The alleged second assassination attempt of Donald Trump bears some striking resemblances to the shooting of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico by a radically pro-Kyiv gunman who strongly disapproved of the politician’s anti-war rhetoric.
An activist with an outsized interest in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the lead suspect in what is being investigated as an attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump, but it would be just the second instance of a pro-Kyiv extremist attempting to assassinate a prominent Western politician this year.
Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was arrested on Sunday afternoon after security services spotted the barrel of a rifle poking out from bushes close to where Trump was playing golf at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Routh has previously travelled to Ukraine and said he wanted to recruit foreign fighters for the cause.
Exactly four months before the alleged attempt on Trump’s life, on May 15th, gunman Juraj Cintula approached Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico as he met members of the public after leaving a meeting at a local town hall. Drawing a handgun, left-wing poet and activist Cintula fired at Fico five times at close range.
The Slovak leader was injured in the gut, hip, arm, leg, and his small intestine was perforated five times. Fico almost died after the shooting but was airlifted to hospital and saved by urgent surgery by an emergency team.
Cintula was arrested at the scene and immediately confessed to police. He told officers he intended to shoot the leader because of his views on the Ukraine war, and he believed by shooting Fico the politician could no longer be Prime Minister, leaving the role vacant for some other with a stronger pro-Ukraine stance. As reported at the time:
While Cintula said he disagreed with several of Fico’s policies and political reforms, according to the document the gunman’s main gripe was with the government not providing military aid to Ukraine. It read that what the gunman “mainly wants is military aid to be provided to Ukraine”, and was concerned that Fico’s government is seen as a “Judas” by the European Union.
Fico won the Slovak national elections last year on a platform that included disentangling the country from the war in Ukraine, which he claims would be better resolved with negotiation — even if that means Ukraine ceding some territory to Moscow — rather than battle.
Although Fico has not spoken out in the wake of this latest alleged attempted shooting of Donald Trump, he did publish a lengthy reflection on events in July, when President Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally. In those remarks, Prime Minister Fico said the Trump shooting was a “carbon copy” scenario of his own shooting and said political opponents creating a febrile atmosphere of hate bore responsibility for driving easily influenced people to attempt to kill politicians.
The Prime Minister said then: “The political opponents of [Donald Trump] try to shut him up and when that fails, they antagonise the public so much that some loser picks up a gun”. Those same politicians would then be the first to call for “reconciliation, appeasement and forgiveness” after the attacks despite having instigated the violence in the first place, Fico said.
President Trump made very similar remarks this week as he reflected on Sunday’s incident. He said he thinks the suspect had “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it”. He continued: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
The suspect in the latest Trump “assassination attempt” remains just that, a suspect. Yet widespread reports have made much of his extremely hardline views on the Ukraine conflict.
A serial donor to the Democrats, Routh has been extremely active online for years and left a considerable ‘paper’-trail. Beyond social media posts declaring he was willing to “fight and die for Ukraine”, he also self-published a book entitled Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, in which he invites Iran to consider assassinating President Trump, who he labelled a “fool” and “buffoon”.
Professing to have the answers for how to defeat Russia, Routh wrote in a foreword: “…while on the current path Ukraine will not win, it is imperative for the world that they do win, and that is why this book is so important, for us all to recognize that losing is not an option and what we must do to win.”
Online, Routh made much of his attempts to recruit foreign fighters for Ukraine and visited the country in 2022 after the Russian invasion. Whether these attempts were sincere or not on his part, Ukrainian military sources cited on Monday claim his overtures were rejected by Kyiv as flights of fancy rather than realistic plans.
Ukraine was quick among European states to offer its sympathies to President Trump this week after the Sunday incident, reaffirming its position that political violence has no place in a democracy. Those strong words came even though Ukraine has boasted of undertaking political assassinations of its own citizens – branded as “collaborators” — in recent months. Meanwhile, Russia leapt on the arrest of Ryan Wesley Routh to make political hay, claiming it was an operation by the Ukrainian government, although neglecting to offer any evidence of this whatsoever.