Muddled politics and multiple arrests: who is alleged Trump would-be assassin?

Ryan Wesley Routh, the man suspected of carrying out a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, has undergone shifting political convictions that elude partisan definition.

Although records show the 58-year-old former roofing contractor making small financial donations to Democratic candidates in recent years, Routh has acknowledged voting for Trump in his 2016 election before subsequently embarking on a ideological odyssey the aims of which appear incoherent and confused.

He vehemently renounced his former support of Trump after having found a meaningful cause in trying to recruit former Afghan fighters to go to war on the side of Ukraine.

Related: Suspect charged as Trump accuses Biden and Harris of incitement

In a book apparently self-published in 2023, a man with Routh’s name sets out his views on Ukraine and other topics, including the collapse of the west’s nuclear deal with Iran, for which he blamed himself for helping to elect a “brainlesss” president and invited Iran “to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal”.

But that alone does not capture the full range of Routh’s political flip-flopping. In 2020, in a series of Twitter posts, he endorsed the presidential bid of Tulsi Gabbard, then a Democratic member of Congress, and now a vocal supporter and ally of Trump who helped the former president prepare for the recent presidential debate against Kamala Harris. Gabbard, he wrote, “will tirelessly negotiate peace deals in Syria, Afghanistan, and all turmoil zones”.

He apparently voted for Joe Biden in the subsequent election, and as of Sunday his car outside his house in Hawaii sported a bumper sticker reading Biden-Harris, though there is no indication when in the last four years it was added. By January 2024, however, he was championing the idea of a Republican ticket of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy to fend off Trump.

Routh’s political gadfly characteristics were further displayed in a 2020 invitation to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator – who he described as “very smart and educated” – to Hawaii on holiday and offered to act as an “ambassador and liaison” in his country’s dispute with the US. He also invited pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, demonstrating against hardline dictates from mainland China, to visit Hawaii and offered free accommodation.

Somewhat incongruously, his WhatsApp profile read: “Each one of us must do our part daily in the smallest steps help support human rights, freedom and democracy; we each must help the chinese.”

Routh’s unstable political views seem to have been mirrored by a turbulent personal past.

Shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022 he travelled to Ukraine to apply for its “international brigade” of foreign fighters, telling a Guardian journalist at the time that he expected to be rejected because he lacked military experience – as indeed it seems he was. Instead, he announced he planned to erect national flags from around the world in central Kyiv, organise a human chain around them and declare, “Putin, here I am”, calculating that if Russia bombed this international protest it would provoke global action.

Routh has also been arrested at least eight times, CNN reported. In 2002, he was charged with possessing a weapon of mass destruction in Greensboro, in his native North Carolina, after being pulled over by traffic police, who found a concealed gun in his vehicle.

He fled the scene and drove to his roofing business, according to local media reports, where he barricaded himself inside for three hours. He was subsequently charged with possessing a fully automatic machine gun – referred to in court documents as a “weapon of mass destruction” – possessing a concealed weapon, driving without a valid driver’s license and resisting, delaying and obstructing law enforcement.

Tracy Fulk, the charging officer, told Wired that Routh was known to police at the time of his arrest and added that she thought he would be “either dead or in prison by now”. She added: “I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.”

Describing the night of his 2002 arrest, she continued: “One night I recognized him in his vehicle. I knew he didn’t have a driver’s license, so I stopped him right in front of his roofing shop. He stopped, and as I approached his truck he pulled a sack away from the center of the seat, and I saw a gun.

“So of course I drew my gun and started saying, ‘Hey! Show me your hands, show me your hands.’ And he just basically pulled into his driveway and ran into his house. So we ended up having a [Special Response Team] callout and a big standoff for a couple of hours before they went in and we arrested him.”

Routh avoided prison over the incident after a judge handed down a suspended sentence and a probation order.

Tina Cooper, 58, a former employee at Routh’s roofing business, told the Independent that her former boss had a local reputation for doing “stupid shit”.

Related: ‘Putin, here I am’: man accused of targeting Trump had ‘delusional ideas’ about helping Ukraine

“He had threatened to blow up the entire Greensboro police department, that was all documented in the police reports,” Cooper said.

Routh was not always on the wrong side of the law. In 1991, aged 25, he was designated a “super citizen” and awarded a law enforcement Oscar by the Greensboro chapter of the International Union of Police Associations after helping to defend a woman against an alleged rapist, the Washington Post reported.

In the 2022 interview on the Ukraine border, Routh said he had left his construction business in Hawaii to “tie up every loose end to get out of town”. He said of his wife and three children, then in their 20s: “They can fend for themselves; they don’t need a dad any more.” He declared that his trip to Ukraine was a “one-way ticket” – but he later did, however, return to the US.

He was at least clear on one loyalty, explaining to the Guardian why he always seemed to be wearing a US flag while in Ukraine. “I want to make sure that if the Russians kill me, they know who they’re killing,” he said.

“I’m an American.”