Man Accused of Trying to Kill Trump Starts Jury Selection With a Twist

The man accused of trying to kill President Trump on his Florida golf course began his trial on Monday—and he’s already running into some strange jury selection issues. 

On September 15, Ryan Routh, a 59-year-old construction worker, allegedly hid in the bushes of Trump Palm Beach golf course with a rifle for hours. When Trump was a hole away, the Secret Service spotted Routh’s rifle peeking from the foliage and shot at him. He ran, and was later arrested and hit with five criminal charges, including attempting to kill a presidential candidate and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. Routh is facing life in prison and pleads not guilty. 

Routh is representing himself, a controversial move that’s been most bothersome to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in her effort to oversee the three-day, 60-person jury selection process. 

“I will be representing myself moving forward; It was ridiculous from the outset to consider a random stranger that knows nothing of who I am to speak for me,” Routh wrote in a letter to Judge Cannon in July. “I am so sorry, I know this makes your life harder.”

Routh has been holding up the process by asking potential jurors questions like how they would react if they saw a turtle in the middle of the road while they were driving, because their answers would “speak to their character and mindset,” he said, according to ABC News. Routh also attempted to ask jurors what they think about Palestine and about Trump’s attempted takeover of Greenland.

Cannon struck the questions, saying, “They are all really off base and have no relevance to the jury selection process.”

Court filings also quote Routh requesting both a “beatdown session” and a round of golf with Trump instead of going on trial. 

“I think a beatdown session would be more fun and entertaining for everyone; give me shackles and cuffs and let the old fat man give it his worst,” he wrote. “A round of golf with the racist pig, he wins he can execute me, I win I get his job.” He also asked for female strippers.

Routh’s witness list is an odd cast of characters, including his son, an ex-girlfriend, a Palestinian activist group, and President Trump. 

Cannon is already over Routh’s shenanigans, and has accused him of orchestrating “calculated chaos” in her courtroom and called one of his witnesses “a farce” and “obviously ludicrous.”  

Routh has not been diagnosed with any mental illness, according to his family, but he does “fixate” on things. That would explain what prosecutors say was months of planning for a failed assassination attempt, or his willingness to “FIGHT AND DIE” as a civilian volunteer for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Opening statements in Routh’s trial are on Wednesday. We’ll see what he has to say for himself.

Four in 10 Americans say that they’re buying less thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to a new poll from CBS.

Support for the tariffs has fallen steadily since June, when 41 percent of those surveyed supported them. In July, that number fell to 40 percent and in August, 38 percent.* Over half of all Americans oppose the tariffs.

Republicans make up the bulk of those who still favor the tariffs, according to CBS. They also are more likely to say higher prices are OK, actually, when Trump is responsible: 70 percent of Republicans believe Americans should be willing to pay more to support Trump’s trade policies, opposed to a mere 6 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of independents.

It’s not just the court of public opinion where Trump’s tariffs are facing an uphill battle. After an appeals court ruled that the president’s tariffs were illegal, the president asked the Supreme Court to make an “expedited ruling” to overturn the decision.

If the highest court rules against the president—which, if it follows precedent rather than bow to Trump’s whims, it very well could—then the U.S. Treasury would have to issue enormous refunds, “about half” of the $180 billion the country has collected in tariffs so far, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Trump has said that refunds of this size would lead to a second Great Depression. But if the latest dismal jobs report is any indication, it seems like we might be heading that way regardless.

* This article previously mischaracterized the polling on tariffs.

The Supreme Court on Monday accepted another emergency request from the Trump administration—this time lifting a lower court’s order that prohibited roving immigration agents in Los Angeles from profiling individuals on the basis of race, language, job, or location.

The majority ruled without explanation, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, took her conservative colleagues to task in a blistering dissent.

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” wrote the court’s eldest liberal justice. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

The Fourth Amendment “prohibits exactly what the Government is attempting to do here,” Sotomayor observed, as the Trump administration has “all but declared” Latinos in low-wage jobs “fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

Kavanaugh’s concurrence, Sotomayor noted, falsely assumed agents are just conducting “brief stops for questioning” and seizing only undocumented immigrants.

