In the weeks leading up to the second attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, Democrats increasingly sounded the alarm that Mr. Trump is the nation’s biggest threat to democracy and must be stopped from winning another White House term.
Republicans, including the former president, said their vitriol inspired Trump-hater Ryan Routh to travel to West Palm Beach. Law enforcement agents say he hid in the bushes for hours with a scoped AK-47 and then pointed the weapon toward the golf course where Mr. Trump and guests were playing.
“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Mr. Trump said of the gunman in an interview Monday with Fox News Digital. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Mr. Routh, who fled the scene without taking any shots after a Secret Service agent fired at him, hasn’t revealed a motive and his actions are under investigation, the FBI said.
Democrats dismissed the idea that their language is provoking assassination attempts against Mr. Trump.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons, Delaware Democrat and co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign.
SEE ALSO: Ryan Routh, attempted Trump assassin, sat outside Florida golf course for 12 hours
Mr. Routh authored a book in 2023 that called for Mr. Trump’s assassination and expressed his deep regret for voting for him in 2016. Mr. Routh also adopted the same rhetoric used repeatedly by Democrats against the former president. They accuse him of threatening democracy and hatching plans to act as a dictator who will destroy the nation’s freedoms if he wins the White House again.
“Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” Ms. Harris posted in early April on her social media sites.
In an April 22 post on X directed at President Biden’s official account, Mr. Routh said the then-Biden-Harris campaign “should be called … Keep America democratic and free,” while Mr. Trump’s campaign, he said, should be called “make Americans slaves again master.”
Mr. Routh, in the same post, said, “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.”
Mr. Routh was charged with two felony firearms violations Monday in a West Palm Beach federal courtroom. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. said Mr. Routh was hiding in the trees near the sixth hole at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, where he had been staked out for hours. A Secret Service agent moving ahead of Mr. Trump and his party spotted the muzzle of Mr. Routh’s AK-47 poking through the tree line and shot at him. Mr. Routh fled without firing his weapon and did not have a line of sight on the former president, Mr. Rowe said.
The Trump campaign sought to pin the second attempt on his life squarely on the shoulders of his political opponents.
SEE ALSO: Investigators ‘laser-focused’ on whether Trump gunman acted alone, Florida sheriff says
It listed dozens of instances in which Democrats characterized Mr. Trump as a threat who must be stopped.
One example cites Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Ms. Harris’ running mate. On July 28, two weeks after Mr. Trump was grazed by a bullet in the Butler assassination attempt, Mr. Walz called him a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy” who would “put people’s lives in danger.”
Democrats, the Trump-Vance campaign said in a statement, “used increasingly incendiary rhetoric against President Trump in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the two assassination attempts.”
Some Democrats shrugged off the assassination attempt. Other Democrats and members of the news media said Mr. Trump may have instigated it with his own rhetoric, particularly claims by Mr. Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing and eating animals taken off the street, including geese and cats.
“They are eating the pets of the people who live there,” Mr. Trump said in comments during the Sept. 10 presidential debate.
Since then, several bomb threats have been called into Springfield schools and public office buildings, and the FBI is investigating threats aimed at Haitians living there. Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of anti-immigrant fearmongering.
In a post on X, Mr. Trump railed against Democrats for their immigration policies, for their rhetoric against him and for what he characterized as lies and political lawfare in the form of four criminal prosecutions.
“Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Mr. Trump said.
In a floor speech delivered Monday in the Senate, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who recently warned that Mr. Trump “threatens American democracy,” toned down his attacks.
“There is no place in America for political violence at any time,” Mr. Schumer said. He called on Congress to ensure the Secret Service has adequate resources.
The agency, along with the FBI, did not provide many fresh details about the attempted assassin, his motives or whether he would be charged with trying to kill the former president.
Mr. Routh’s social media, now scrubbed, showed his progression from a Trump supporter in 2016 to a staunch opponent of the former president and backer of the Harris-Walz ticket.
He has had extensive run-ins with law enforcement and felony convictions since 2002.
Mr. Routh, who lives in Hawaii, spent the past several years obsessed with Ukraine’s war against invading Russia, begging for international help and attempting to attract mercenaries from Afghanistan and other countries to help defend the country against President Vladimir Putin’s forces.
In his self-published 2023 book, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War,” Mr. Routh encouraged the Iranians to assassinate Mr. Trump.
He called Mr. Trump “brainless” and lamented voting for him in 2016. He referenced Mr. Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.
“You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal,” Mr. Routh wrote. “No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.”
Mr. Trump has campaigned on quickly ending or settling the war between Ukraine and Russia, which has killed millions of people and cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid.
During the Sept. 10 debate, ABC moderators pitched Mr. Trump’s position as a question of whose side he was on by asking, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”
Ms. Harris, moments later, said, “I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up.”
If Mr. Trump were president, she said, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said Mr. Trump is wrong to blame Democrats for the assassination attempt.
“I don’t think he’s pointing to anything that suggests there is any basis for that,” Mr. Kaine said. “But it’s a good indication everybody, including President Trump, let’s reduce some of the rhetoric.”
• Kerry Picket contributed to this report.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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