I came across this post today on a site called Public Notice. I don't know much about it except that Aaron Rupar works there. In any case, this article is pushing a line I've seen a lot in the last week. It's titled "Ryan Routh is the fruit of conspiracy-addled gun culture" but the subhead is really the key. It reads, "MAGA's effort to blame Democratic rhetoric is absurd." It opens with a shrug.
It’s weird to say this, but the latest Trump assassination attempt is not really that interesting.
Followed by the necessary caveats:
That’s not to condone what happened nor to make light of it. Rather, it’s that people trying to shoot at Trump is the unfortunate consequence of a society where guns are far easier to get than, say, mental health treatment.
Rather than grapple with that, the Trump campaign is blaming the Harris/Walz campaign for “inflammatory” rhetoric. Yes, the same campaign that has basically forced an entire Ohio city to close its schools and city buildings for multiple days running because they’re receiving so many bomb threats thanks to the racist lies Trump and Vance keep spewing.
This is the same thing the NY Times was arguing yesterday, i.e. Trump is seizing on the assassination attempts against him. There are lots of problems with this argument but one of the most obvious is that would-be assassin Ryan Routh was pretty clearly was acting on left-wing impulses at the time he was caught. Here's how Public Information dismisses that. [emphasis added]
Routh went to Ukraine to try to fight on behalf of that country after the Russian invasion. His efforts appear to have come to naught, with a source close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling ABC that Routh didn’t pass the psychological screening required to join the International Legion. Regardless, right-wingers think Routh’s affinity for Ukraine is slam-dunk evidence of his leftish leanings, but he voted for Trump in 2016, then pivoted to backing Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, then fantasized about a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy ticket in 2024. But he’s also praised Biden and Harris. He’s a conspiracy theorist when it comes to China and covid. He wrote a lengthy self-published book, mostly about Ukraine, and in it told Iran that they were free to assassinate Trump.
This is not someone operating with a coherent political philosophy.
Granted, Routh seems a bit unhinged, which is exactly the sort of person you'd expect to attempt a political assassination, but I don't think his motives seem all that difficult to discern. It's true that Routh voted for Trump in 2016 and has mentioned other candidates along the way, but evidence suggests he had turned strongly against Trump and was aligned with Democrats.
Public Notice has simply omitted a bunch of information that doesn't fit their agenda. I'm taking this from PolitiFact, not usually considered a right-leaning site.
Charlie Collicutt, elections director for Guilford County in North Carolina, told PolitiFact that a person with Routh’s name registered in 1988 as a Democrat and changed to unaffiliated in 2002.
"He’s been unaffiliated since then," Collicutt said...
North Carolina State Board of Elections’ website shows that Routh voted in the March Democratic primary...
The Federal Election Commission website shows that a man named Ryan Routh in Kaaawa in 2019 and 2020 donated 19 times ranging from $1 to $25 for a total of about $140 to ActBlue, a political action committee that supports Democratic candidates. Some of the donations were earmarked for Democratic presidential primary candidates including Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and Tom Steyer.
So he was a Democrat decades ago. He donated to Democrats in 2019 and 2020 and he voted in the Democratic Primary this year. But there's more. In 2023 he self-published a book in which he apologized for voting for Trump and suggested Iran should assassinate the former president. "Iran I apologize. You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal," he wrote. And as recently as July he was offering Kamala Harris campaign advice on showing compassion. Prior to Harris taking over the campaign, he was clearly supporting Biden:
So, yes, he's not a perfectly sensible person but he does seem to be clearly anti-Trump and pro-Democrat prior to the assassination attempt. That's backed up by what Routh's adult son told the Daily Mail.
He said his father hates Trump as 'every reasonable person does.
‘I don't like Trump either,’ the son added.
Routh did have a coherent political philosophy, one that has become the central animating principle of the entire Democratic party: He hatred Trump. The fact that he was getting 190,500 views on his Trump-hating posts just a few months ago suggests he'd found his people. He was in the midst of the Democratic Party where there are literally thousands of people saying similar things and worse on social media every day. We can argue about whether this tone is coming down from the top but it's clearly coming from within the party.
