The Trump Assassination Body Count

Police body camera footage of Routh’s arrest following the attempted assassination on September 15, 2024.

In the end we know little about the latest assassination attempt against presidential candidate and career fraudster Donald J. Trump, who was playing a round at Trump International Golf Club when a member of the Secret Service opened fire on a fence running beside the sixth hole—a dogleg to the right that runs along South Congress Avenue and Summit Boulevard.

When the agent began shooting, all he saw was a gun barrel peeking out through a chain link fence. Immediately thereafter, other agents found, in addition to the rifle (an SKS mounted with a scope), two backpacks and a Go Pro digital camera in the assassin’s hedgerow lair (the portrait of a gunman as either Peter Rabbit or an aggressive influencer).

One of the backpacks contained ceramic tiles, as if the potential assassin (who fired no shots) decided to pass the night in his golf-course ambush puzzling over a bathroom sink back splash.

“I am a patsy”

According to a law enforcement press conference (never much of a guide when it comes to decoding an assassination attempt), after the Secret Service agent opened fire on the briar patch, the presumed shooter, Ryan Wesley Routh, dropped his rifle and headed to his nearby parked car.

It appears that Routh’s black Nissan SUV (in which he was living at the time of the incident) was parked somewhere along Summit Boulevard in West Palm Beach.

According to a sherif, when Routh ran to his car and drove away, an alert citizen on the four-lane boulevard next to the sixth hole saw the fleeing suspect, followed him, and photographed his car license plate.

Armed with that information, Florida police fed the suspect’s license number into the state’s plate recognition system, and within an hour the state police “had their man.”

Only the 1963 Kennedy assassination was solved in less time: within fifteen minutes of that shooting, the Dallas police were already on the lookout via an all-points bulletin for someone matching the description of Lee Harvey Oswald. (Perhaps they even knew who they would look for before the shots were fired?)

“We have met the enemy and she is Harris…”

Since no shots were fired at Trump on the sixth hole (normally, according to Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, it’s Trump himself who is in the habit deducting shots while playing), there was no role for forensics—all those CSI types with white rubber gloves—to break down the anatomy of a shooting. It was left to those in the assassination spin rooms to explain the crime scene to the public.

The Trump campaign quickly established the narrative that it was the “rhetoric” of the Biden and Harris campaigns that has made their man a target, first in Butler, Pennsylvania, and now in West Palm Beach at the so-called “international” golf course, although much of the surrounding neighborhood looks like an industrial suburb south of the airport.

Trump himself said: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance stuck to the same talking points, but went further, saying:

But you know, the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months…..I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the Left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out.

For their part Democrats played down Routh’s Trump outrage (especially over Ukraine) and pointed to his vote in 2016 for the former president, and Routh’s later support for such Trumpeters as Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard. But it sounded half-hearted, as under their breaths many Democrats were whispering (if only to themselves), “Can’t anyone around here shoot straight?”

The Usual Suspects

If the assassin’s crime scene had been arranged on the Orient Express, I am sure Agatha Christie or her doppelgänger, Hercule Poirot, would have had questions for suspects far beyond the car-sleeping Ryan Wesley Routh and his backpack full of ceramic tiles.

I don’t rule out minuteman Routh as a prime suspect, although in a country that supposedly has 433 million guns in circulation, you cannot tell me he was the only armed man in the vicinity of the Trump golf course last Sunday or the only person nursing grievances against Trump.

Who else other than the deranged, down-on-his-luck Routh had motives to take a pot shot at the golfing Trump? Let’s round up a few of the usual suspects.

Spurned Lover Kimberly Guilfoyle

About the same time that Trump was scurrying for cover on his golf course, the Daily Mail was reporting (together with numerous pictures) that first boyfriend Donald Trump Jr. could be seen “canoodling” and “locking lips” in a trendy Palm Beach bar “with glamorous ‘it girl’ Bettina Anderson, 37, during an intimate brunch date last month.” Then, in the interests of serious journalism, the Mail added that “fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle [was] nowhere in sight.”

In case you are weak on the girlfriends of the Trump men, Guilfoyle is the ex-wife (from 2001 – 2006) of California Governor Gavin Newsom (when he was mayor of San Francisco).

Guilfoyle rose to national stardom first as a talking head (emphasis on eye shadow) on Fox News and later on as the first girlfriend, who accompanied Don Jr. into the limelight of the Trump presidency.

At the 2020 Republican National Convention Guilfoyle even succumbed to the raptures and shouted into a mic—in announcing her unwavering support for President Donald J. Trump’s reelection—that “THE…BEST…IS…YET…TO…COME,” which at those decibels sounded like a Pornhub sound track.

Now that her toy boy boyfriend (Don Jr. is 46, and Guilfoyle is 55) has found a younger girlfriend for canoodling and lip locking, and now that the affair has gone public in the Daily Mail, I would imagine that Kimberly is in a murderous rage at all things Trump.

