The extensive social media history of Routh, which included dozens of posts about recruiting soldiers for Ukraine and echoed the Democratic talking point that Trump is a threat to democracy, has led to speculation that he may have been instructed by some government force to assassinate the former president. However, others have argued the media’s incessant assertion that Trump is a threat to democracy and Ukraine is what led Routh to take drastic action.
By comparison, the first alleged Trump would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had virtually no online presence, with a brief appearance in a BlackRock commercial being the only detail internet sleuths have been able to uncover.
The issue with the first explanation, some critics would argue, is that Trump is hardly an enemy of the deep state.
He increased the military budget every year he was in office. He sent lethal arms to Ukraine that his predecessor Barack Obama wouldn’t. He has been a vocal and active supporter of Israel both while in office and since.
However, the oligarchy that controls the US empire is not necessarily a monolith, and assassinations are common among competing factions of a declining empire. During the Late Roman Empire, 32 of the 59 emperors were executed or assassinated, and another five committed suicide - three of them during or after attempts to overthrow them.
With a few exceptions when emperors were killed by their own soldiers, most were killed by other factions within the Roman oligarchy.
The Deep State
Aaron Good, who holds a PhD in political science and is the author of American Exception, Empire and the Deep State, looked at another much more recent historical comparison for insight into Sunday’s assassination attempt: the 1970s when the US establishment was similarly in crisis and factions conspired and fought to shape American politics for the decades to come.
After former US President Richard Nixon resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford replaced him, a man no one had voted for. Nixon’s previous vice president and running mate, Spiro Agnew, had already resigned, leading to the unelected ascension of Ford to the post.
“It was basically a shift to the neocon right of a Republican administration,” Good explained during his appearance on Radio Sputnik’s Political Misfits.
During his short-lived presidency, there were two failed assassination attempts against Ford within a month in 1975. The first was by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Manson family who said she decided to kill Ford to promote environmental issues. Her attempt failed when she forgot to load a bullet in the chamber of her gun.
Just 17 days later, Sara Jane Moore took two shots at Ford and missed with both. The women were sentenced to life in prison but were paroled in 2009 and 2007, respectively. Ford died from natural causes in 2006 at the age of 93.
A little more than a month after the second attempt, Ford massively shook up his cabinet in an event known as the Halloween Massacre. Henry Kissinger was replaced by Brent Scowcroft as national security adviser (retaining his position as secretary of state). William Colby was replaced by George H. W. Bush as CIA director. James R. Schlesinger was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense and Dick Cheney was picked to fill Rumsfeld's old position of chief of staff.
Ford-era Vice President Nelson Rockefeller removed himself from the ticket after facing pressure from within the party. Bob Dole was eventually picked to run with Ford in 1976.
Cheney and Rumsfeld would go on to become staples of the Republican party for decades after, while Dole would eventually be tapped as the Republican nominee in 1996. Bush became president in 1988, kicking off a political dynasty that still holds influence today.
“So my bigger point is who was behind those shootings, of attempted assassinations of Ford?” asked Good. “We still don't totally know who they would have been, but Ford was really moving. I mean, Ford as president was at the head of a real serious realignment of American politics to the right that almost nobody perceived at the time.”
Even more than the 1970s, the American empire is in a state of chaos. Comparing the United States to Rome is a cliche, but it has become one because the comparison is often apt. Like the Late Roman Empire, the US also finds itself in a seemingly unavoidable state of decline and now political assassinations are in vogue, just as they were in Rome.
“The US empire is in a state of chaos and it would seem to be kind of almost checkmated in multiple areas. And, this is a really frightening prospect because we wonder if it will lead to nuclear war,” Good noted.
Political Misfits co-host John Kiriakou, a former US intelligence agent who rose to prominence after he exposed the CIA torture campaign during the War on Terror, noted that the assassins he knew in the CIA would have been much more professional than the two failed Trump assassins.
“If the deep state or the Clintons or [US President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris wanted Trump dead, he would be in the ground and they wouldn't find some hapless felon, or some 18-year-old kid to do their dirty work for them, right?” Kiriakou argued. “I mean, I used to work with assassins at the CIA. They know how to kill people. It's what they do.”
Note: Crooks was 20, not 18 at the time of his death. Routh had a lengthy rap sheet.
But Good argues that not unlike 1975, the US deep state is not necessarily a singular entity.
“One way to think about this and to think about those people trying to shoot Gerald Ford is not to think of the deep state as typically a monolith and that the deep state really could be described as the oligarchic state” with multiple factions competing for power.
“And when there’s cracks in this consensus that they have, that’s when some of the crazier things happen. And so, if the entirety of the deep state or the American oligarchy was decided upon the fact that Trump needed to go, as was the case with John F. Kennedy it seemed… I think Trump would be gone,” Good continued, comparing it to competing factions in the television drama “Game of Thrones.”
