A jury found Ryan Routh, who in September 2024 hid in a tree line with a semiautomatic rifle at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, guilty on all five of his charges after about two hours of deliberations on Sept. 23, 2025. The DOJ said in its latest filing that the man’s crimes “undeniably warrant a life sentence.”
Officers restrained him, and his daughter, Sara Routh, yelled out in the courtroom “This is all rigged.”
“I'll get you out, Dad, I promise,” she could be heard saying after the verdict.
Routh was accused of staking out for hours in a “hideout” behind a chain-link fence at Trump International Golf Club.
He was on the sixth hole with an SKS-style semiautomatic rifle, two bags with bulletproof plates attached to the fence, a flashlight, and Vienna sausages. He fled when a Secret Service agent fired at him after spotting him and the rifle’s barrel in the brush. Routh was later captured heading north along Interstate 95.
The man was charged with attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate; possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence; assaulting a federal officer; being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition; and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
During a lengthy pretrial period, Routh filed a request suggesting a golf match with Trump that would end with either Routh dying or becoming president himself.
Once trial began in September 2025, Routh represented himself, arguing for the jurors to see his “gentleness and nonviolence.”
“If the intent was there, it would have happened,” Routh said at trial.
Justice Department prosecutors presented contrasting evidence, showing the would-be assassin’s movements and whereabouts leading up to the day to prove he was planning to kill the president for months. The latest DOJ filing Friday reaffirmed these arguments.
“He took steps over the course of months to assassinate a major Presidential candidate, demonstrated the will to kill anybody in the way, and has since expressed neither regret nor remorse to his victims,” it said in the court documents. “His arguments for a downward variance from life imprisonment are wholly meritless.”
Trump, who was the GOP’s presidential nominee at the time of the attempt on his life, hailed the jury’s guilty verdict and the DOJ’s effort in the case.
