Mark O'Connell: I spent time recently with a would-be presidential assassin recently, but Ryan Routh is an enigma

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : He seems almost a parodic version of the "undecided voter": he voted for Trump in 2016, supported Bernie Sanders in 2020, has donated several small sums of money to the Democratic Party, and is registered as an independent voter.
38% : In that piece, which was published shortly after Matthew Thomas Crooks took a shot at Trump, I considered Hinckley and Crooks as avatars of the American archetype of the lone gunman.
28% : How many more assassination attempts on Trump should we expect before the election on November 5th?
27% : He thinks Trump is a puppet of Putin and presents a danger to American democracy: the kind of views you would likely encounter within 10 minutes of turning on MSNBC.Men like failed Trump assassin Crooks, and Routh, whose actions are being investigated as an assassination attempt, are in some ways an anomaly, but they also reveal the extent to which violence is a form of political expression in American life.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.