Turkey Links

Another Trump assassination attempt bulletin

Last Sunday some turkey (“a stupid, foolish, or inept person”) named Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested in West Palm Beach, Florida, after an alleged assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump on the links of his golf club—the second such attempt on Trump this year. Secret Service agents fired (first, this time) on the alleged attempted assassin after Trump had finished the course’s fifth hole—a par three, at which neither of them got a shot. Routh has a long criminal history (including a 2002 charge for possessing a “weapon of mass destruction”: a machine gun) and more recent political interests: once a supporter of Trump, he became a vocal critic following the 6 January 2021 entrapment at the U.S. Capitol, thereafter donating to Democratic causes and promoting support for Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Product of stable diffusion (“Turkey aims fully automatic gun at an eagle on a golf course.”)

The Dissident published a profile of Routh the next day—or some might call it a review of his Ukraine’s Unwinnable War (2023), which has since been removed from Amazon. (Unless that link is working again.) As one would expect from the author of a book with a title like that, Routh had a strong ideological connection to the Ukraine-Russia war. After volunteering to fight in Ukraine and being rejected by the army for his age and inexperience—maybe that’s why he decided to try taking a shot at Trump: “I’ll show them!”—he remained in the country to recruit for Ukraine’s foreign volunteer Georgian Legion. Meanwhile, his book reveals his obsession with the war, his disdain for Russia, and his frustration with Ukraine’s lack of enthusiasm for foreign fighters like himself. He advocates for compulsory military drafts in Ukraine and other extreme measures to defeat Russia, including advocating for nuclear strikes.

In The Dissident’s analysis, Routh’s extreme views on the war and dissatisfaction with Western inaction seemingly motivated the assassination attempt, as he feared Trump might end U.S. support for Ukraine. At the time of that analysis’ publication, the media had mostly ignored Routh’s pro-war motivations and his previous involvement in Ukraine.

A few hours later, The Duran released its own coverage of this latest assassination attempt from a geopolitical perspective.

Here, Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris first express (at ~1:18) their concern over the lack of significant attention from the political class, media, and Western world regarding the two assassination attempts on a potential future U.S. president within a short span of time during an election cycle. They argue that this should be ringing alarm bells but does not seem to be treated as a dominant or major story.

Speculating on the potential motives behind the second attempt, the hosts hypothesize (at ~4:33) a link with the prevalent rhetoric and narrative surrounding Ukraine’s conflict with Russia, portraying it as an existential battle for the future of Ukraine, the West, democracy, and human civilization. The hosts opine that this rhetoric has attracted and potentially radicalized some individuals, leading them to view any Trump’s peace proposals as a betrayal of Ukraine—and, apparently, to deem him worthy of assassination for them. They also suggest (at ~19:29) that this incident, given Routh’s obsession with supporting Ukraine, may further alienate Trump’s supporters against continued U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict, viewing it as a threat to domestic political stability and the electoral process.

But others seem to think more than just a desire to see the war in Ukraine continue motivated Routh to attempt Trump’s assassination: among them Ian Carroll—featured in our mid-year dispatch—who has been parsing as much of Routh’s social media presence as the internet has been able to archive before the FBI asked Big Tech to take it down. Carroll notes that Routh’s Twitter activity appears to be highly automated, and that he only followed 60 people on the platform, with one of the last people he followed being a former CIA employee, whom Carroll speculates could have been Routh’s “handler” or contact, with the relationship between their social media accounts potentially indicating his ties to intelligence agencies.

From here, the researcher then delves into Routh’s background, noting that he has connections to institutions like Johns Hopkins University, which has ties to the CIA and military-industrial complex, as well as the Rand Corporation and LMI Org—“military-industrial complex think tanks.” After mentioning Routh’s criminal record, including his aforementioned charge in 2002 for possessing a weapon of mass destruction, Carroll goes on to discuss his alleged recruitment activities in Ukraine, where he was reportedly posting on his Facebook page about recruiting hundreds of civilians to fight for Ukraine. Certainly that’s unusual for a “random citizen from Hawaii,” fueling further speculation about the attempted assassin’s potential ties to intelligence agencies or military operations. In the end, Carroll concludes, “the war machine desperately needs the wars to escalate, and they’re not down with the MAGA folks shutting down the wars, and they are ready to kill people […] in order to perpetuate those wars.”

