Another obsessed jerk-off tried to take a shot at Trump. He didn’t get one. Ryan Routh has been arrested.
Apparently, he was a former Trump voter who was disappointed over Ukraine policy; he’d flown to Ukraine and attempted to organize a military unit to support them, and failed. He had an arrest record for some over-the-top stunt with a machine gun.
He also was charged in December of that year [2002], when, according to an account from the News & Record newspaper, Routh, armed with a machine gun, barricaded himself in a United Roofing building in Greensboro for three hours. Authorities say the incident began after he was pulled over for a traffic stop. Police ultimately arrested him without incident.
He is just a loser who achieved a measure of notoriety by virtue of cheap, easy access to lethal weapons, a forgettable nobody.
Supposedly the actual Ukrainian army’s foreign legion knew this guy, and decided he way too crazy to let him join or work with them in any way.
I mean.. One one hand, this should never be happening. On the other hand… there is a bit of unavoidable amusement that everyone trying to shoot at Trump ends up being right wing, current, or prior, Trump supporters. I mean, a “normal” person might start to worry a bit when its not the other side, but their own, trying to end them. It would be a bit like the a Mob boss suddenly realizing that all the cops love him, but people in his own organization want him dead, and not out of rivalry. It just amazes, but you know exactly how they will try to spin this – “He was never a supporter, just a fake.”, or, “The Democrats subverted him.”, or some other excuse.
“Assassination attempts on Donald Trump are just a fact of life and we should get used to it” – JD Vance, if he wasn’t such a hypocrite
Kudos to the Secret Service guy who saw the barrel sticking out of the bushes. Trump must not become a martyr.
BTW now we can expect copycats from all around the country coning to Florida.
Are we sure Donalf Trumpenführer didn’t arrange for this just so people would stop talking about his abysmal debate performance?
Should be “coming”.
Not the tourism DeSantis was hoping for.
AugustusVerger @ 5
No one in his team has the skill to arrange a successful false flag operation. They might have left rice along with the rifle to make it look like a Chinese, or a pile of sand to make it look like an Arab job. Or a note saying “this is totally not a false flag attack”.
Obviously “A good guy with a gun.”
At least this one remembered to buy an optical sight. And ruined it by buying an AK-style weapon, not the most accurate if you want to hit a distant target. I expect the gun enthusiasts will dissect every detail (he should have used this sight) like theater critics.
What can they charge him with, unless he confesses? He didn’t fire a shot, he was over five football fields away, and I think FL is open carry, so…
Good question.
He is clearly guilty of littering.
He left his AK-47 style rifle, two knapsacks, a scope used for aiming a weapon, and a GoPro camera behind when he ran.
Someone else had to clean up after him.
Being totally clueless isn’t a crime either.
birgerjohansson @ #4 — “Trump must not become a martyr.” Exactly. I don’t want him killed. I want him humiliated at the polls and in the courts. And the GOP suffering a similar fate would be a bonus.
The Guardian
The world should breathe a sigh of relief that Donald Trump wasn’t harmed in Florida
.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/16/donald-trump-assassination-attempt-shooting-florida
We are not engaging in rumor mongering, just speculation that is not far fetched in today’s unhinged world.
But, we can’t help but wonder if this attempt to shoot tRUMP might not be a campaign stunt. Both of these shooting attempts put him back in the bright but biased main stream news spotlight and both resulted in a surge of fund raising. This last one seemed rather amateurish, which makes it more likely scripted by the repugnantcants that pull the strings.
It’s sad that he draws support by exploiting these groups:
1) old toothless people in single-wide trailers sending their social security checks
2) drooling rtwingnuts and xtian terrorists
3) billionaires that consider sending large sums of money is an expendable investment that will be richly rewarded if/when the magat gets back in office.
They are all delusional.
And, I agree with @4 birgerjohansson and @12 robro: If he becomes a martyr, the rtwingnuts, xtian terrorists and project 2025 crowd will be empowered. And, that would be even more catastrophic for all of us.
Also, after reading the comments thoroughly, I must credit @5 AugustusVerger for being first to mention the possibility of it being a campaign stunt.
