fighters and organize memorials for those killed in combat.
Routh had created a website, Fight for Ukraine (Fight for Ukraine), in which he explained how to travel there and join the Ukrainian army as a foreign fighter. For almost a year, his main goal was to get hundreds of Afghan soldiers, who had fled after the collapse of their country’s government, to fight for Ukraine.
Routh had principles idealistsand sometimes illegal, when it came to carrying out their plans: giving money to officials, falsifying documents and using American military planes to fly Afghans to Poland.
But he was tenacious, according to a soldier who fought with Ukraine and who helped officially recruit foreign fighters for Ukraine’s Foreign Legion. The soldier, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss sensitive information, said Routh often offered to provide recruits from the Middle East in exchange for a commissionHe added that he was not aware of Routh bringing foreign fighters into Ukraine.
By the summer of 2023, Routh had grown frustrated with Ukraine’s demands and bureaucracy, and his fervor turned to disillusionment and contempt.
“The Ukraine thing started to get on his nerves,” said David M. Edwards Jr., a retired U.S. Army commando and founder of Project Exodus Relief, a group that advocates for the evacuation of U.S.-trained Afghan military personnel.
Edwards put Routh in touch with several Afghan fighters trying to leave Kabul, but he realized “something was not right,” he said. Ultimately, Routh abandoned the Afghan fighters halfway through their trip to Ukraine, with no support or money to return to Afghanistan, Edwards said.
But a former Afghan soldier, one of the first refugees Routh tried to help, stayed in touch until just days before Routh’s arrest in Florida. The soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said Routh was living in the back of his car. In a WhatsApp message, Routh sent him a photo of his trunk filled with clothes and sleeping supplies, with the message “my house.”
He also sent the soldier a photo of his bank account: he only had 68 dollars.
However, the soldier said that just days before he was arrested, Routh was still sending money to a friend, an Afghan commando who was unable to leave Kenya but was trying to reach Ukraine.
Selected article from The New York Times
Patricia Mazzei She is the Times’ Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff He is a correspondent in Ukraine and a former marine.
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. Born in Alabama, he currently resides in Durham, North Carolina.
Glenn Thrush covers the Justice Department and has also written about gun violence, civil rights, and conditions in U.S. jails and prisons.