And I can well imagine that her desperate calls to her famous quasi father-in-law have gone unanswered, as the former president himself seems distracted with either Alina Habba or Lauren Loomer. Did Kimberly’s wrath boil over?Did she come to think, as infantrymen in World War II liked to quip: “Nothing quite says good-bye like a bullet.”

Jilted Marjorie Taylor Greene:

While we’re on the subject of scorned women, it’s worth putting the Georgia member of Congress on the golf course assassin short suspect list, after her outburst when Trump Sr. seemingly threw her over in favor of siren Lauren Loomer, who seems to have replaced Marge as Mar-a-Lago’s resident QAnon scholar and Air Force One arm candy.

Loomer is a lascivious 31-year-old Trump acolyte and professional “Islamophobe” who crashes parties, pranks celebrities, and denounces all things Democratic with an array of f-bombs, insults, and racial slurs.

Of Vice President Harris, she posted: “If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Earlier, Loomer called Harris a “drug-using prostitute” and said more recently: “Look, I know Kamala Harris s**ked d**k to get where she’s today and she had to sleep with Willie Brown to get to the top.” But none of this foul-mouthed conduct got Loomer banned from Trump’s inner circle; just the opposite, it seems.

Loomer was with Trump as he prepared for the presidential debate in Philadelphia on September 10, and most likely was his source for the Haitians-eating-pets-in-Springfield-Ohio line.

An avowed 9/11 truther (she calls it an “inside job”), Loomer went the next day on Trump’s plane and in his company to the September 11 memorial service in lower Manhattan (at which Trump shook hands at Ground Zero with Vice President Harris).

All this aroused the fury—not of Donald Trump, who often uses similar crude language and peddles the same fanciful history—but of the former MAGA “it” girl, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said:

I have concerns about her [Loomer’s] rhetoric and her hateful tone. To me, many of the comments that she makes and how she attacks Republicans like me, many other Republicans that are strong supporters of President Trump, I think they’re a huge problem. And that doesn’t represent MAGA as a whole….I just felt like it was time to call it out. I think it’s wrong. We’re not a party of identity politics…not attacking people for their race.

Sorry, Marge, I guess there’s always someone who doesn’t get the word.

But was it for some other political party that Greene herself spoke of Asians as “yellow people” or wrote on Twitter: “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles” or that “Joe Biden is Hitler. #NaziJoe has to go.” Or that she took the cue (Q?) to link the Clintons to pizza deliveries?

And was it not in the cause of identity politics that Greene summed up the Islamic world as a place where men have sex with “little boys, little girls, multiple women” and “marry their sisters” and “their cousins.”

Clearly, Trump has broken Greene’s heart by taking up with another QAnon “it” girl. (Does Donald not recall Marjorie saying, “It’s odd, there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon” or that she said of deep state Democrats in 2017: “I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it…”) But we all know how wedded Greene is to the Second Amendment, and in south Florida, all roads lead to a golf course.

Abandoned Melania Trump

Any time a husband in a broken marriage is shot from the bushes of his golf course, the police will routinely question his disgruntled wife, to find out where she was “around 1:31 p.m. last Sunday afternoon.”

Of course, Melania would have many reasons for dispatching a triggerman to the rough along the sixth hole, beginning with the names E. Jean Carroll, Stormy Daniels, and Karen McDougal, and continuing through the list of 26 women who over the years have accused Trump of everything from groping to rape.

So while Melania might well be the perfect suspect—the humiliated wife now staring at tabloid pictures of Trump with his arm around Lauren Loomer in a black dress with revealing décolletage—my guess is that is that she is so over Trump that she would not waste the time or energy involved in hiring a hitman.

My intuition is that Melania’s revenge against her husband will come in a more economic form: for example, were her lawyers to assemble every Trump boast of being worth in excess of $10 billion, and then in divorce court to ask for half of that amount. Could the vainglorious Trump really then claim he was broke?

Murdering Trump on one of his golf courses might assuage a lot of Melania’s feelings of betrayal, but my sense is that she needs him alive (to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “to spur my dull revenge!”) more than dead.

Burned Crypto Investors

If everyone Trump has ever cheated in business had, by chance, shown at the same time at the fence alongside the sixth hole, the management of Trump International might well have needed to lay on extra valets just to handle the parking overflow.

To enrich himself over the years, Trump has defrauded banks, insurance companies, limited partners, investors, tenants, shareholders, suppliers, contractors, bondholders, and even his extended family—to name but a few of his marks.

On the day of the potential assassination, Trump was playing golf with his new cryptocurrency partner, real estate investor Steve Witkoff, which raises the possibility that the gunman could be someone cheated both by Trump and Witkoff, who the next day launched their joint venture, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a cryptocurrency exchange with its own stablecoin.

Because of his runaway vanity, Trump always assumes that anyone with a heater is gunning for him, but it’s possible that Witkoff was also a potential target, given that the Trump cryptocurrency venture looks like a deal with many devils, and that in no time early-round WLFI investors will be ringing their hands over diminishing returns and losses.

Trump himself brings to the fly-by-blockchain scheme 34 felony convictions relating to accounting fraud with the books of his parent corporation, the Trump Organization. Sons Don Jr. and Eric (also part of the WLFI offering and dream team) were also fined in the fraudulent accounting endeavors. But the rap sheets don’t end there.

The Trump family partners in WLFI, besides the Witkoff family, include Chase Herro, who did time in prison for drugs and who describes himself as “the dirtbag of the internet.”

Herro also said famously (sounding like Trump’s ideal partner): “You can literally sell s— in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”

Herro’s other partner in running the Trump coin operation is Zachary Folkman, whose background in crypto finance includes running a company called Date Hotter Girls.

Selling the story (if not the hotter girls?) in this case will be serial perpetrator Donald J. Trump, whose position in the company is listed as that of “Chief Currency Advocate.” (Doesn’t he have enough to do without hawking crypto coins on cable TV at midnight?) Eric and Don Jr. each have the same title, “Web3 Ambassador,” while their younger half brother, Barron, was given the honorific “Chief DeFi Visionary.”

Of the four Trumps, only the reclusive 18-year-old Barron has a dim awareness of “decentralized finance,” but the Trumps are figuring that by lending their name to an easy crypto heist, they can keep, say, 10% of the expected billions for themselves in exchange for little work other than cheerleading the get-rich-quick scheme.

Knowing little about DeFi themselves, the Trumps agreed to a business model that lets the stardust twins Herro and Folkman use the codes of an earlier failed DiFi venture, Dough Finance, in the new, Trump-blessed structure, and to position the coin issuance as funding for a bank focused on subprime borrowers (which for obvious reasons would appeal to the oft-bankrupt Trumps). What could go wrong?

Trumps Media Scam Victims

In other respects (in that the scheme eludes most all regulatory authorities and allows investors to buy a piece of Donald Trump’s political soul), World Liberty Financial echoes the swindle of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG)—a Trump-led public company in which the former president was given 115 million shares (about 60% of the public company) in exchange for agreeing to post (for six hours!) his tweets on Truth Social, a subsidiary.

Since going public on the Nasdaq exchange in late March 2024, Trump Media’s shares have fallen from a brief high of $94 to $16 today (despite having insider Marjorie Taylor Greene in the shareholding).

That price still leaves TMTG with a market capitalization of $3.2 billion, which ignores the reality that the Trump company has few clients, less than $4 million in annual revenue, and millions in accumulated losses. Sooner than later, the shares will be worthless, once the hapless TMTG management (which includes Lothario Don Jr. on the board of directors) burns through the cash on the balance sheet.

Just as World Liberty Financial is being set up as a drain on the crypto bubble, Trump Media is a tap on public share markets, but when duped investors in both ventures figure out how the Trumps have stolen their money (in the billions), they might well grab their guns.

John Wilkes Routh

Missing from most presidential assassination investigations is any sense of reality. Almost immediately after any shooting, no matter what the evidence points to, alleged assassins are declared “misfits” and “loners,” and the reasons for their shootings are divined from diaries, letters, or emails found back at their lodgings (inevitably some shabby rooming house with an unmade bed).

In Butler, PA, shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks fit the off-the-shelf, lone assassin profile, except that he lived with his parents and seemed to have an affection for the policies of Donald Trump, and certainly agreed with the former president on the right to bear arms.

Routh seems to have differed with Trump on the war in Ukraine (which Trump would give to Putin), but enough to kill him? Routh voted for Trump in 2016, and even now supported his disciples, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard.

Did the deranged and confused Routh imagine himself mobilizing to the sixth hole to protect Trump from his enemies? In his confused mind was he attending yet another January 6 rally? Did Trump Media wipe out his life savings? Did Trump grope his wife on an airplane? Or was he John Wilkes Booth rehearsing his lines, “Sic temper tyrannis”, from a sand trap?

The bigger problem is trying to attribute clear motives to anyone pointing a gun in the direction of a political candidate. To hear Trump’s survivor stories, anyone lining him up in their sights is only doing so to advance a Biden-Harris collectivist agenda, but that overlooks that Trump is less a traditional candidate (some distant heir to Greek or Roman democracy?) and more the head of an organized crime family for whom politics is just another racket. (Solon wasn’t in the game to sell crypto or gold sneakers.) In that regard Trump would do well to remember Calo’s advice to Michael Corleone in The Godfather: “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”