Campaign stunt or not, both attempts — both by known Trump supporters — prove that the madness, fear, bigotry, malice and hate incited by Republicans (since 1980 but especially during Trump’s ascendancy) is getting out of control and can turn on anyone anywhere anytime. You want to talk about “the issues?” This is THE central issue of this election: reason vs. madness and malice, decency vs. savagery. (Democracy vs. tyranny being a very close second.)
QFT.
At this point, Trump is a figurehead, a meat puppet, a placeholder.
His cognitive decline is so obvious and so severe that no one, especially his supporters expects him to say anything intelligent or true. It’s all dog whistles, soundbites, reflecting the hate of his followers, and obvious lies.
If he gets elected, they will simply carry him into his office and prop him up in a chair with lots of soft drinks and a TV set.
The real rulers will be his right wing staff. That would be the Project 2025 Heritage foundation, the fundie xians, the billionaire oligarchies, and JD Vance. Vance is every bit his evil equal and young enough to still have a working brain.
Insightful distillation: THE central issue . . .reason vs. madness. WELL DONE @16 Raging Bee
@17 Raven, very interesting possibility, wasn’t there an old Star Trek episode with a drugged figurehead?
I’m just concerned that he is such a raging ego they would have to keep him drugged all the time.
???
There was one episode, where an ancient ruler was copied into a computer which then ruled the planet.
@shermanj
I think you’re thinking of “Patterns of Force,” aka “the Nazi episode.”
A Federation historian was studying the pre-warp Ecosian society, (I.e., the Prime. Directive was in full effect: no disclosure of spacefaring civilizations) but when that society was on the brink of collapse he decided to violate the PD and intervene. He became an autocratic leader…somehow…and instituted a society that emulated Nazi Germany because it was the most efficient at utilizing resources. He felt he could use his position to keep the new Nazis from copying the worst impulses of a totalitarian society. The Ecosians did, in fact, recover from whatever the original crisis was. And, inevitably, the Federation historian who started it all (Gill, I think his name was) was betrayed by an underling who drugged him up and propped him in front of TV cameras while splicing together old speeches. The Ecosians then quite easily slipped into the violence and totalitarianism they had been primed for.
So, that tracks.
replying to @20 Raven, I was thinking about the one where there was a planet with ersatz nazis running the government and they used a starfleet captain? as a drugged figurehead on broadcasts to support their propaganda. Could this be what you were saying in @17? And, it may even be a likely option in this insane world.
To reinforce the insanity of this society, digby has a post by the muskrat that seems to encourage more assassination attempts: ‘And, no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala’
replying to @21 vinnievidivici: Yes. That’s the one. Thanks. You obviously are either a true trekkie, or your web searches are quick.
Maybe it was JD Vance who organized this little shootery. Kill Trump and then make yourself the “guardian” of his legacy Mark Antony style. Con: JD Vance is a moron who couldn’t make this work. Pro: the attempt was stupid and failed as if some moron arranged it.
When you ride the tiger, you can’t get off.
Trumpeteer gone more radical than actual Trump. It’s a risk for every extremist-populist. If you incite your supporters bad enough, eventually some will out-extreme you and think you are Betraying The Cause, and then turn against you.
@#5 AugustusVerger
I knew I couldn’t be the only one thinking these are set-ups by Trump collaborators.
Trump is blaming the “inflammatory rhetoric” from Biden and Harris on these attempts. Which is quite honestly probably the most hypocritical thing he’s ever said.
I don’t know about false flag operations: seems like they’d want to make sure that the shooter wouldn’t get taken alive if they’d done that.
What I do know is that I’m sending some thoughts and prayers.
Re: birgerjohansson @7:
Or used an AK-47 to look Russian. Wait, no.
Re: raven @17:
Imagine GOP’s glee if the first attempt had left him mute!
@21
“…and instituted a society that emulated Nazi Germany because it was the most efficient at utilizing resources.”
Okay, just gotta throw in I’m quite disappointed in Star Trek’s writers for falling for that one. IRL totalitarian regimes, including the Third Reich, were incredibly backstabby and inefficient, and the amount of (supposedly) grudging respect the US has for them is very unhealthy and IMO part of how we got here.
Also uh… did they miss that racism and racial genocide are core aspects of Nazism? And you literally can’t have the latter without the former?
