For the second time in as many months, Donald Trump faced an assassination attempt that could have thrown the United States into chaos. Thankfully, a US Secret Service agent spotted the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan Routh, stalking the former president at his West Palm Beach, Florida, golf club on Sunday (15 September). The agent opened fire, leading Routh to abandon his scoped AK-47-style rifle and flee by car; he was arrested not long after and charged.
The incident is the latest sign of a political order reaching a crisis point characterised by rising political violence and extremism. It’s also a reminder that American political madness respects no partisan boundaries — making it incumbent upon both major parties and their leaders to promote national calm.
The motives of Trump’s first would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks of Pennsylvania, were murky, and his death and lack of a public profile will likely ensure that they will remain that way. Routh, however, has left behind an extensive public record that includes a fairly active X (formerly Twitter) account, political donations, and even a New York Times interview last year related to his efforts to recruit foreign fighters to help defend Ukraine.
What we know for certain is that he claimed to have supported Trump’s first run for the presidency before turning against him. Addressing Trump directly on X in June 2020, Routh wrote: “We all were greatly disappointment [sic], and it seems you are getting worse and devolving… I will be glad when you gone.” In 2019 and 2020, Routh donated a total of $140 to ActBlue, a Democratic political action committee, across 19 small payments.
Routh’s Ukraine activism — he worked as the self-appointed director of an outfit called the International Volunteer Center, recruiting American and even Iranian, Afghan, and Pakistani warriors for Ukraine — will come under intense scrutiny in the coming days. Already, social media are rife with speculation that he must have been linked to the Kyiv government or hawkish elements of the US security apparatus that oppose Trump’s more dovish approach to the conflict.
No one familiar with the history of these agencies should preemptively dismiss such dark possibilities — not least progressives, for whom skepticism of the “intelligence community” used to be a defining commitment. But for now, without any evidence, the claim that they tried to kill Trump because he would end the war in Ukraine is just that: baseless speculation and itself a symptom of what I’ve called online Americans’ “epistemic snap” – a reflexive assumption that the authorities are lying, and a corresponding trust placed in X’s most cracked crackpots.
The causes of the epistemic snap are complex. The mainstream media’s failure to air skeptical views at decisive moments, from the Iraq War to the pandemic, no doubt are partly to blame. An overzealous “anti-disinformation” campaign that encouraged Big Tech censorship is another factor: the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins is now a Kamala Harris talking point, but many Americans won’t soon forget that a few years ago, they couldn’t post legitimate news and viewpoints about it on Facebook.
Malign actors are now taking advantage of this mistrust to flood social-media, and especially X, newsfeeds with overt racism, anti-Semitism, and all manner of conspiracy theories. It’s one thing to defend freedom of speech, but X’s algorithms seem to actively promote such accounts — that is, when Elon Musk himself doesn’t positively interact with them.
These two dynamics — officialdom quick to rebuke and censor wrong-think, and a genuinely toxic information underground — play off each other. The result is a febrile atmosphere where anyone can get hooked on outrage, hatred, and a sense that political reconciliation is impossible. For a tiny subset of Americans, these feelings can inspire political violence. And with more guns than people circulating in the country, the violent can too easily make good on their resolutions.
It is possible that this dynamic will go on until Americans attain a greater degree of social stability. In other words, what we profess online only reflects material and structural antagonisms that must be resolved politically. It is naive to put our hope in healthier discourse to buck up what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.
Still, public rhetoric has a role, and all political sides should be prepared to re-examine their own rhetoric as much as they criticise that of others. Here, the case of Routh hints at a discomfiting reality. While the liberal mainstream is used to denouncing far-right rhetoric and ideology, Routh was devoted to a cause dear to the establishment’s heart: the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression. It first led him to donate to ActBlue, and then, it seems, to allegedly try to kill Trump.
This isn’t to suggest that pro-Ukraine, pro-Nato Atlanticism is an extremist ideology. Rather, it shows that the ideological wellsprings from which extremists draw aren’t always the ones we expect. The duty to tamp down extremism, then, should be a cross-partisan effort: will Trump and his followers rethink the wanton dissemination of falsehoods about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, which has coincided with bomb threats against schools and hospitals in the area? Will Democratic politicians and magazines cut it out with the suggestion that Trump is a second Hitler – or even “more dangerous than Hitler”? If neither side changes, neither will the escalating violence.
[See also: Netanyahu’s all-out war]
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