Trump Assassination Attempt With GoPro in Hand
Ryan Wesley Routh tried to play Lee Harvey Oswald and Abraham Zapruder. He succeeded in neither role.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Sunday, the second such serious effort to murder the former president in 63 days, at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Florida, revealed a startling piece of evidence. The would-be assassin, after Secret Service bullets sent him scurrying, left at the scene, atop backpacks filled with ceramic tile and an AK-47, a GoPro camera that suggests he intended to record the murder of Donald Trump.
Mr. Routh … did not pull off his horrific stunt. So, he gets the three-name treatment and his 15 minutes of fame.
A GoPro — the item that, say, a skateboarder might mount to his helmet to capture a daring stunt — Routh brought to an alleged assassination attempt.
Hmmm.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw assessed that the wannabe assassin was “intent on filming what was going on.”
Assassins once tried to get away. Now they look to get caught.
Ramon Mercader, while he could not escape from Leon Trotsky’s bodyguards after bludgeoning Joseph Stalin’s bête noire with an ice ax in Mexico, refused to give up his identity for the remainder of his days.
Lee Harvey Oswald murdered a policeman to elude capture after murdering President John Kennedy. James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King’s assassin, went on the lam for two months during which time he traveled to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Portugal.
Even John Wilkes Booth, whose “sic semper tyrannis” shout perhaps served as the 1865 version of bringing a GoPro to a murder, broke his leg jumping from President Abraham Lincoln’s theater box, spent 12 days on the run, and died as the result of a gunshot wound after refusing to surrender.
Contra Booth, Mercader, Oswald, and Ray, Routh brought the mechanism that would implicate him in the murder. Mr. Routh allegedly sought to memorialize his moment of infamy, which many can no longer distinguish from fame, on video and perhaps the internet through a livestream. Yes, he fled in his Nissan. But the man brought a camera to a killing. Who does that?
Criminals, at least ones with a degree of intelligence, don disguises, brandish aliases, and establish safe houses. They do not, at least they did not until fairly recently, broadcast boastful pictures of drugs, guns, and money on the internet. That now happens a lot.
Crime always job-recruited among the dumb. Have those taking up the profession ever been this stupid?
Maybe some condition other than “stupidity” more precisely describes the phenomenon. “Vainglory” comes to mind.
Not just criminals but huge swaths of the citizenry feel compelled to narc on themselves, and for their boring, law-abiding activities. Pictures of the pork chop they ate for dinner posted to Instagram, dear diary-style recordings of their feelings about their childhood for show on YouTube, and journaling the mundane activities (“Just fed the dog”) of the day on X strongly indicate that we live more in an exhibitionist culture than a voyeuristic one.
Ryan Wesley Routh’s motivations, probably from his own mouth given what the presence of the camera tells us about him, will likely become known in the coming days. He donated 19 times to Democrats, with gifts earmarked on Act Blue to the likes of Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren, since 2019, so some type of political motivation given that he targeted a political figure seems likely.
But almost all of the people who donate to such figures do not attempt to harm their political enemies. At 58 and lacking success, Routh possibly looked at life’s checkmate, the moment one realizes that bad choices and fate no longer allowed for the fulfillment of dreams.
Did a loser believe that, in killing a man intensely admired by so many Americans, he would become a winner?
We live in a profoundly narcissistic culture in which celebrity rather than sainthood appears to many as the highest level of humanity. Without a heaven or a hell, the disturbed increasingly see immortality coming through the pulling off of horrific stunts of the like Mr. Routh allegedly attempted to undertake on Sunday.
Mr. Routh, once again a failure, did not pull off his horrific stunt. So, he gets the three-name treatment and his 15 minutes of fame. He does not win online immortality through his GoPro or a Lee Harvey Oswald line in the history books.
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