“This is THE central issue of this election: reason vs. madness and malice, decency vs. savagery. (Democracy vs. tyranny being a very close second.)”
As the great Jordan Peterson would say “its the infinite border of a bound logos. Be a man, clean up your room”
We all hate the carrot. Even from the depths of the Australian winter I shudder in fear of him possibly winning.
However assassination attempts are never OK.
Posts like this in public feed the shitheads rhetoric and his delusions.
I admit I said somethng similar in private. Do you lot want him to win or something?
feed in the sense of fueling the fire
@29 well said. They also miss that tyrants come in all flavours of the political spectrum Germany had a far right one. Putin is far left
You lot seem to want to get your own homegrown far right nutter elected
wolja:
Clarifying…
Wikipedia – Vladimir Putin
Wikipedia – Conservatism in Russia
I am slightly comforted by the fact that so far none of the would be assassins appear to be time travellers from the future.
I had read one or two excerpt from Trump’s speeches and had not realized the speed of his cognitive decline. If anythig it may be worse than Biden’s.
I admit in the last election I had thought Trump was showing worse signs of cognitive decline than Biden but the Joe seemed to decline more quickly. Has this been sudden?
Far left would be anarchy, which doesn’t describe the far-right authoritarian dictatorship currently running under Putin. Russias current system isn’t markedly different from Imperial Russian Czars. Very few people tend to prosper under authoritarian regimes.
There was nothing leftist about the USSR either, despite the fact that Russian oligarchs called themselves Communists. Seizing private property via murder and genocide is the opposite of communism.
Re: jrkrideau:
From the Infinite Thread:
Okay, just gotta throw in I’m quite disappointed in Star Trek’s writers for falling for that one. IRL totalitarian regimes, including the Third Reich, were incredibly backstabby and inefficient…
True; but two points:
a) Back in the ’60s lots of Americans, liberal as well as fascist-leaning, had this mental picture of Nazi Germany as this super-efficient machine-state founded by a superhuman evil genius, whom the whole rest of the world had to gang up on with all their strength and will to defeat or even slow down.* AND
b) There will always be people — some of them very smart, though maybe very technocratic — who think a dictator with unchecked power is the most “efficient” way for a large society to do anything that needs doing. So it’s totally plausible to think a future expert observer like John Gill would see a huge social crisis coming and think “Oh shit, I gotta set up a fast-acting hierarchical regime to fix all this in time!” And it’s equally plausible to think the people would go along with it because they’re scared and don’t see any alternative.
* Side note: that mental picture was at least partly cultivated by my granddad’s generation in Western Europe, largely to cover for their own spinelessness and incompetence in the face of someone who was, in reality, a buffoon, a fraud and a coward, who could easily have been knocked down and neutralized much earlier if only “our” side’s leaders had had the courage to call his bluff.
Raging Bee@39–
I’m not saying the leaders of Europe couldn’t have done a lot better, but I don’t think there was any path they could have taken that would have prevented WW2. It might have happened a little sooner or a little later, and there might have been some shifts in power within the Axis, but Hitler had always intended to start a war of European conquest and by 1938 there were no political barriers left in Germany to rein in his ambitions.
One of the great ‘what ifs’ of history is what would have happened if Chamberlain hadn’t sold out the Sudetenland and Hitler had been forced to fight for it…but I don’t believe it would have changed much (imo it would have been a better moral position, unless one is a hardcore consequentialist). Germany annexed the Sudetenland without firing a shot and still invaded Poland less than a year later with zero moral pretext. Had Germany been forced to fight for the Sudetenland, I have no doubt Hitler would have invaded Czechoslovakia, which would have triggered pretty much the same falling dominos as invading Poland. Probably within the same year. And today we’d be hearing people say ‘if only they’d just given Sudetenland to Germany, WW2 could have been avoided!’
Re: chrislawson:
Something somethng Archduke Ferdinand.
Also
Behind the Bastards – Kaiser Wilhelm: The Saddest Warlord In History, Part Two
Not really arguing. Just enjoyed the trivia and the inadvertent similarity to the main topic.
I’m not sure I get all the people who think it’s a very good thing Trump has survived these assassination attempts.
