The Daily - A Second Assassination Plot and the New Era of Political Violence

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

A suspect was charged on Monday in connection with what appears to be a second assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump.Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Glenn Thrush, who have been covering the case, and Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, discuss the suspect’s background, the Secret Service’s struggle to protect the former president, and this new era of political violence.Guests: Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a correspondent on the National desk of The New York Times.Glenn Thrush, who reports on the Justice Department for The New York Times.Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: What we know about the latest apparent assassination attempt.The case is another sign of how much the American political landscape has been shaped by anger stirred by Mr. Trump and against him.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, everything we now know about what appears to be a second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I spoke with my colleagues about the suspect's background, the Secret Service's struggle to protect Trump, and this new era of political violence. It's Tuesday, September 17th. On Monday, law enforcement officials offered a much fuller picture of what they're describing as the attempted assassination of former President Trump in West Palm Beach, the second such

attempt on his life in just over two months. According to a criminal complaint, cell phone data showed that the suspect, Ryan Wesley Rouse, had been lurking in the woods near Trump's golf course for roughly 12 hours, starting at around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. Then, around 1.30 p.m., as Trump began a round of golf, a Secret Service agent who was monitoring the perimeter of the golf course spotted what appeared to be the barrel of a rifle poking out from a line of trees. Moments later, the agent fired in the direction of the rifle.

All right, 1.30 this afternoon, call came out, shots fired. That was called in by the Secret Service. It was then, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw, that Routh, unharmed by the gunfire, fled the scene. Fortunately, we were able to locate a witness that came to us and said, hey, I saw the guy running out of the bushes. He jumped into a black Nissan, and I took a picture of the vehicle and the tank, which was great.

Police in Palm Beach quickly took that license plate information and fed it into the state's highway camera system. And we were able to get a hit on that vehicle on I-95 as it was headed into Martin County. Take two steps to your right! Take two steps to your right! Take one step back.

Driver! Walk straight back! About 40 minutes later, police in a nearby county pulled Routh over and ordered him out of the vehicle, a scene that was captured on their body cameras. Back at the golf course, police found what Rouse allegedly left behind as he fled. Now, in the bushes where this guy was is an AK-47-style rifle with a scope,

two backpacks which were hung on the fist that had a ceramic tile in them, and a GoPro. By Monday morning, federal prosecutors charged Routh with two gun-related crimes. And suddenly, the world was very focused on Routh himself. This morning, we're starting to get a clearer picture of the suspect in the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. It was quickly revealed that Routh had a lengthy criminal history, including a conviction in 2002,

over an incident in which he barricaded himself inside a building in North Carolina with an automatic weapon. What the FBI is also aware of are some of his online claims about foreign travel. But perhaps the most unusual piece of his biography was his decision to travel to Ukraine. Ralph claims that he went to Kyiv in 2022. He was raising money. Which is what had brought him to the attention of my colleague, Thomas Givens-Neff, who goes by TM.

As it happens, TM actually interviewed Routh by phone last year. A conversation that TM recounted to me on Monday morning. So it was the winter of 23 last year, and I had just finished covering Afghanistan. I was covering the war in Ukraine. And I was working on a story about these wayward volunteers who had kind of flooded into Ukraine at the start of the war. And when you say wayward, what do you mean?

Well, I mean, this is kind of the weird puzzle where the West is backing Ukraine, but not sending their own troops. And instead you just have this flood of people who want to support Ukraine. They want to be Instagram stars. They want to write books. They want to see combat.

They want to kill people. And one of these volunteers that showed up in Ukraine was Ryan Routh. He was a man in his mid fifties. He was a former construction worker. He I think grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. He kind of had this like gentle southern twang and his pictures, you know, posted online. Were a little ridiculous his hair unkempt, wearing like American flag paraphernalia.

And I mean he from the get-go struck me as quite a character. And I was put in touch with him through a colleague. And when I spoke to him after, you know, back and forth on WhatsApp and Signal to an extent, he basically said he had this grand plan, he had the spreadsheet to get hundreds of Afghan soldiers who were spread between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan into Ukraine to fight for the government. Huh. So within, it seems like a very short while of you meeting him, he's describing a very ambitious idea he has to not just personally try to help Ukraine, but somehow recruit people who had left Afghanistan

to help Ukraine. Yeah, that was the short of it. And he was talking about paying off officials and forging passports. And there was even one thing where he said he was going to arrange a US military transport from Erbil, Iraq, and it would fly to Poland with these Afghans on board, which seemed absolutely ridiculous. But his tone of voice was already in motion. If he was selling me a used car

