Ryan Routh’s life sentence closes one of the most chilling chapters in recent American political violence, yet leaves the country deeply unsettled. He spent months plotting, traveled state to state, and ended up hidden in the Florida brush with a scoped semiautomatic rifle, waiting for Donald Trump to line up a putt. He never got a clear shot, but the intent was undeniable, and the judge said so in stark, unforgiving terms.
In court, Routh unraveled in public view: speaking in the third person, invoking Hitler and Putin, veering into rants about history, Ukraine, even buying a boat. He challenged the man he tried to kill to a round of golf, then tried to stab himself with a pen after the guilty verdict. Now he will appeal from a prison cell, as Trump walks free and a shaken nation wonders how close its politics has drifted to the edge.