Sure, his assassination would make him a martyr to his base.
Also, that same base is not enthused to vote for any presidential candidate not named “Donald Trump”, so Harris would be pretty much guaranteed to win 2024 no matter who Repugs replaced the top of their ticket with at the last minute. There would also be little enthusiasm for a repeat of J6.
Violent reactions from Republican and MAGA groups would be lacking a central figure to rally around or any centralized coordination, and the ring of shadowy figures with various agendas that revolves around Trump trying to get him to adopt positions that favor them would fly apart from centrifugal force. Then follows four years of the normal rule of law with a competent, non-treasonous administration, chances to fix the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster (as disappointed MAGAs unable to vote for their preferred fuhrer stay home, hurting downballot Republicans and handing Dems the House and Senate on a silver platter), and an opportunity to continue the incremental improvements that have occurred under Biden and that could, in the end, win back chunks of the white working class to the Dem side.
Also four more years of demographics that are increasingly hostile to white supremacists.
And four years of having a power vacuum at the center of the GOP and infighting among the various factions seeking to fill it, from good old-fashioned business Republicans to various fascistic groups that coalesce around multiple Trump mini-mes and possibly others besides. With any luck, the party never recovers and some credible alternative emerges on the Dems’ left flank, perhaps the DSA.
Meanwhile, what we currently face is 538 giving Trump a 39% chance of winning outright, plus the prospect of a second J6 (or worse) coup attempt the other 61% of the time, with lessons learned from the first, failed attempt in 2021. Are you all that confident that Harris will win if Trump survives to election day, and that she will then be inaugurated on January 20, 2025?
Because if that does not happen, here’s what does. The US turns into the Republic of Gilead. Millions suffer and at least thousands die, just from that alone; over one hundred and fifty million people are rapidly reduced to a condition approaching chattel slavery. Economic mismanagement results in a catastrophic recession and widespread poverty in America. Ukraine is destroyed by Russia, likely resulting in large scale genocide there, and what weak and ineffectual opposition to the one in Gaza there is will likely evaporate, accelerating the horrors there. NATO is weakened, perhaps fatally, which could lead to further Russian conquests extending even into western Europe. And that’s just for starters.
Trump is promising to “deport” en ever-larger number of millions of “illegal” immigrants, and when an autocrat promises something like that history suggests believing him. That will mean a nightmare of massive concentration camps and pretty soon we’re looking at Holocaust 2: Electric Boogaloo here. Millions will die in those camps even if there isn’t an official “final solution to the Hispanic question” eliminationist policy, and tens of millions if there is. And, of course, the last time something like this happened in a large, militarily powerful, industrialized country, it started a world war that ended with tens of millions more dead and nuclear weapons used in anger …
Trump must not be inaugurated in 2025 — it is that simple. It is a moral imperative that that not happen. I don’t know what y’all are expecting would happen if Trump became a martyr but I doubt it is even 1% as bad as even the first of those last two paragraphs, let alone the second. But go ahead and make your case, if you believe otherwise, or that Trump’s return would not result in the utter catastrophe described immediately above.
Hi BB, the main reason for those people (who are also politicians) to be glad that Trump has survived the attempts on his life is because of the normalisation of violence that would result and the potential for reprisals given that the US has twenty states where open carry is allowed and thirty million AR style weapons in circulation. Or is it thirty states where open carry is allowed and twenty million AR style weapons in circulation? Whichever numbers it is, assassination of public figures (even one so egregiously odious as Trump) is not seen as a viable means even if (in the singular case of Trump) you could justify some positive ends that would result.
@39 Raging Bee
Not sure, but its possible someone might have been thinking along the lines of the original “tyrant” from Rome, which was a Palpatine like figure, who was expected to step down after 6 months, when the crisis was solved. And, in their case, it sort of worked, the first couple of times, then you got people who wanted to keep power, make themselves emperors, etc. Its not entirely different than the US president’s ability to declare marshal law, and the possibility proposed of, “What happens if they never end the declaration of a crisis?” Its a bit less likely, but when you have huge swaths of the government, like we do now, either terrified of the consequences of going against the crazy man, if he gets power, or willing to do a JD Vance and kiss his ass for their own rise to power…. then you have a freaking problem, because the only thing stopping someone from declaring permanent marshal law is other parts of the government refusing to go along with it (and how many times during Trump’s last administration have we heard about that being necessary already?)
