‘I Met Trump’s Would-Be Assassin.’

Barely two months after a bullet came millimeters from taking Donald Trump’s life at a rally in Pennsylvania, the Secret Service spotted a gunman hiding in the bushes at his golf club in West Palm Beach and opened fire. The man fled and was later detained. Trump was unharmed. “Nothing will slow me down,” he said in an email to supporters. 

Law enforcement said they did not know if the suspect had fired a shot Sunday, but that he had an “AK-style” rifle with a scope and was about 400 yards from the former president. “With a rifle and a scope like that, that’s not a long distance,” said Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw. Law enforcement also identified the suspect in custody. 

Ryan Routh is not a name that was familiar to most Americans when he was identified yesterday as the suspected would-be assassin of Donald Trump. But when it was made public, my colleague Tanya Lukyanova got a call from someone she used to work with. Why? Because Tanya had interviewed Routh last year over video for a piece she reported for Semafor on American-trained Afghan commandos who wanted to fight for Ukraine. 

Routh had started something called the International Volunteer Center, which purported to help foreigners seeking to assist Ukraine’s war effort. He spoke to Tanya about his frustration with Kiev over how it handled foreign fighters. “Ukraine is very often hard to work with,” he told Tanya. “Many foreign soldiers leave after a week in Ukraine or must move from unit to unit to find a place they are respected and appreciated.” 

“He was this zealous guy, an American who really wanted to volunteer to help Ukraine,” says Tanya of Routh, whom she spoke to for about twenty minutes over video while he was perched outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., last summer. 

“You can tell right away that he’s crazy, but I think people thought, ‘Who cares? He’s supporting the right cause,’ ” said Tanya. “Everyone knew him as a little zealous, a bit much. But nobody really cared about that ‘too much’ because he was on the side of good. He was helping Ukraine.” 

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw holds a photograph, during a press conference, of the rifle and other items found near where the suspect was discovered. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Back then, “he was just a harmless loon, who didn’t do anything too crazy.” (Though not totally harmless: records indicate a long list of run-ins with the law in North Carolina, including a 2002 conviction for possessing a fully automatic machine gun.)

But Routh hardly seemed a career criminal to Tanya. “He reminds me of Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, if I am completely honest,” said Tanya, referring to the Coen Brothers’ black comedy and its protagonist—a bumbling, dim-witted personal trainer who attempts to blackmail a CIA analyst. “A guy who is overzealous and goes a little overboard on the conspiratorial side of things. But until he does something terribly wrong, nobody quite thinks of him that way. 

“Ryan Routh wasn’t a story, until he allegedly went to Trump’s golf course with a gun.”

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. 

This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today: