Tuesday Briefing: Suspect is Charged in Apparent Trump Shooting Attempt

A man who appeared to have been planning to assassinate Donald Trump was charged with two firearm counts yesterday in Florida. Investigators said the man, Ryan Wesley Routh, waited near Trump’s golf course for roughly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire.

Trump was a few hundred yards away and he was not injured. Routh, 58, did not have Trump in his sightline and did not fire his semiautomatic rifle during the confrontation with the Secret Service on Sunday, the agency’s acting director, Ronald Rowe, said at a news conference. Routh fled the scene and was arrested later. Here’s the latest.

The fact that a gunman was able to get so close to Trump for the second time in two months raised questions about the Secret Service. President Biden told reporters that the Secret Service “needs more help” and that Congress should take action.

Who is Routh? My colleague Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The Times’s Ukraine correspondent, interviewed Routh for a 2023 article about American volunteers fighting in Ukraine. Routh had spent some time in Ukraine and was seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. Routh, Thomas wrote, “was in way over his head.”

Political violence: The shooting underscored how much American politics has been shaped by anger stirred by and against Trump, my colleague Peter Baker wrote in an analysis.