I mean, I'd be I'd be paying for it I guess but having you know interacted with a lot of these guys. It was pretty clear. It was pretty unsustainable From what you're saying this is sounding like somewhat of a fanciful plan But did routh at all seem on paper qualified to be drawing up such a plan at all No I mean I think that was one of the things that really drew me to interviewing him for the story

and then putting him in there is the fact that he was from Greensboro, North Carolina, had spent time in Hawaii, had absolutely no experience, one in this part of the world, in the military, and was just a man in his mid-50s with good intentions. Did he give you a sense of why Ukraine mattered to him? Why he had gone there and put all this effort,

and in theory, risk, toward a country he doesn't live in? Yeah, I mean, that's tough to answer because I think I am a little jaded as far as, you know, the motivations behind the people who show up in war zones. He had all the boilerplate responses where everyone should be here fighting, you know, it's ridiculous that other governments haven't sent troops. Like if it's not me, then who? That kind of rhetoric.

But it just felt to me that he was kind of there to be a different version of Ryan Routh. And he was putting his entire being into it. That's really interesting. Did he at any point, TM, talk to you about American domestic politics, either in relation to America's approach to the war in Ukraine or in general during your conversation? No, he did not. But a couple of days ago, he spoke to one of his Afghan friends and politics came up and he wasn't pro Trump or pro Biden. He was pro immigration. And at this point, I mean, this was four days ago, he was living in the back of his car and said he had no money in his bank account. So it seemed very

much that he was at the end of this arc that began after Russia invaded Ukraine. So I think that brings me to the biggest question of all I have for you, which is by the time you were done talking to him and now of course incorporating this information that you just described of him living out of a car, what was your overall impression of him? Yeah, I mean my interactions with him were brief, but I think from the first time I got on the phone with him, I was kind of under the impression that this was a guy who wasn't completely there. I mean, he said things that made sense and he composed complete sentences, but yeah, he lived in a reality that I could see, but definitely wasn't a part of. And I think if it was, you

know, some guy in a vacuum that I would say this is, it was pretty unsettling, but since there were a lot of guys like Mr. Routh especially in Ukraine at that time you know seemed kind of par for the course that's not to say there aren't partners in Ukraine that are there for all the right reasons and doing great things he just was kind of in a different camp. So what were your first thoughts when you realized that this same guy you had been talking to about Ukraine had been arrested for allegedly attempting to assassinate former President Trump.

Yeah, I mean, sadly, it kind of checked out. Right at the heart of this is the war in Ukraine and some way, shape or form that the US has sent and other governments have sent money and weapons but not people and the people that have gone are of varying backgrounds and have varying motives and in some way shape or form like the war always comes home. And that was just an extension of that. It was an extreme extension and I didn't think it was going to be someone I talked to on the phone or quoted in a story a year ago, but so it goes. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN AND OUT OF THE FLOOR.

Well, TM, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN AND OUT OF THE FLOOR. Yeah, thanks for having me. On Monday night, The Times reported that Routh had authored a self-published book focused on Ukraine, in which he expressed his hatred for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his disdain for Donald Trump. In the book, Routh described Trump as a threat to American democracy, and at one point told his readers, quote, You are free to assassinate Trump.

We'll be right back. By Monday, amid the police briefings and the criminal charges, the real question on almost everyone's mind was how could this be happening again and happening again so soon, which inevitably led to questions about the Secret Service, the agency whose 3,000 agents are responsible for protecting presidential candidates, an agency that by its own admission failed to do that two months ago in Pennsylvania. On Monday morning, President Biden himself weighed in, saying that in his mind, there was no longer any debate.

The Secret Service, quote, needs more help. So I put all of those questions to my colleague, Glenn Thrush, who has been reporting on the Secret Service's troubles over the past few months. Glenn, should we see what happened here? An agent spotting this gun before the suspect could fire a shot, his eventual arrest, as the Secret Service succeeding? Or, as President Biden seemed to have suggested on Monday, should we see all of this as a sign that the Secret Service is still struggling to do its job?