The best opportunity was almost certainly Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 – breaking the Treaty of Versailles. According to Paul Schmidt (Hitler’s interpreter, so in a good position to know, but also with motives to say what he thought would put him in the best light), Hitler said (Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, 1993 Fontana Press edition, p.570):
It’s certainly true that German rearmament had a long way to go at that point. If Hitler had been forced to withdraw, it could well have prompted a military coup against him; the generals had thought the remilitarisation too risky (not that they were nice people, but they were able to see that Hitler was a reckless adventurist). As it was, Hitler’s successful gamble gave him the whip hand over them.
If I understand the US electoral system correctly (American commenters, please correct me if I’m wrong), it would have to be Vance. Indeed, the ticket would remain “Trump/Vance” even though Trump was dead, and if the ticket won, Vance would be inaugurated in January. During the remainder of the campaign, he would of course try to pin the assassination on the Democrats; and I think the great majority of potential Trump voters would vote for him, while Trumpoid thugs would intimidate Democratic voters – and Trump the martyr might well be more useful to the Republicans than Trump the candidate. Vance is completely on board with the Gilead programme.
…I don’t think there was any path they could have taken that would have prevented WW2.
I think there were PLENTY of points where a more serious response by Britain and/or France could easily have stopped Hitler’s aggression before it got enough momentum to be seen as “unstoppable.” For starters, If France had actually put up a fight over the Rhineland in 1935-6, Hitler would have pulled German forces out (we’ve since found written orders to that effect); the whole world would have suddenly seen Hitler stopped in his tracks and cowed; and even if Hitler himself still wanted to wage bloody war all over Europe, that retreat would have discredited him at home and lots of potential rivals would have smelled blood in the water and possibly deposed him.
Then there’s the Sudetenland in 1938: if the Czechs had been encouraged to fight, instead of being pressured to surrender, they could very likely have stopped the German conquest — or at least made it too costly for Germans to want to continue — and either way that would have seriously blunted Hitler’s momentum and left him discredited at home and abroad. Also, I read somewhere that most of the tanks Hitler used in the invasion of Russia were made in Czechoslovakia — would he have been able to mount any such invasion without those tanks?
Remember also that Stalin had been begging Britain and America to join with him in a unified front against Hitler for many years before either country did so. If we had taken that path — instead of thinking Hitler would be our strongman/bulwark against those horrible godless commies — that might have turned things in a very different direction.
(And speaking of Stalin, maybe if he’d run his country more competently, he could have deterred Hitler from invading it, and maybe from invading Poland as well.)
Kahegi: I suspect that if the writers were thinking of Rome, they would have had Roman trappings and symbols instead of Nazi symbols; sort of like they did in the Caesar/gladiator/tiny hint of Jesus episode.
Raging Bee@48 the Czech Model 35 and Model 38 were used extensively by the Germans in the early stages of WW2, and were better than the Panzer I and Panzer II that made up most of the 1939 German tank force. After production of what the Germans called the Panzer 38(t) ended in 1942 the chassis was kept in production to build self propelled guns. But most of the tanks used in the war by the Germans were German made. Czech arms factories also made rifles for the German forces, since the standard Czech rifle was a straight copy of the standard German Mauser rifle in the first place.
The idea that the Republicans would try to fake an assassination attempt against Donald Trump is silly enough. No one would take that kind of risk. But that they’d used either of the 2 would be assassins in any sort of plot is even more silly. The dead shooter in the first attempt was a teenage kid who’d already come to police attention due to his obsession with school shootings. Sunday’s shooter has a criminal record going back at least 2 decades, including a 2002 armed standoff in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was a Trump supporter at one point but soured on him.
Based on a lot of further research, I am no longer convinced the repugnantants are likely to be directly responsible for the Routh ‘maybe’ attempted assassination.
Reading about his antics through out his life, he is definitely a person constantly seeking the spotlight to provide meaning to his life. As others pointed out, he has often flip-flopped on political positions. He was foolish, the rifle is ill suited to an accurate 400 yard shot, yet he put a powerful scope on it. He seems to have carefully displayed his backpacks on the fence for officials to find. He made a big show while being arrested. He tried to make himself a ‘powerful’ figure in Ukraine.
