Fame Seeker II
“I am going to fight and die for Ukraine,” Ryan Wesley Routh, the man who just attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, decided at the age of 56, and so he went there. But he did not fight, and he did not die.
He had no combat experience, so the Ukrainian Foreign Legion turned him away. He tried a drone technology startup, but could not find any support. He tried getting embassies to help bring Afghan volunteers to fight in Ukraine, but got the brush-off every time. “I have asked many occasions of countless people in Ukraine to cross over into Russia and smuggle ourselves to Moscow to handle the job” of assassinating Vladimir Putin, Routh writes in his strange little book, “but all help looses [sic] it’s [sic] courage and will to make something happen.”
Routh finally left Ukraine disappointed. “It was a childish idealistic endeavor that was unwinnable,” he concludes, blaming Ukraine. The country he wanted to die for “should get out of the way” of foreigners like himself, Routh says. Self-reflection raises its head only to be shot right down: “I often felt that I was the common denominator of failure, but” really, it was Ukraine’s fault.
People who knew Routh in Ukraine describe a “delusional” person with “delusional ideas,” someone who was “off,” who “seemed to have this delusion of grandeur thing.” One acquaintance in Ukraine called him “harmless, but not a person who should be in a war zone, as he was all over the place mentally.”
Routh also showed support for Taiwan. Routh claimed in online posts to be involved in the “Taiwan Foreign Legion,” a group allegedly recruiting foreign military personnel to fight for Taiwan in the event of a war with China. But several people listed as supporters on the group’s website told CNN they had no knowledge of the legion or its activities, and some had never heard of Routh before.
In his self-published book, Ukraine's Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity, Routh writes that Ukrainian police systematically removed his public displays of support for Ukraine. Perhaps they had conducted a background check and knew that Routh had a criminal record, including a bizarre 2002 arrest and conviction for possessing a weapon of mass destruction, namely a machine gun.
Or maybe the Ukrainian Foreign Legion had tipped them off. En route to Kyiv, “I met some Iranian journalist that were amazing [sic] and took their phone number so we could collaborate later,” he writes. “When I crossed the border and went to the Legion office they scrubbed my phone and the Iranian raised red flags and I had to defend his character; it was strange.” Stubbornly naive, Routh brought an Iranian engineer into his drone-building project, then was disappointed that no one would supply him with critical circuit boards or a testing range.
In his book, Routh includes photos of the rallies he held in Ukraine and a booth he set up that was torn down by police. Official disapproval of these efforts mystifies him. He cannot imagine why authorities in Ukraine, a country living under constant bombardment, might not want him to build standing attractions or hold scheduled events that might draw large crowds of civilians into one place where a single Iskander missile can kill many. He instead places great faith in the magical power of rallies and protests to make Russia stop killing Ukrainians. No wonder the most common question Routh received from Ukrainians, by his own account, was: “Who is paying you?”
Today, there are calls for Democrats to rein in their rhetoric. This is a fine discussion to have, and overdue, yet it is a mistake to simply blame the anti-Trump speech of other people for Routh’s actions. He was his own best source of anti-Trump rhetoric, getting high on his own supply. In his own mind, he was an iconoclast who disdained both Democrats and Republicans, “as I refuse to be put in a category and I must always answer independent and I think that most intelligent people judge every situation case by case and vote solely on the merit of the candidate and not about parties or groups.” He is of course wrong — partisanship is a built-in heuristic of democracy — but more to the point, he believes his own self-image to be universal, and that it should govern.
Routh has a very high opinion of his own opinions, which he frames as common sense. In itself that is hardly unusual for political speech. In fact, there is something familiar about his casual exchanges of land for peace. Why not appease China with Alaska, or part of Montana, in exchange for Taiwan’s independence? It makes as much sense as, say, trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. Land is land. Reading this batshit book, it is striking how ... Trumpian … Routh’s thinking is. If Trump was a burned-out hippie instead of a man with a rich and famous lifestyle, he might write a book like this. I was struck by the thought that Routh might have read Crippled America, Trump’s 2015 campaign book subtitled How To Make America Great Again, and decided to write a response.
Grand bargains, deals cut one by one with the rest of the nations, will fix everything and bring world peace. Routh wants rule by the “logical majority” acting as global citizens, for the good of all. Here is the chief ideological divergence with Trump: a patriotic American, he nevertheless puts the world first.
“Homelessness is not allowed and not a problem in communist countries,” Routh says, having never visited a real communist country. He seems very confused about what communism even is. Like Trump in the twilight of the Soviet Union, Routh merely respects the power that communism seems to wield. The war in Ukraine is a contest of “free market ingenuity” versus “slumbering communism,” he believes, pinning final blame on American policy. “We suggested that Russia have a system with a president and look how that has turned out,” he writes. As wisdom, it is a whole step down from fortune cookies and the world-views of cab drivers.
Routh has a simple solution for everything. Crime? Just defund the police. “If we could wipe away religions and government systems and just end up with individuals working with individuals without groups and organizations we could get along just fine?” he states in the form of a question, since this idea is questionable.
“Resolving our issues with North Korea is the simplest challenge on our globe,” Routh announces. Just drop all the sanctions and flood the country with food aid. “I will gladly volunteer to be kidnapped by North Korea and spend years working with them to show them one by one that Americans are not the enemy.” If we simply gave every North Korean a free sightseeing tour of the United States, they would see we are not their enemy.
Subsequent to his anarchist’s call for doing away with police, his solution for crimes against humanity is that America should be the policeman of the world. We should send everything we have to Ukraine and so should everyone else. It is rational, therefore no one could possibly have any good reason to oppose it. Even the African states should join us. Surely they will join us! For logic.
