A US federal court has sentenced Ryan Wesley Routh to life in prison for attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf resort in 2024. Prosecutors said Routh, who was reportedly obsessed with the Ukraine conflict, had stalked the then-US presidential candidate while armed with a rifle.
US District Judge Aileen M. Cannon in Fort Pierce, Florida, imposed a sentence of life plus 84 months following Routh’s conviction by a federal jury on all five counts in the indictment, the Justice Department said on Wednesday. The charges included attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, assault on a federal officer, and multiple firearms offenses.
“Ryan Routh’s heinous attempted assassination of President Trump was not only an attack on our president – it was a direct assault against our entire democratic system,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
Prosecutors said Routh, 59, conducted surveillance and waited for hours in dense bushes outside Trump’s West Palm Beach resort while positioning a scoped semi-automatic rifle through a fence line. A Secret Service agent spotted the weapon and opened fire, forcing Routh to flee before Trump came into view. He was later arrested on a nearby highway.
During his trial, Routh chose for a time to represent himself, delivering rambling courtroom statements – which mentioned Adolf Hitler, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Russian President Vladimir Putin – before a judge curtailed them. After the jury returned guilty verdicts, he attempted to stab himself with a pen.
Prior to his assassination attempt, Routh had been fixated on the Ukraine conflict. Multiple outlets reported that he traveled to the country and sought to recruit foreign Afghans, who had fled the Taliban, for the Ukrainian cause. He also publicly advocated the assassination of Putin.
The New York Times pointed to his “penchant for violent rhetoric,” citing an X post by Routh in which he said he was willing to “go to the border of Ukraine to volunteer and fight and die.”
Routh stalked Trump several weeks after the US president was targeted in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally, grazing Trump’s ear with a bullet and killing one spectator before being shot dead by a Secret Service detail.
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