Trump safe after another assassination attempt: Live updates

A few months after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Routh traveled to Kyiv to help Ukraine defend itself, having previously expressed his willingness to fight and die for the cause. While in Ukraine, he gave an interview to Newsweek Romania about his efforts:

He also spoke to the New York Just in March 2023 about his efforts to recruit fighters. The newspaper identified him as a “former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina”:

As the Legion's growth stalls, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, is seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who have fled the Taliban. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he plans to bring them to Ukraine, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran. He said dozens have expressed interest.

“We can probably buy some passports through Pakistan because it is such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.

It is unclear whether he succeeded, but a former Afghan soldier said he had been contacted and was interested in fighting if it meant leaving Iran, where he was living illegally.

According to a now-suspended Twitter/X account that apparently belonged to Routh, he voted for Trump in 2016 and supported Biden in 2020 after initially supporting Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primaries.

Here is a tweet from June 2020 addressed to Trump:

While you were my choice in 2016, I and the world hoped that President Trump would be different and better than the nominee, but we were all very disappointed and it seems that you are getting worse and regressing; are you retarded? I will be glad when you are gone.

In the last tweet he sent from his account, a few days after the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, Routh asked Kamala Harris to visit the victims of the attack:

You and Biden should visit the injured at the Trump rally in the hospital and attend the funeral of the murdered firefighter. Trump will never do anything for them… show the world what compassion and humanity mean.

The Just reports that Routh may also have been involved in an earlier incident involving a firearm more than two decades ago:

A man with the same name and age as Mr. Routh was arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2002 after barricading himself in a building with a fully automatic weapon, the Greensboro News & Record reported. The newspaper said the man was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and possession of a fully automatic machine gun. How the charges were resolved is unclear.