While Trump has been anything but a revolutionary, Good speculates it is his lukewarm at best comments about the NATO proxy war in Ukraine that has led a faction of the oligarchy to move against him.
“The differences between what Trump represents and what Harris represents are not always clear. But, Trump does seem to have the idea that the Ukraine war is unwinnable and you should negotiate an end to it as soon as possible,” Good argued, adding, “there might not be pluralism in our politics because we don’t really get much choice. But the oligarchs, there’s some pluralism there. There’s some competing factions.”
Routh’s philosophies “dovetails so much with nefarious right-wing imperialist shenanigans that were involved in Ukraine that it’s reasonable to suspect that he was working on someone else’s behalf,” Good said, noting that “we don’t have any proof of that.”
In addition to his fanatical support of Ukraine, Routh’s social media posts showed him recruiting “human shields” to protect Taiwan from what he saw as aggression from the People’s Republic of China. In a self-published book, Routh called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and hoped that someone would assassinate Trump “for him.”
In his book, he also praises 2019 Venezuela coup leader Juan Guaido, the Free Syrian Army, and the Myanmar rebels, all forces known or suspected to be backed by the CIA and its cutouts.
The Media
Trump is not the only world leader to survive an assassination attempt by a fanatical supporter of Ukraine. In May, Juraj Cintula, an elderly poet from Western Slovakia, was arrested for allegedly shooting Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, hitting him three times. Fico was seriously wounded and spent 15 days in the hospital and recovered for 52 days before making his first public appearance in July.
Cintula later told police it was Fico’s opposition to providing weapons to Ukraine that drove him to take drastic action. Three weeks before the shooting, he was seen on camera at a pro-Ukraine, anti-Fico protest, during which he could be heard shouting, “long live Ukraine!”
Prior to the Fico assassination attempt, Slovak and European media painted Fico as a threat to freedom and democracy in Slovakia.
“Growing fears for Slovakian press freedom amid government crackdown,” reads the headline from an article published in The Guardian in January.
“The Slovak democracy must not be dismantled in silence” an article published by the European Broadcasting Union read. That article described Fico as “Putin-friendly and openly anti-journalist.”
Following the attempt against Fico’s life, Slovak politicians promised to tone down their rhetoric against the prime minister.
Trump, likewise, was painted as a threat to democracy and everything the United States represents.
In December, Biden said “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans [are] determined to destroy American democracy.” In January, he raised the temperature even more, claiming “[Trump is] willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.” By June, Biden posted on X that Trump is “a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
In July, less than 10 days before the first attempt on Trump’s life, Harris posted a Biden-Harris campaign ad on her Facebook* page. The ad heavily implied Trump would represent the end of the American experiment.
“Nearly 250 years ago, America was founded in defiance of a king, under the belief that no one is above the law, not even the president. Until now,” the bombastic ad claimed. “He’s already led an insurrection. And threatened to be a dictator on day one. Donald Trump can never hold this office again.”
Following the first assassination attempt against Trump, American politicians from both parties called for a “lowering of the temperature.” But, unlike Fico’s opposition, Democrats continued their attacks that Trump is a unique threat to democracy.
Just days later, Biden gave an interview doubling down on his assertion that Trump is a threat to democracy and blamed Trump for using heated rhetoric. “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he said,” Biden replied when asked if his previous comments could incite people to violence.
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded aggressively to a reporter’s suggestion that the White House’s assertion that Trump is a threat to democracy could have played a role in the two assassination attempts.
“It’s only been two days since somebody allegedly tried to kill Donald Trump again,” Fox News reporter Peter Doocy began. “And you’re here at the podium in the White House briefing room calling him a threat. How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the president and the vice president and you pick a different word to describe Trump other than ‘threat?’”
Jean-Pierre attempted to turn the question back onto Doocy, saying that asking such a question itself was the real threat.
“I completely disagree with the premise of your question,” she replied. “The question you’re asking is also incredibly dangerous in the way that you’re asking it because the American people are watching.”
“You also have to be careful on how you’re asking me these questions. People are watching,” she continued, mentioning the January 6, 2021 riots at least seven times to justify the White House’s public proclamations that Trump is a threat to America.
“That is why the president decided to come back. He believed that it is important to save the soul of America, of our nation. And he believed it was important that we continue to fight for our democracy, fight for our freedom.”
Social media posts by Routh that were uncovered and archived by internet users and journalists before being taken down included comments that “Democracy is on the ballot” and said Trump would turn Americans into slaves. Was he trying to "save the soul of America?" Did he think he was fighting for our democracy when he attacked Trump?
As mentioned above, he was also a fanatical supporter of Ukraine. According to his posts, confirmed by photos, he traveled to Kiev and set up an international recruitment center. It is unclear how successful it was – he claimed to have recruited hundreds of soldiers but may have exaggerated his own importance. Regardless, in an interview with a Newsweek reporter in Ukraine, he described the conflict as a fight between good and evil, like a “movie.” In his book, he even called for the US to initiate a nuclear war against Russia.
Evidently, Routh’s philosophy was rooted in the Ukrainian conflict. Biden asserted in July that Trump would let Russia do “whatever the hell they want” in Europe. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Trump was “encouraging invasions of our closest allies” and was endangering “American national security, global stability and our economy at home.”
Biden even went as far as to imply Trump will bow down to Putin.
“No other president in our history has bowed down to a Russian dictator,” the commander-in-chief said.
Does anyone seriously doubt Routh was listening? Jean-Pierre argues such questions are dangerous. But, when it came to violence that could be connected to Republican figures, even under the most flimsy links, Democrats have had no issue blaming Republican rhetoric.
After a racially-motivated mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, New York, killed 10 people, NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a segment titled, “What the shooting in Buffalo has to do with Fox News Host Tucker Carlson.”
NBC News ran an article titled, “Fox News’ Tucker Carlson under fresh scrutiny after Buffalo mass shooting.” An opinion article published by The Washington Post ran with the headline, “Tucker Carlson ducks his own potential link to the Buffalo shooting.”
These articles were based on the premise that Carlson promoted the so-called great replacement theory, the idea being that Democrats are welcoming immigrants to change voting demographics. The outlets claimed Carlson’s rhetoric inspired the shooter, despite the fact the shooter targeted Black Americans and not immigrants.
The shooter also released an 81-page manifesto that never mentioned Carlson and said he was inspired by discussions he had in the online 4chan forum, yet Carlson was still blamed.
After another racially-motivated shooting targeting immigrants left 23 people dead in a shopping center in El Paso, Texas, The Washington Post wrote a headline that read, “Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre.” US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Trump was “directly responsible” for the mass shooting, even though there was no indication the man was inspired by Trump.
When a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was targeted in a mass shooting that killed 38 people, that was blamed on hateful conservative rhetoric against the homosexual community. It was later revealed the shooter was Muslim and angry about the US bombing campaign in Iraq. He picked the nightclub at random, unaware of its typical clientele.
When a man shot up three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia, it was blamed by liberals on Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese rhetoric, but the shooter claimed he had a sex addiction and attacked the spas because he saw them as a source of sexual temptation.
Conversely, according to the White House, when a shooter who mirrored claims that Trump is a threat to democracy tries to kill Trump, his actions are unrelated to those claims. When the shooter is a fanatical supporter of Kiev and advocates for nuclear war against Russia, the president of the United States’ comments that Trump will bow down to “Russian dictators” are irrelevant. The White House claims it is “dangerous” to even suggest they might.
This writer does not believe that people are culpable for the actions of people who interpret their political speech as calls to violence, but the double standard could not be more clear. On Wednesday, US media reported that an explosive device was found near the location of a planned Trump rally.
The Kiev Connection
In May, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov bragged openly in an interview about assassinations of Russian public figures, saying that Ukraine already “got to” many of them. Two months later, in July, Budanov further claimed that Ukraine had prepared assassination attempts against Putin.
Routh claimed to have regular communications with the Ukrainian government and it was confirmed on Tuesday by The New York Times that he met with several influential US lawmakers to lobby for more aid to Ukraine.
Is it unreasonable to question if Budanov or someone under him may have recruited Routh? It was reported on Wednesday that Routh was essentially homeless when he was in Kiev, and lived on military bases and barracks.
Are we to believe that he found the money to fly to his home in Hawaii, get his gun, fly back to the mainland of the United States with it somehow, and then travel to Florida to attack Trump? Or, are we to believe that this recently homeless man flew straight to Florida from Kiev and purchased the weapon there? With what money?
Those questions are unlikely to be answered by official sources.
“Ultimately, if it comes down to it, like in the case of the John Kennedy assassination, they’ll just withhold the documents in a way that's so obviously suspicious,” Good explained.
If Routh was ordered to take his actions by state actors, either in Washington or Kiev, the heated rhetoric and Routh’s regurgitation of it provides a convenient cover story for whoever was really behind it.
“The far-right alliances that we made in Ukraine could definitely cause some ‘blowback,’ meaning negative consequences on US soil or European soil,” explained Good. “[But] it also provides a kind of deniability because you can say, if this guy was some sort of operative, then it can always be blamed on blowback… It creates a certain realm of unaccountability, plausible deniability.”
That plausible deniability allows the true perpetrators to take risks on attempts that have a low chance of success. “You have these lone nut-types go out and do this and they’re not likely to succeed, but if they do, then it’s kind of deniable,” Good added.
At press time, Routh has only been charged on gun violations, but more charges are expected.
*Facebook is owned by Meta, which has been banned in Russia due to extremist activities