Former President Donald Trump said Monday that the man who allegedly tried to assassinate him while he was golfing on Sunday was inspired by the “rhetoric” of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“They believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris and acted on it,” the 78-year-old Republican presidential candidate said. told Fox News,
“I am being shot at because of their rhetoric, while I am the one who is supposed to save the country and they are the ones destroying it – from the inside and from the outside.”
Trump cited suspect Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, as having used similar language to Biden and Harris, saying the former president would pose a threat to American democracy if he returned to the White House.
Routh was found hiding in bushes near Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was golfing. Authorities recovered a tactical rifle, a scope and a GoPro camera.
“These are people who want to destroy our country,” Trump said of Biden and Harris. “It's called the enemy from within. They're the real threat.”
Routh posted numerous political commentaries on social media and was interviewed by major news outlets in recent years about his efforts to recruit Afghans to support Ukraine against Russia's invasion.
In April, Rauth wrote that “Democracy is on the ballot and we can’t lose.”
Biden, 81, had repeatedly used the phrase “democracy is on the ballot” before ending his campaign for a second term on July 21 and endorsing Harris as his successor.
Harris, 59, has also claimed that Trump is a threat to democracy — both before and after she was shot during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle, with a motive still unclear.
“Donald Trump wants to turn our democracy into a dictatorship,” Harris said in Las Vegas on July 9 — four days before the first assassination attempt against Trump.
Less than a month later, Harris again said that “our fundamental liberties are on the ballot, and so is our democracy”, a statement she repeated twice on July 31.
Democrats say Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
Biden and Harris have been criticized for taking Trump out of context in presenting this argument, including saying this year that Trump had threatened a “bloodbath” if he lost, when the former president was actually referring to the election's potential effects on the auto industry.
Spokespeople for Biden and Harris have not commented on Routh's use of language similar to theirs.
Routh has also made a number of other posts online — including claiming in 2020 that he was a disappointed former Trump supporter who backed the populist conservative in 2016.
Also this year, he wrote that he believed two of Trump’s former rivals, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and GOP businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, should band together to run for president as independents.