I find it highly likely that, again, he was just trying to shine a spotlight on himself for his own ego’s sake.
Chaos continues to increase everywhere. And, the magat crowd is using that to muddy the political waters.
@34
Sky Captain Wrote
wolja:Putin is far left
Clarifying…
Wikipedia – Vladimir Putin
Putin has promoted explicitly conservative policies in social, cultural, and political matters, both at
home and abroad. Putin has attacked globalism and neoliberalism and is identified by scholars with
Russian conservatism.
Yes my point. Russia and Putin identify as communist which is always seen as far left. They are no different than the far right
Basically tryants and dictators call emselves what they want they are all basically the same.
I cannot work out formatting here. I’ll keep looking
@wolja:
From my second quote: “both major post-Soviet conservative parties largely condemn communism”. There’s a left-wing Communist Party, but Putin’s not in it.
Vladimir Putin
Putinism
Russia under Vladimir Putin
So you’re not referring to “communist”/”far-left” as economic practice; you’re referring to branding itself? Are you saying Adolf was far-left for calling himself a national socialist?
“blockquote” is the tag you want, not “code”.
Blockquote inside greater than / lesser than signs gives you indented quotes
i inside those gives you italics whilst b inside those gives you bold and to avoid embedding see :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/16/infinite-thread-xxi/comment-page-3/#comment-2117142
@52. wolja : ” Russia and Putin identify as communist which is always seen as far left. They are no different than the far right. Basically tryants and dictators call emselves what they want they are all basically the same.”
Well, not exactly, no.
Yes, they are similar in some respects and all authoritarians a.k.a. totalitarians but not the same with each (to mangle a quote from someone about happy vs sad families) being awful in their own unique ways.
See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
However whatever dictators and tyrants callthemselves which is really misleading doesn’t make them so anymor ethan th e North Korean dictators callingthemselves dieties makes them so and fascism, communism, even variants like Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, nazism etc .. are different ideologies with different foci and meanings and implications and aren’t just interchangable buzzwords whatever the reichwing pretends to the contrary.
Of course, there is the Horseshoe theory :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#Academic_studies_and_criticism
But then, that deservedly has its critics and is probly oversimplified and only superficially reasonable.
Ptooey and Russia far left? Let’ see:
1.Russia has a rigid class divide and discriminates against ethnic minorities
2.The economy can be best described as crony-capitalism where the means of production are entirely in the hands of Ptooey’s accomplices
3.Ptooey’s #1 wish is to recreate the Russian Tsarist state in its old pre-1918 borders due to empirestalgia
4.Ptooey’s social policies are regressive and reactionary based on burgeoise family values from the 1800s
What part of it would here qualify as “left wing”?
@48 Raging Bee
On the point of intervention in WWII, true. But, I was recently watching a kind of review video of an old TV show episode, from “Crusade”, where the guy pointed out how much he hated the whole, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, trope, except when its an “individual” choice. The problem of course is, “Could we have convinced anyone to act earlier, since well.. we literally failed to do so, which is why we didn’t?” That ends up being part of the problem – how many times you miss opportunities, because you can’t convince your own people to do something, due to your current politics, before it becomes so desperate you have to do something horrible, to convince even the detractors that there is no other option? That is the insanity of the problem – obstinance, isolationism, etc. leave a nation unwilling, and thus unable, to act when it “should”, so before its too late desperate people end up having to pull the, “needs of the many” trope out, to fix it. It was in fact the one single case I commented that it might be both a) necessary, and b) horrifying, at the same time, and not involving either someone “choosing” to do it themselves, or only a single person.
Holy crap, we’re calling Putin “left-wing?” Puh. Lease. We might have called the Soviet regime “left-wing” due to their social-welfare policies and state ownership of nearly all means of production. But Putin’s only connection to that regime was through the KGB, and his part in that agency had nothing at all to do with “leftist” social or economic policies — just another modern totalitarian secret-police agency trying to prop up another modern totalitarian regime. And then sulking away and blaming the rest of the world for its utter failure.