Well, it's both. The individual agents responded swiftly and they had keen eyes. They did their jobs. But the Secret Service writ large seems to have committed some significant errors in terms of securing the perimeter of Trump's golf club. It appears that Ralph camped out for about 12 hours on the perimeter of Trump's golf course. And that reflects a failure by the Secret Service

and its local partners in law enforcement to sweep and secure the perimeter. That's 12 hours. We're not talking about somebody who showed up and then jumped into the bushes. This was somebody who could have been detected for a half of a day. So when we think about the shortcomings exposed here on the part of the Secret Service, it's in failing to secure that perimeter, not in of course, spotting a barrel of a secret service, it's in failing to secure that perimeter, not in of course spotting a barrel of a gun along a tree line, which as you said,

seems quite heroic. Michael, that's the duality. On one hand, they're among the best trained, best equipped law enforcement officials in the country. On the other hand, their mission is so amorphous, rapidly changing, and difficult that it's oftentimes hard for them to deal with all these emergency threats. Over the past six months, it seems like they have been one step behind, that they continue to be behind the curve when it comes to addressing all of these new problems.

Well, let's talk about that and whether or not it seems to be a resource problem. Because one thing that we learned in the aftermath of the first attempt on Trump's life during that political rally in Pennsylvania was that Trump and those around him have said that some of their previous requests for more security from the Secret Service were denied. And the thinking was that after that, that they would get more security. So did that ever happen? We've been told that they have gotten enhanced security, and it's not just bodies. It's individuals doing on-the-ground intelligence to determine threats.

But here's the thing. All law enforcement folks, from prison guards to local cops, have trouble recruiting and hiring people. And the standards for the Secret Service are the highest in the country, comparable to hiring FBI agents. So you can't just recruit people easily. So there's a manpower shortage to be able to deal with these threats, which are emerging and morphing and evolving into challenges that the Secret Service has never had to confront before.

That makes me wonder, and here, of course, we can't get into Donald Trump's head or into the conversations he has with his security detail, but why is he playing, to put this bluntly, so much golf on an open-seeming golf course that would seem to present a unique challenge to this already strained Secret service detail. Well, you and I both know that this is part of his routine This is how he blows off steam. This is how he socializes Sacrificing this would be an immense change Particularly at a period of time where he is under a tremendous amount of stress. And before we forget, he was shot,

he was grazed in the ear. And to anyone who's experienced that kind of trauma, it shapes you, it changes you, it creates a ton of stress. Throw this on top of that, golf happens to be the way that this guy happens to unwind. That said, it's virtually impossible to provide blanket security in that kind of an environment.

And it would make it a lot easier on the Secret Service, which is overstretched already, if they didn't have to confront those kind of challenges day after day, weekend after weekend. So, I want to understand from you, Glenn, because you've been covering this so closely, how this latest assassination attempt and this duality, this kind of mixed view of whether the Secret Service handled it really well, is likely to fit into the current investigations into the Secret Service. Congress has been looking into what happened at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. So far, their conclusions are very unflattering to the Secret Service.

And there are all these calls for major reforms top down within that agency. Is what happened in Palm Beach, do you think, going to fuel those calls or, because of its complex duality nature, going to be treated a little bit differently? Look, I think we're on two tracks here. You have to do something to triage the situation because you're in the middle of the most intense campaign in terms of security in the history of this country. So they've got to throw whatever resources, whether it's bringing in other federal law enforcement officials, coordinating better with the locals just to deal with the challenges of the current election for the next couple of months, right?

But after that, and this comes from conversations with a lot of people, former and current federal officials, there has to be more accountability, there has to be more precise systems in place. So I think after all is said and done, we are going to see a major top to bottom overhaul of this agency. Well, Glenn, thank you very much. Thank you. What I can tell you is that we have immediate needs right now and we have great support, not only from President Biden. And you saw his public statement today.

After I spoke to Glenn, the head of the Secret Service now and we have great support not only from President Biden and you saw his public statement today. After I spoke to Glenn, the head of the Secret Service acknowledged the agency's need for greater funding and for more agents during a news conference. Success, we have to have it every day. We cannot have failures. And in order to do that, we're going to have some hard conversations with Congress and we're going to have some hard conversations with Congress, and we're going to achieve that. But as the debate waged over the conduct of the Secret Service, there was another conversation happening on Monday about something arguably even bigger,

which is whether the United States has now officially entered a new era of political violence with Donald Trump at its center. There have been periods of political violence throughout American history. We've had four presidents who were assassinated and another one who was shot and seriously wounded. Peter Baker is the Times Chief White House correspondent. But what we're seeing now does stand out. I think we've had two attempts on the life of a former president and presidential candidate

Within just two months and that's a lot fortunately in this case Trump has survived both of them, but it raises questions about our polarization about the anger in our Politics and our culture and about whether political violence is becoming an accepted or if not accepted and expected regular feature of our politics. Right. And when we think about political violence in this moment or the threat of political violence, it's not just that there have been these two attempted assassinations of former President Trump.

