President Trump was in grave danger of assassination as he played the fifth hole of The Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach yesterday. Ryan Wesley Routh was lying in wait. He was armed with an AK-style rifle and scope to take Trump out. He had a GoPro camera to stream or film the planned shooting and ceramic body armor plates to protect him.
Having set up a sniper’s nest in the bushes along the chain link fence, Routh was within a few minutes of shooting Trump and within 300 hundred to 500 hundred yards of his target. An alert Secret Service agent working a hole or two ahead of Trump spotted Routh’s weapon emerging through through the fence. The agent opened fire. According to the New York Post, we have yet to learn if Routh got off any shots.
Observed by an unidentified citizen, Routh took off in a black Nissan SUV and headed north on I-95. With the help of identifying information provided in a photo snapped by the citizen, Routh was apprehended by law enforcement authorities 41 miles north of the scene. The New York Post and Daily Mail have good roundups of the public story as of this morning.
Routh’s attempted assassination of of Trump stands as the second such attempt in two months. Routh is a bad actor who was armed not only with the rifle, but with the full panoply of Democratic Party talking points about Trump. He had taken them all to heart and he meant to do something about it — that is, the threat to our democracy posed by Trump: “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.”
On this point, the Post reports: “Spokespeople for [President] Biden and [Vice President] Harris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.” However, they have both released formulaic statements. Vice President Harris’s statement allows that she is “thankful that former President Trump is safe.” Harris had earlier released a statement on X that seemed to me even less sufficient to the occasion.
I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) September 15, 2024
As Stephen Miller commented on X: “They are relieved that the biggest threat to America since the civil war is safe.”
At the press conference that followed Routh’s apprehension yesterday, we learned that the security afforded Trump could and would have been higher, if he had been the incumbent president. One may wonder if it was up to the level afforded Dr. Jill at the time of the first assassination attempt on Trump this past July? Something does not compute.
This is a dark time for the United States. Routh seems to have come remarkably close to killing Trump yesterday. If Routh were to have succeeded, the election would be thrown into chaos the likes of which we have never experienced. Ballots have been printed and mailed. Early voting has begun. One senses that the authorities are not entirely serious about protecting “our democracy.”
The forces arrayed against Trump include those inspired to kill him, of course, but also the complacent bureaucratic response to the first attempt in July. They include the relentless Biden administration lawfare against him. They include the other Democrat lawfare against him. They include the corporate media. They include all those peddling hysteria over Trump’s possible election.
I learned of the second attempt on Trump’s life yesterday afternoon while watching the 49ers/Vikings game on television and scrolling through X. We have apparently become so habituated to the Trump assassination scenarios that CBS did not see fit to interrupt the proceedings with a breaking news alert. Insofar as the possible murder of Trump is concerned, complacency seems to be the order of the day.
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