A book apparently written by Ryan Routh, the suspect behind the second assassination attempt of Donald Trump, reveals that he had an unusual death wish. Documents revealed by the U.S. District Court, per The Washington Post, provide details on Routh’s state of mind before he was caught by Secret Service agents on Trump’s golf course in Florida. A lot of the focus has been placed on a chilling handwritten letter he allegedly wrote, saying that his action was indeed an “assassination attempt” on Trump’s life and that he would offer a bounty for finishing the job. But a book he supposedly authored goes into some reasons why he went through with it in the first place.
Why did Ryan Routh allegedly attempt to assassinate Trump?
According to court documents, Ryan Routh apparently blamed himself and his country for electing Trump, apologizing to Iran to the point that he said that the country was “free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal.”
This is according to a passage in a book he allegedly penned in February 2023 called “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea, WWIII and the End of Humanity.” This document was found by FBI agents as part of the investigation.
Not only did Routh also call Trump “brainless,” but he believed that no one had “the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.”
In May 2018, Trump declared that the Unites States would be withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal enacted by Barack Obama, as reported by The New York Times. In the letter mentioned above, Routh writes that Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”
A NYT reporter also revealed that Routh was not in the best living situation, either, before his arrest by authorities.
On Monday, September 23, Routh was detained without bond until trial on federal gun charges. The judge cited the letter and other evidence in his decision to keep him in detention instead of him being released on $250,000 bail into the care of this sister, per Politico. Federal prosecutors have suggested that they are planning to file a more serious attempted-assassination charge against Routh.