There are smaller, admittedly, meaningfully smaller versions of political violence happening across the country. You're right. Exactly. Even in Springfield, Ohio, a small town in the Midwest where there's been an influx of Haitian migrants. And the former president just said last week that these immigrants are eating people's

pet dogs and pet cats. Not true. No evidence of that. But it hasn't stopped him from saying it. And it seems to have provoked some sort of reaction because there have been more than 30 bomb threats and other threats in Springfield just in the last few days alone.

And people in the Haitian community, of course, also feeling particularly threatened. And that again, comes back to Trump actually, right? And of course, anger has been the animating force of Trump's time in politics. Both the anger he stirs among his supporters against his rivals and the anger he generates among opponents who come to loathe him. Right.

In some sense, Trump is the through line in this new era of political violence, but that's a pretty complicated equation to think about. And I want us to explore this for a minute. I mean, this idea that Trump has at times inspired political violence through his rhetoric. We know that dating back to his first campaign and to January 6th. And now, on two occasions, in quick succession has become the target of political violence. How are we supposed to think about the two sides of that equation? Yeah, exactly.

I think he has elevated the temperature in our society to the point where therefore politics is an existential fight. And it's not just enough to have a debate about what the best immigration policy is. The immigrants who are here are a threat. They must be dealt with in some way or another. And obviously most rational people don't believe

that that should mean political violence, but it doesn't take that many irrational people to cause real trouble. And similarly on the other side, where he inspires such anger at himself because of the way he is, that inspires again, people who might not be fully rational to potentially at least lash out as well.

Of course, Peter Trump is making a very different argument in this moment, which is that these assassination attempts are not the result of a heightened political temperature that he has created in the system, but instead, he is pretty explicitly blaming Democrats and the way that they treat him. Right. And look, you know, the language that Democrats are using against him is pretty strong, right?

They're not saying that he is wrong about tax policy or foreign policy. They're saying he is an existential threat to the country, that he wants to be a dictator, that America, as we have known it, might not exist any further if he becomes president. Now, when he complains about that though, he then uses the same kind of language, if not more extreme, about them, because he says that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are destroying the country,

that you won't have a country anymore if she's elected, he says, he literally on Fox News, while complaining about democratic rhetoric, said that Biden and Kamala are the enemy within. Well, if we believe, and he's making the argument that we should, that using such language encourages people to take violence against him,

he doesn't seem to have any compunctions about using language like that against them. And in fact, he's used much worse. He has over the years directly encouraged beating up protesters or hecklers at his rallies, shooting unarmed people like looters or immigrants. He has mocked the vicious attack on Speaker Pelosi's husband.

I mean, he has gone much further than the language he complains about Democrats using in his own rhetoric. And so I think we're in a moment in our history where we risk normalizing that kind of conversation. Peter, I want to be careful with this question, but it feels upon reflecting on what Glenn Thrush, our colleague, just told us that we're now facing two very serious problems at the same time, and they're very interrelated. We're facing the problem of our Secret Service

being stretched very thin and everyone understanding it because there have been two attempts on the life of the same Republican nominee for president. And simultaneously, the political temperature of the country fueled by that candidate is really high. And that combination seems very fraud and very worrisome. It is fraud and it is worrisome and you don't know where it can lead.

I'm reminded that in the morning of his own assassination, Jack Kennedy reportedly said, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it. In other words, he seemed very fatalistic about the idea that you could ever truly protect a president. Now we've done a lot since then to make it a lot harder. And there are more things presumably that can be done now as a result of the lessons that will presumably be learned from these two most recent incidents.

But it is true that we're in a moment where our polarization is so exacerbated, our public conversation is so toxic, the anger is so thick in the air that you don't know where it's going to lead. And we've never, you know, in decades, we have not lived through the crisis that a political assassination of somebody

at that level would cause. It would rip the country apart. Right, it would simply just tear us apart. It would just the country apart. Right, it would simply just tear us apart. It would just tear us apart. Well, Peter, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, a former engineer for the company that operated the Titan submersible, which

imploded in the ocean last year and killed everyone on board, testified that he was fired for raising safety concerns within the company. During a hearing, the engineer told Coast Guard investigators that he was fired for refusing to approve a deep-sea expedition after he had determined that Titan's hull was unsafe. Another former employee, the company's finance director, testified that she quit over safety concerns, in particular over the submersible's design, which had never met industry standards. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Eric Krupke, and Luke Vanderklug. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Alicia Baitu, and was engineered

by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.