FORT PIERCE, Fla. — The man accused of attempting to gun down Donald Trump on a Florida golf course came face-to-face Thursday with the Secret Service agent who prosecutors say rousted him from his hiding place at the Trump International Golf Club.
Under questioning by the accused man, Ryan Wesley Routh, Secret Service agent Robert Fercano quickly placed Routh at the scene of the crime.
“I do not know your mindset that day, but I know you pointed that weapon at my face,” Fercano told Routh, who is acting as his own attorney at the trial in federal court.
The courtroom confrontation came on a day when Routh found himself on the receiving end of several scoldings from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for failing to adhere to her warning against turning the proceedings into “a mockery of the dignity of the courtroom.”
It also came one day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on a Utah college campus, raising anxieties about political violence in the United States.
Routh began his brief interrogation of Fercano by asking him, “Is it good to be alive?”
After agreeing that it is, Fercano testified that he spotted Routh hiding in the shrubbery last Sept. 15 while checking the fence line of the golf course as part of then-candidate Trump’s security detail. He told Fercano that after being discovered, “you smiled at me.”
A 59-year-old Hawaii resident and former Trump supporter, Routh was arrested after Fercano spotted his rifle and went to investigate.
Routh, prosecutors say, allegedly aimed the weapon at Fercano, who then opened fire. The suspect dropped his weapon and fled without firing a shot. He was caught a short time later.
“Agent Fercano is the hero of this story,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Shipley told the court.
Charged with attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate and assaulting a federal officer, plus several firearm violations, Routh has pleaded not guilty and faces a sentence of life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge.
During pretrial hearings and in motions, Routh at times disrupted the proceedings and repeatedly disparaged Trump as a “fragile victim,” an “insecure ego idiot-mad fool” and a “baboon.” He even challenged the president to a golfing duel and declared he wanted to subpoena Trump.
So when Routh announced he no longer wanted to be represented by his court-appointed attorneys, Cannon called that a “bad idea” but reluctantly agreed to his request.
Cannon also ordered the public defenders to stay in the courtroom on standby as the prosecutors and Routh, dressed in a suit and confined to a corner of the courtroom, began choosing potential jurors out of a pool of 180 people.
In his opening statement, Shipley told the court Routh was armed with a “military-grade weapon” and had brought along “diapers” to get through the night while he waited in the bushes for Trump to come into his sights.
“Ladies and gentlemen, he was not there to play golf in the middle of the night,” Shipley said as he used his 40-minute opening statement to methodically lay out the government’s argument that the suspect spent weeks plotting to kill Trump.
Shipley said Routh visited the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach at least 17 times in the month before he was arrested and was “obsessively tracking Trump’s movements.”
By contrast, Routh was just three minutes into his opening statement when Cannon suddenly cut him off and sent the jurors out of the courtroom.
Instead of talking about the case, Routh had begun by asking “what happened to Homo erectus” and then launched into a monologue about violence in other countries, mentioning Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German dictator Adolf Hitler.
“Putin has murdered 1.5 million and we do nothing,” Routh said.
“Mr. Routh, we discussed the purpose of opening statements,” Cannon said, telling Routh that what he had said thus far was “not relevant.”
But when the jury returned, Routh went on a tangent about “beauty” and “building wheels,” and, growing emotional, he suddenly declared, “No, this case means absolutely nothing, and a life has been lived.”
Cannon cut off Routh again. “That concludes your opening statement,” the judge said after Routh had spoken for a total of five minutes.
Earlier, Routh sparked a minor courtroom uproar by claiming the process by which the panel of 12 jurors and four alternates were chosen was racist because prosecutors struck two jurors who were Black.
Routh claimed they were ridding the jury pool of the “African Americans.”
Cannon asked if Routh was making a Batson challenge, meaning was he accusing prosecutors of illegally trying to strike jurors based on sex, race, ethnicity or religion.
Routh quickly backed down. “I think we got our jury. … We just got a racist situation,” he said.
Outside the courtroom, Routh’s daughter said her dad was holding his own.
“He’s not, you know, a lawyer, but I think he’s been doing a great job,” Sara Routh told NBC News.
Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump and is the same judge who dismissed the charges against the president after he was accused of mishandling classified documents at his home at Mar-a-Lago.
Juliette Arcodia and Maria Piñero reported from Fort Pierce and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.
