While Trump was playing golf at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, with Steve Witkoff, a friend and major donor, a Secret Service officer who was doing a security sweep a few holes in front of him spotted the muzzle of a rifle with a scope sticking out of the fence and opened fire on the suspect. Trump was about 300 to 500 yards away from the incident, Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw told reporters.
A witness saw a man fleeing the scene and took a photo of his car, a black Nissan, and with that information, authorities tracked the vehicle down Interstate 95, where Martin County Sheriff’s Department officers arrested him.
The suspect was “relatively calm” when he was taken into custody, Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder told reporters. “He didn’t show much emotion, and he never asked, ‘What is this?'”
Bradshaw said the witness was taken to Martin County and identified the suspect, who was later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, and an AK-47 rifle, a backpack and a Go-Pro camera were found on a fence outside the Trump Golf Club.
The Secret Service said Trump was safe, and the FBI said it was investigating the incident as an “assassination attempt.”
Regardless of the FBI’s description of the incident, it is still unclear whether the incident was a real “assassination attempt,” as explicitly as the first failed attempt on Trump two months ago. This made the political impact of the West Palm Beach incident unclear, unlike the first attempt, which sparked a wave of reactions from lawmakers around the world and the business community, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his support for Trump at the time. Since then, the tech billionaire has helped start a pro-Trump political action committee and conducted an interview with him on his social media platform X, at the same time leading some major observers to predict a Trump victory in November, expectations that pushed President Joe Biden to end his re-election efforts and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, who quickly gained the support of the Democratic Party, chose academic and politician Tim Walz as her running mate, and raised more than $500 million.
The yawning and uncertainty that shrouded the response to the West Palm Beach incident on Sunday also prompted Republican pollster Frank Luntz to tell X that he needed to wait for the facts to be determined before responding.
Many details seem faint, amidst the commotion that followed the disclosure of the incident, but in reality they are a bundle of questions that may seem like a key to locks that it may be in the interest of “some party” to keep closed.
Local media have questioned how a heavily armed individual could have easily entered the golf course and hidden there in the bushes, especially since the fact that there are places along the perimeter of the property where golfers — including Trump — can be seen by those behind the fence has long been known to law enforcement. During Trump’s time as president, news photographers were often able to capture him on the greens by finding gaps in the bushes.
Although Trump’s Sunday golf plans were not part of any public schedule, on days when he is not campaigning, he can often be found playing golf at one of his courses. One of his favorite courses is the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, about a 10-minute drive from his Mar-a-Lago residence. It is one of three golf clubs he owns in Florida, and features 27 holes of championship golf, as well as event space. Trump often has lunch and holds meetings at the club between rounds.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw seemed to anticipate being a target on the firing line of similar questions, saying that if Trump were president at the time, the Secret Service would not have allowed him to play golf in such an open environment, but “he is not the current president, so we are limited by what the Secret Service deems possible.”
But other questions remained unanswered, without any convincing answer being provided regarding the security arrangements for a highly sensitive figure, and in a country with a history of disastrous political assassinations. How was Trump allowed, after coming close to being shot in Pennsylvania, to go out to play golf in a place that seemed impossible to secure? What is expected to happen in a country with a painful history of successful assassinations like America when it sees a former president and a strong and controversial candidate targeted, not once but twice in such a short time?!
One of the more questionable “skeptical” stories is that within minutes the license plate was scanned by state license plate readers, the fleeing suspect was quickly tracked down I-95 and immediately detained at gunpoint.
Even more surprising, as William Snyder, the sheriff of neighboring Martin County where the arrest took place, noted, was that the suspect was unarmed and appeared “relatively calm, not showing much emotion.”
Some believe that these questions are in the status of “evidence” that reinforces the feelings of “uncertainty” that accompanied the incident, and called for the possibility of acquiescing to the “conspiracy theory” as an incident to “recycle” the reputation of the Secret Service, which was greatly damaged after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in which the Secret Service faced serious questions about its competence, which led to the resignation of its director – then – Kimberly Shettle. The incident on Sunday seems to paint a rosier picture of the agency. Bradshaw was seen repeating and repeating his statement that “the Secret Service did exactly what it was supposed to do, and its agent did a great job.” He said that one of the agents, who was assigned to jump one space in front of the former president to identify potential threats, was able to spot the gunman’s gun barrel protruding from the fence surrounding the golf club and “immediately engaged this individual.”
Although the United States of America is fortified by an independent and strong media, and by solid and elected democratic institutions, the so-called “parallel state” can easily move in spaces that know very well the distance separating it from the eyes of censorship, and intersect with secret security boxes, in order to change the course of history, in a way that appears spontaneously before the eyes of the American people, and this is the experience that shakes confidence in some major incidents that occur in conjunction with decisive political transformations, including, of course, the second assassination attempt on Trump two months before the future of the “master of the White House” is decided next November.
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