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It’s extremely easy to fall down the rabbit hole when looking at presidential assassination attempts. The most infamous is practically synonymous with conspiracy theories, with the question of who really killed JFK never likely to be satisfactorily answered.
Cubans, LBJ, labor unions, multiple gunmen, CIA assets. They all appear in and around the story, and any connection—even tangential or coincidental—is hard to dismiss when questions remain in your mind.
But the case of Ryan Routh is turning into an even more elaborate conspiracy, a tale that, even if one is willing to make a number of illogical leaps, baffles basic comprehension.
In recent days, far-right sites have obsessed over the news of a letter written by Routh the Department of Justice recently revealed.
“Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh allegedly pledged $150,000 to anyone who could kill the former president,” the Daily Wire wrote.
Those headlines have been spun into claims of a credible “bounty” on the former president’s head.
“Routh put a bounty on @realDonaldTrump,” wrote one news aggregator.
“There Is $150,000 Death Bounty on Trump’s Head,” wrote conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“For the life of me, I do not understand why the Kamala-Biden DOJ is publicly releasing a letter from Ryan Wesley Routh announcing a $150,000 bounty on my dad’s head,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “They’re putting his life even more at risk with this reckless decision.”
In the letter written by Routh, he admits he wanted to assassinate the former president.
“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” the letter reads.
The DOJ released it as part of its effort to charge Routh with attempting to assassinate the former president. He currently only faces gun charges after having been found armed on Trump’s golf course while Trump played a round.
Routh reportedly put the letter in a box and gave it to an unnamed confidant who provided it to the FBI after seeing the news.
It repeatedly got dubbed an active bounty, as though a mob boss called together all his assassins John Wick-style and sent them out into the world, a legitimate concern that every Trump appearance would now see him dodging shady underworld figures.
But for it to carry some sort of legitimacy as a post-failure plan to inspire more people to take a shot, well, let’s see how you need to get from here to there.
Routh would have had to drop off a box at a friend’s house and hope the friend decided not to open or toss it.
Routh would then need to (intentionally?) fail at assassinating Trump, his friend would then need to decide to open the box, contact the proper authorities, and the DOJ would need to decide to publish it.
But… since all that happened, perhaps it was a master plan.
Except that, crucially, for it to be an actual bounty that inspires anyone, would-be assassins would need to believe that an aimless drifter with a deranged posting history would both have $150,000 and be able to pay it from the confines of his jail cell.
A number of right-wing posters also took this at face value, believing Routh had $150,000 in the bank. And instead of just assuming he might have been… not telling the truth, they freaked out about how he got the money.
“The guy with no money is offering $150,000 Does that sound right to anyone? So much for lone-gunman theory. So who is really supplying the $150,000?” asked one person.
“Who was funding Ryan Routh?” wondered prominent user Catturd.
“He didn’t work so where did he get so much money??” said another.
Well… the CIA.
“There’s still CIA fingerprints all over this. The CIA is out of control,” wrote a Truth Social user.
“The CIA. Which means the bountry of 150,000 also come from them. Sounds like treason to me.” replied a user, echoing the idea that the CIA gave Routh the money to… again, fail in his assassination attempt, hide a letter, and have the DOJ publish it to get someone else to attempt it.
Any way you slice it, even if you accept the fact that the CIA wants to assassinate Trump (hey who knows?), it doesn’t make any sense as to why they’d use Routh as a cut-out to advertise a bounty instead of just, you know, paying someone to successfully kill Trump.
Perhaps the only possible reality is that … (inhales): The CIA gave Routh the money as a payment for an attempt, not for him to offer to others, and that, worried he might not succeed and thus be undeserving of the fee, went slightly rouge and offered it up to anyone in the world by … placing the letter in a box and hoping his friend would find it and the government would publish it after he failed, while he evaded capture and created a plan to wire the money to whoever succeeded (who would also need to then evade capture and find a way contact Routh) or set up a plan to pay whoever succeeded from his prison cell.
It’s so convoluted it makes you pine for the days of the grassy knoll.
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