Such an analysis accords well with that of Niko House—whom we’ve featured in bulletins from both July and August—who believes that Routh’s criminal history must guarantee that he’d been on the radar of the federal government (especially given the treatment most felons have come to expect in the U.S., raising questions about how he was able to evade close observation by law enforcement—especially given his recent attempts to recruit mercenaries to fight for a foreign government in the U.S.’s proxy war. Given that Trump wants nothing to do with the situation in Ukraine and does not like NATO, House points out (at ~2:34) the strategic policies implemented to “Trump-proof” aid from the U.S. to Ukraine, implying that there may be a connection between these factors and the assassination attempt to avoid the consequences of a potential second Trump presidency.

Similar to The Duran’s coverage above, House also expresses concerns (at ~3:17) about the mainstream media’s lack of coverage on this incident, despite the seemingly suspicious circumstances surrounding it. Of course, in the two days since House released his coverage, more about Routh has trickled in through the mainstream establishment: for example, while working with the International Volunteer Center to recruit foreign fighters, Routh faced skepticism from both Ukrainian authorities and his own allies, which apparently generated the frustration that The Dissident mentioned above. His dedication led him to try lobbying in Washington, hoping to push U.S. leadership to pressure Ukraine into using the soldiers he recruited. With Routh remembered as well-meaning but increasingly obsessive, his ideas were dismissed as delusional, and his attempted assassination of Trump has forced Ukrainian officials, however, to publicly deny any connection, emphasizing that Routh has no ties to the country’s military or government.

Certainly the geopolitical context of Routh’s personal history makes his story tricky to cover or comment on, both for the establishment media and for Western vassals—for imperialist proxies in general, I suppose. After all, in the same dispatch from last October to which we linked above while describing the events of 6 January 2021 as “entrapment,” we quoted the white-supremacist antisemite Christopher Pohlhaus saying at a neo-Nazi rally (also in Florida), “I think Biden’s better than Trump because he sends rockets to Ukraine.”

Maybe it sounds strange to some that both Pohlhaus the neo-Nazi and Routh the Ukraine supporter should express (in their own ways) a disinclination toward Trump—or, at least, that only Routh would so far act on it. But keep in mind too that our aforementioned dispatch also discussed then the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—initially created by the CIA to promote U.S. interests during the Cold War, and which has continued since then to advance the neoconservative agendas—and its role in Ukraine before the Maidan uprising of 2014, including pressuring the country’s then-President Yanukovych to accept trade agreements with the EU before NED-supported projects cultivated the protests that led to his ousting. Those protests involved far-right paramilitary groups like the Azov Regiment—which (wouldn’t you know it?) showed Routh in one of its promotional videos from May 2022.

(As an aside, Matthew Thomas Crooks—the first attempted Trump assassin—appeared in a BlackRock commercial as a high school student, and Routh was initially misreported as appearing in another commercial from the same company. Wouldn’t that have been something?! Especially since BlackRock has been consulting Ukraine since November 2022, and two of its former executives designed the economic policies of Trump’s opponent.)

For that reason, it seems to us that the recent assassination attempt provides some potential evidence for the arguments of Rainer Shea and Jesse Wingert mentioned in our last bulletin: first, that leftist groups focused on armed radicalism are unwittingly serving the interests of (if not manipulated outright by) intelligence agencies, and only hinder true revolutionary progress; and, second, that these obstructive pan-leftist counter-gangs pose a greater threat to an anti-imperialist mass movement than their reactionary counterparts. Of course, we couldn’t go so far as to cast Trump himself as an anti-imperialist or as the leader of such a movement: however, he’s the candidate who has pledged to cut funding for Ukraine and claims to have plans to end the war even before taking office, while his opponent—who has given only as of yesterday the same number of interviews as her rival has survived assassination attempts—promises that she “will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Presumably both she and Routh would have also stood by the UK’s Boris Johnson in April 2022 when he flew to Kiev and persuaded Zelensky not to sign the peace deal that Ukraine and Russia had reached in Turkey.

This latest attempt on Trump’s life highlights the increasingly complex intersection of U.S. foreign policy, intelligence operations, and domestic politics. Routh’s radicalized support for Ukraine demonstrates how geopolitical narratives can drive individuals to extreme actions. The incident also raises questions about media and governmental responses, particularly regarding how political motivations are presented or ignored—not to mention how the establishment media’s presentation of the Russia-Ukraine war might incite acts of extremism. As Trump remains a polarizing figure, his stance against U.S. involvement in Ukraine has become a focal point for both support and opposition, further complicating the national conversation on foreign intervention and domestic stability.

While that conversation continues, we here at Radio Free Pizza will keep doing our best to amplify those voices who understand that imperialism abroad only produces instability at home—where (as best we can tell) some want to kill presidential candidates for not being pro-war enough. With any luck, their voices can help relax the domestic political tension: anyway, that sounds like a good start.