Routh painted a grandiose image of himself online that didn't match up with his reality
The man suspected of trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Sunday depicted himself on social media as a globe-trotting freedom fighter – tweeting at world leaders, traveling to Ukraine to support its war effort, and professing his willingness to die for the causes he believed in.
But the grandiose image that Ryan Wesley Routh painted online didn’t seem to match up with his reality. Away from his keyboard, the 58-year-old ran a small company that built tiny homes in a suburb of Honolulu, Hawaii, and he spent his time writing letters to his local newspaper about homeless encampments, graffiti on an Oahu highway tunnel, and a dispute about a hiking trail.
In the years before Routh’s alleged assassination attempt, he posted messages online criticizing Trump and showed a deep interest in supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Routh joined X, then known as Twitter, in January 2020, and immediately began posting about politics, according to tweets saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Routh claimed in a 2020 post that he supported Trump in 2016, but had changed his tune on the former president – writing that “I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment (sic) and it seems you are getting worse and devolving.” More recently, he suggested that Trump’s campaign slogan should be “make Americans slaves again.”
Routh also displayed a sense of self-importance in messages to world leaders as early as 2020, when he tweeted repeatedly at North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
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