It is a collective security doctrine as told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Collectivism and feminism inflect his shallow thinking. “We must get to a place where every leader is always a woman so that we can avoid this testosterone driven insanity and macho bullshit,” Routh says. “Perhaps we can extract all the testosterone from all future generations and make the male population more kind and caring and eliminate all conflict mongering pricks.” We must kill all men to be kind. “Sorry to all the girls looking for those rough gun-slinging cowboys; those redneck barbaric crude days need to be done with and the whole population of the world needs to be educated that such behavior is not to be tolerated.”
But he also wants to re-invade Afghanistan and re-destroy the Taliban as many times as it takes. He is mad at Joe Biden for withdrawing from Central Asia because as an American, Routh finds it “extremely unusual when nations allow religion to be an integral part of their governing.” He is the innocent, abroad. War is bad until he is offended by a regime.
Routh displays little comprehension of risk. Not only does he want to assassinate Putin to end the war in Ukraine, he asks: “Why not Nuclear War?” as a chapter title. “All Nato nations have missile defense systems in place to eliminate the what [sic] Putin sends and the fallout will blow in his direction,” Routh reassures us. Suddenly, he is Dr. Strangelove. “We must strike first. Sitting and waiting and doing nothing as this tragedy unfold [sic] and I am telling you now who will win here — Russia and we are going to sit and allow decades of war to grind on ending and Russia once and for all.”
Grammar and coherence dissipate from this text wherever we encounter the author’s ego-dystonic arousal that the world is not as it logically ought to be, which is to say how he thinks the world should be.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy ought to make daily statements of support and appreciation of the foreign volunteers, “eliminate all visa requirements for foreigners and lift the 3 month limit on time spent in the country,” Routh says, and “welcome millions of civilians to stand beside the Ukrainians without any paperwork or medical insurance needed.” Surely this “symbolic gesture” of open borders in wartime will unlock victory. Why, Ukraine should open up an airfield in the middle of the country solely to bring in all the millions of global citizen volunteers. What could possibly go wrong?
Ryan Wesley Routh did not die in Ukraine like he wanted. He came home and decided at some point to kill Donald Trump instead of Vladimir Putin. This time, for this mission, he did not ask anyone else to accompany him.
“The suspect is believed to have been positioned at the tree line of the golf course from about 1:59 a.m. to 1:31 p.m. Sunday,” ABC News reports. At that time, a Secret Service agent “spotted a firearm poking out of shrubbery on the West Palm Beach golf course around 400 to 500 yards from where Trump was playing.” Routh “did not have a line of sight to the former president” but “an agent who was visually sweeping the area of the sixth hole’s green saw the subject, armed with what he perceived to be a rifle, and immediately discharged his firearm,” according to the acting Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., who “said Routh and did not fire at Secret Service agents before fleeing.” Agents soon recovered “a digital camera, a loaded SKS-style rifle with a scope and a plastic bag containing food” nearby.
To recap: this time, Routh camped out in the bushes for twelve hours with a rifle, was spotted by the first Secret Service agent to look for him, retreated immediately under fire, abandoning his position and equipment. He was arrested later in an adjacent county as he tried to escape in a motor vehicle. We may therefore judge that his combat performance might have been poor, had he been allowed to fight in Ukraine. And once again, if he meant to die, he failed at it.
Routh is a suitable bookend to the previous attempted Trump assassin. ABC News contributor John Cohen summarized Thomas Matthew Crooks as “a combination of mental health issues, ideological beliefs and a sense of personal grievance, the same combination of factors present in almost every school shooting and mass casualty attack over the past several years.” Because there is no single cause for his actions, we were supposed to throw up our hands and abandon all hope of understanding Crooks or his motivations. I said that this is politically correct nonsense at the time, that Crooks was a simple fame seeker, and now I say that politics do not explain Ryan Routh, either, for his opinions are too incoherent and his ideology is a dime-store philosophy. One might as well look to Sesame Street for lessons on international relations.
Crooks was young. He had no criminal record and heterodox views. Like Routh, he was supportive of Trump until he was not. Routh turned to crime later than most males, racking up charges for stolen goods in his late twenties. In his late fifties, with no greater claim to fame than building ramshackle sheds in Hawaii, Routh tried to find a meaningful end to his life in Ukraine, and failed. When he came home from his failure, Routh looked for another path to a fulfill his self-image. He saw Crooks fail, and thought he could succeed because he was older, wiser, smarter.
He told himself he was doing it for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for world peace, but the real motivation of Ryan Routh was disappointment. He was disappointed with Ukraine, the world, and himself, and got the idea that he alone could set it all straight. He alone could fix it. That kind of thinking seems to be common, in current America.
This is the heyday of the independent pundit and the public intellectual. A person with an interest in current events who seeks out news and opinion will soon find himself in parasocial relationships with people whose names are household words. They all seem to know one another and respect their expertise in their respective fields. It's perfectly understandable why someone with Walter Mitty tendencies would feel encouraged to make a place for himself in the chattering class. The other people make it look so easy! Having an untreated personality disorder would prevent him from perceiving the impossibility of his aims.
I liked it better when media opinionators were less accessible. There was a time decades ago when a byline was sufficient acknowledgement and publicity for a writer. Now, when everyone has to be entrepreneurial because job security is almost extinct, it seems that even the most prestigious outlets run the reporter's color photo and thumbnail bio below the piece, that is, if they're not also being their own talking head by delivering their story over video. When esteemed thinkers were distant figures it discouraged gadfly wannabees to think of themselves as being in their league.
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