In reality, they “are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” and whisking away American citizens as well. Further, she wrote, Kavanaugh incorrectly places the burden of proof during immigration stops not on law enforcement but on “an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely”—essentially creating “a second-class citizenship status” that is incompatible with the Constitution.

In Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has repeatedly enabled the president’s lawless excesses via its emergency docket—overruling lower courts that halt his actions, oftentimes, as on Monday, providing little or no explanation. Sotomayor’s dissent railed against these tendencies, calling the decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” whose lack of explanation is “troubling.”

“In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially,” she pointed out. “Its interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not.”

Whereas there are sometimes good reasons for issuing orders without explanation, other “situations simply cry out for an explanation,” Sotomayor said—“such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law, or when lower courts and litigants need guidance about the issues on which they should focus.”

To conclude, Sotomayor wrote that Monday’s ruling means the Fourth Amendment may no longer protect the rights of people “who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.”

President Donald Trump was so desperate to claim he’s conquered crime in Washington, D.C., Monday, he dismissed claims of domestic violence.

Speaking to the White House Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible, Trump tried to tout some impressive crime reduction numbers in Washington, where he has federalized police and unleashed thousands of National Guard troops.

To support his assertion that crime was down “more than 87 percent,” Trump callously claimed that people were attempting to undermine his success by crying wolf about “much lesser things, things that take place in the home.”

“You know, they’ll do anything in the home to claim something. If a man has a little fight with the wife they’ll say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent,” Trump said.

Trump’s effort to downplay domestic violence is not only desperate but despicable. Every minute, 24 Americans experience rape, stalking, or physical violence by their partner, and domestic violence results in more than 1,500 deaths every year. Eighty-five percent of victims of intimate partner violence are women, meaning a woman is beaten every nine seconds.

Despite all of Trump’s talk about cracking down on crime, it seems his commitment only goes so far.

Over the past few weeks, the president has been eager to claim victory over violent crime in the capital. Since Trump deployed the National Guard in Washington D.C., violent crime has decreased by just 22 percent. Property crime has decreased considerably though, with carjackings down 83 percent, car thefts down 21 percent, and robberies down 46 percent.

The Trump administration has also been sending mixed messages on its use of National Guard troops. While Trump would like to imagine his crackdown is so complete that there are no more criminals to arrest, Attorney General Pam Bondi keeps touting a running tally of arrests.

At the same time, National Guard troops with no actual work have been tasked with raking up leaves and laying out mulch.

Last week, D.C. sued the Trump administration, alleging that the use of federal troops was “illegal federal overreach.” That lawsuit follows a California judge ruling that Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles in June had violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

President Trump lost to E. Jean Carroll again.

A federal appeals court has rejected the president’s appeal of the initial $83.3 million verdict that found him guilty of defaming Carroll in 2019 after she accused him of rape.

A three-judge panel on Monday ruled unanimously in favor of Carroll, rejecting Trump’s presidential immunity arguments in the process.

Since the initial ruling last year, the amount Trump owes Carroll has increased, thanks to a 9 percent annual interest rate in New York, where the case was decided.

Carroll accused Trump of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November 2022 for the countless social media posts he made about her. Those posts haven’t stopped. Trump called Carroll out again on Memorial Day last year, writing on Truth Social:

Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” She didn’t know when the so-called event took place - sometime in the 1990’s - never filed a police report, didn’t have to produce the “dress” that she threatened me with (it showed negative!), & sung my praises in the first half of her CNN Interview with Alison Cooper, but changed her tune in the second half - Gee, I wonder why (UNDER APPEAL!)? The Rape charge was dropped by a jury!

The vast majority of the verdict money—$65 million—was specifically for punitive damages, as the jury found that the president acted with malice toward Carroll.

While Trump’s team seems to be surrendering on the defamation charges, they have indicated that they intend to challenge the $5 million in damages Carroll received in a separate defamation case in which Trump was also found liable of sexually abusing Carroll.