The man found guilty of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at his Florida golf course last year attempted to stab himself in the neck with a pen after a verdict was read in federal court.
Ryan Routh’s daughter reportedly screamed out, “Dad, don’t hurt yourself,” as U.S. Marshals tried to restrain him inside the Fort Pierce courtroom on Tuesday.
Routh, 59, was found guilty on all counts after jurors deliberated for roughly two hours at the conclusion of a fast-paced, 12-day trial over his aborted plot to kill the president. He faces life in prison when he is sentenced on December 18.
Routh, who pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and chose not to have a lawyer throughout the proceedings, had planned the attack at the president’s Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach nearly one year ago. He was armed with a semiautomatic rifle while then-candidate Trump was playing golf on September 15, 2024. The incident was just months after Trump was wounded in a shooting during a Pennsylvania rally.
Secret Service agents spotted him hiding in shrubbery — what prosecutors called a “sniper’s nest” — armed with an SKS-style rifle with a shaved-off serial number.
An agent then fired at Routh, who fled the scene without firing any shots of his own. He was stopped roughly 45 minutes later while driving north on Interstate 95.
He was found guilty of attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, assaulting a federal officer, possessing a firearm and ammunition as a felon, and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
“This is not a whodunnit,” federal prosecutors told jurors during the trial in Fort Pierce.
Prosecutors focused on Routh’s intent, arguing that he “wanted” to shoot Trump despite not firing any shots, and had “obsessively stalked and tracked his intended victim” with a “meticulously” planned assassination attempt.
Routh, serving as his own counsel, delivered a brief and disjointed closing statement to the jury in which he tried to argue that the government had not proved “any intent” to kill because he never fired his weapon nor pointed the gun at Trump.
“No one ever intended to kill anyone,” he said. “The rifle was never picked up from its resting place.”
Routh once supported Trump in 2016 but grew more critical of the president in the years that followed, according to prosecutors. “It seems you are getting worse and devolving. I will be glad when you gone,” Routh wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2020.
According to prosecutors, Routh was living out of a Nissan SUV while casing the golf course and closely following Trump’s schedule, awaiting his arrival at nearby Palm Beach International Airport.
He left a box at a friend’s house in North Carolina with a letter reading, “Dear World, This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” according to prosecutors.
Routh also had multiple license plates and searched Google for “directions to Miami airport” and “flights to Mexico,” prosecutors discovered. He also searched for “hospitals in the area” and instructions on “how to make a tourniquet,” prosecutors said.
The aborted attack arrived just two months after Trump was nearly fatally shot during a campaign rally last July, when a gunman fired several shots into a crowd at an outdoor event in Pennsylvania. One bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed a spectator.
At multiple points during the trial, Routh was reprimanded by District Judge Aileen Cannon for disrupting the proceedings, asking irrelevant questions, or making statements that were beyond the scope of the case.
Cannon had also presided over and eventually dismissed a federal indictment against Trump for his withholding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Routh asked Cannon in July for permission to represent himself after he stated that he was “a million miles apart” from court-appointed public defenders.
The judge reluctantly agreed to Routh’s request but called it a “bad idea,” keeping public defenders in the courthouse to represent him if he could not.
The 12-day trial concluded after federal prosecutors called 38 witnesses who placed Routh at the scene and identified him as the suspect who could have killed Trump had he not been caught.
Routh did not testify. He called only three witnesses and had finished presenting his case Monday.
Trump praised Cannon and Department of Justice leadership on his Truth Social account.
“The trial was meticulously handled, and I would like to thank the Judge and Jury for their time, professionalism, and patience,” he wrote.
“This was an evil man with an evil intention, and they caught him,” he added.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the verdict reflects the Justice Department’s “commitment to punishing those who engage in political violence.”
“This attempted assassination was not only an attack on our president, but an affront to our very nation itself,” she said in a statement.
