Donald Trump is blaming the presence of a gunman on his golf course on Sunday on “the rhetoric of Biden and Harris,” which the ex-president, whose rhetoric on “people eating dogs” in an Ohio city has led to numerous school and municipal-office closings due to bomb threats from his MAGA base, “is causing me to be shot at.”
“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,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Digital on Monday, in which he pointed to comments from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party presidential nominee, casting Trump as a “threat to democracy,” while telling Americans they are “unity” leaders.
“They are the opposite. These are people that want to destroy our country,” Trump told Fox News Digital, adding: “It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”
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Trump, playing a round of golf at his West Palm Beach golf club on Sunday, hours after his latest meltdown on social media, which included an all-caps post in which he declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” another in his series of swipes at the pop superstar, who formally declared her support for Harris after the ABC News debate last week, was whisked away by the Secret Service after shots were fired several hundred yards ahead of him.
What had happened was, agents securing the course came up on a sniper’s nest in which a former Greensboro, N.C.,-based roofing contractor, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, had set himself up with an AK-47 rifle, two backpacks with food and ceramic tiles and a GoPro.
According to court documents, Routh had been at the location since the early-morning hours on Sunday, with cell-phone records indicating that he had been at the location as early as 1:59 a.m.
Agents, after apparently seeing Routh point a rifle in the direction, fired at him, and Routh fled the scene, and was apprehended nearly an hour later on Interstate 95.
There’s no indication at this point that Routh had actually fired any shots.
This Routh fellow is a mishmash of political ideas and ideologies – a self-described Trump voter in 2016, he declared his allegiance for Tulsi Gabbard, then a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, where he had relocated in 2018, in the 2020 election cycle, and in the 2024 cycle had written online about his support for a Nikki Haley-Vivek Ramaswamy presidential ticket.
Routh also somehow managed to draw attention to himself for his supposed efforts to recruit foreign soldiers to help Ukraine fight the Russian invasion, earning himself interviews with the likes of The New York Times and Agence France-Presse, even as Ukrainian officials didn’t view whatever he claimed to be doing as being anywhere near “realistic.”
“The best way to describe his messages is, delusional ideas,” Oleksandr Shaguri, an officer in the Foreigners Coordination Department of the Ukraine Land Forces Command, told CNN.
If anything, Routh comes across as a disillusioned ex-Trumper – he was critical of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, which he called a “tremendous blunder,” and wrote in 2020 that he “hoped that (P)resident Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment (sic) and it seems you are getting worse and devolving. I will be glad when you gone (sic).”
Because Routh didn’t actually fire shots, he is facing, at this stage in the legal proceedings, two federal gun charges – possession of a firearm as a convicted felon, and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
The legal exposure is 15 years on the possession of a firearm by a felon charge, and five years on the serial number charge.
Not at all coincidentally, Trump’s atavistic “people eating pets” lie, Example 4,080 of Trump’s rhetoric leading to violence and threats of violence, has effectively shut down Springfield, Ohio, where even the Trump-loving Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has had enough.
“Any political leader that takes the national stage and has the national spotlight needs to understand the gravity of the words that they have for cities like ours, and what they say impacts our city. And we’ve had bomb threats the last two days. We’ve had personal threats the last two days, and it’s increasing, because the national stage is swirling this up. Springfield, Ohio, is caught in a political vortex, and it is a bit out of control. We are a wonderful city, a beautiful town. And for what it’s worth, your pets are safe in Springfield, Ohio.”
That was Rue, from an interview with Politico, in which he added, after being asked how he is planning to vote in the 2024 presidential election: “I’m just probably not going to answer that question. We have a big-hearted community, and we’re being smeared in a way we don’t deserve.”
Video: Donald Trump deflects again
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Chris Graham
