The man found guilty of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf course last year tried to stab himself in the neck with a pen after a verdict was read in federal court Tuesday.
Ryan Routh’s daughter reportedly screamed out “dad, don’t hurt yourself” as U.S. Marshalls tried to restrain him inside the Fort Pierce courtroom.
Routh was found guilty on all counts after roughly two hours of deliberation in a fast-paced 12-day trial over his aborted plot to kill the president. He faces life in prison when he is sentenced at a later date.
Routh, who pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and chose not to have a lawyer throughout the proceedings, had planned the attack at the president’s Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach nearly one year ago.
He was armed with a semiautomatic rifle while then-candidate Trump was playing golf on September 15, 2024. Secret Service agents spotted him hiding in shrubbery with an SKS-style rifle, which Routh had argued was never pointed at the president.
An agent then fired at Routh, who fled the scene without firing any shots of his own. He was stopped roughly 45 minutes while driving north on Interstate 95.
Routh, serving as his own counsel, delivered a brief and disjointed closing statement to the jury in which he tried to argue that federal prosecutors had not proved “any intent” to kill because he never fired his weapon.
“No one ever intended to kill anyone,” he said. “The rifle was never picked up from its resting place.”
According to prosecutors, Routh was living out of a Nissan SUV while casing the golf course and closely following Trump’s schedule, awaiting his arrival at nearby Palm Beach International Airport.
He left a box at a friend’s house in North Carolina with a letter reading, “Dear World, This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” according to prosecutors.
The aborted attack arrived just two months after Trump was nearly fatally shot during a campaign rally last July, when a gunman fired several shots into a crowd at an outdoor event in Pennsylvania. One bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed a spectator.
At multiple points during the trial, Routh, 59, was reprimanded by District Judge Aileen Cannon for disrupting the proceedings, asking irrelevant questions, or making statements that were beyond the scope of the case.
Cannon had also presided over and eventually dismissed a federal indictment against Trump for his withholding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Routh asked Cannon in July for permission to represent himself after he stated that he was “a million miles apart” from court-appointed public defenders.
The judge reluctantly agreed to Routh’s request but called it a “bad idea,” keeping public defenders in the courthouse to represent him in the event that he could not.
The 12-day trial concluded after federal prosecutors called 38 witnesses who placed Routh at the scene and identified him as the suspect who could have killed Trump had he not been caught.
Routh did not testify. He called only three witnesses and was done presenting his case Monday.
Trump praised Judge Cannon and Department of Justice leadership on his Truth Social account.
“The trial was meticulously handled, and I would like to thank the Judge and Jury for their time, professionalism, and patience,” he wrote.
“This was an evil man with an evil intention, and they caught him,” he added.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the verdict reflects the Justice Department’s “commitment to punishing those who engage in political violence.”
“This attempted assassination was not only an attack on our president, but an affront to our very nation itself,” she said in a statement.
Routh once supported Trump in 2016 but grew more critical of the president in the years that followed. “It seems you are getting worse and devolving. I will be glad when you gone,” Routh wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2020.
“This is not a whodunnit,” prosecutors told jurors during the trial in Fort Pierce.
This is a developing story
