The alarm was raised around 1.30pm on Sunday. Trump was playing golf at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was between the fifth and sixth holes when a Secret Service agent ahead of him spotted the barrel of a rifle sticking out of the fence and opened fire, scaring off an armed man. His colleagues, meanwhile, got Trump to safety: they pounced on him and covered him, also protected by snipers with tripods. The man was later arrested.
Thus, just over two months after the shooting at the Butler rally (it was July 13), Donald Trump escaped a new attack. This time the gunman didn’t have time to shoot, but the news still shocked America 50 days before the presidential vote on November 5.
Man Arrested Near Trump’s Golf Course Is Ryan Wesley Routh58. He has a 20-year long criminal record, large and small, and was arrested in 2002 in North Carolina when he was 36 for possession of a machine gun, which police then, in the wake of the events of September 11, classified as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Routh’s posts on the social media site X revealed a penchant for violent rhetoric in the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. “I am willing to fly to Krakow and go to the border of Ukraine to volunteer, fight and die,” he wrote. He was interviewed by The New York Times in 2023 for a story about Americans volunteering to help the war effort in Ukraine. Routh, who had no military experience, said he went to the country after Russia invaded and wanted to recruit Afghans.
As Routh’s past is delved into, controversy rages over the efficiency of the Secret Service, the agency of the United States federal government controlled by the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting US Presidents, their families and heads of state visiting the United States.
“The fact that a gunman was able to bring a semiautomatic rifle with a telescopic sight so close to the former president underscored how many pressing problems remain unsolved and how difficult it is for the Secret Service to respond to an unpredictable and increasingly violent political climate,” writes the New York Times.
Michael Matranga, a former Secret Service agent who protected President Barack Obama, said the Secret Service should “seriously consider giving former President Trump the same or equal package as the president of the United States” and called the incidents “unprecedented.” Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle praised the agents’ actions but vowed to subject the agency’s already-struggling leaders to intense questioning over whether the suspect was able to position himself close to the former president.
President Biden has stated that the Secret Service must be put in a position to work at its best and has asked Congress to respond adequately to the needs of the agency. Trump, meanwhile, has not changed his agenda and continues his election campaign.
