For the second time this US election campaign, former US president Donald Trump has survived an assassination attempt at the hands of a would-be shooter.
Once again it has sent the media and internet sleuths into a frenzy in an effort to find details about the motivation of the suspect, named by law enforcement as Ryan Wesley Routh.
Using a comparison of Mr Routh's passport, with interconnected social media profiles and videos freely available online, ABC NEWS Verify has pieced together many of the details of the 58-year-old's activities in the years before this alleged assassination attempt.
We've combed Mr Routh's digital detritus, much of which has been scrubbed from the internet, to piece together who he is. What we've found presents a chequered history, including attempts to fight in Ukraine, philanthropic work and deeply ambiguous political affiliations.
Would-be assassin claimed to have previously voted for Trump
Mr Routh's posts on social media platform X reveal a confusing and mercurial political history. The account has now been suspended, but ABC NEWS Verify made an archive of many of his posts and replies before they became unavailable.
On X, Mr Routh claimed to have voted for Trump at the 2016 election in which the former president was propelled to power.
In March 2020 he posted in support of Hawaiian Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard as she vied for the party's nomination for president.
(Though Ms Gabbard was a member of the Democratic Party at the time, she has since left the party due to what she has described as "growing wokeness, fomenting racism, and intolerance" and has recently endorsed Trump for this year's election.)
Mr Routh also appeared to throw his support behind the very left wing of the Democratic Party, endorsing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders at the same time as he cheered on Ms Gabbard.
By early June 2020 he was publicly lamenting that former Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton was not running with then-former vice-president Joe Biden. Other tweets from 2020 are critical of Joe Biden, parroting Trump's favourite description of him as "Sleepy Joe".
Yet on the same day he appeared open to a second Trump term, penning advice to the then-president on how to get re-elected amid protests following the death of black man George Floyd in Minnesota.
By June 11, 2020, his attitude towards Trump appeared to have soured completely. Mr Routh referred to him as "retarded", adding that he would be glad when Trump is gone.
It appears Mr Routh made a series of small donations to Democratic fundraiser Act Blue in 2019 and 2020, with his name and state of residence (Hawaii) appearing in the US Federal Election Commission database.
But Mr Routh's political interests did not stay on the Democratic side of politics. On January 9 this year, he tweeted at then-candidate for the Republican nomination Nikki Haley and advised her to join with fellow Republican candidate and eventual Trump supporter Vivek Ramaswamy, describing the hypothetical alliance as "a winning ticket … we can all get behind".Mr Routh continued to express a strong dislike of Donald Trump as recently as July 17 this year, posting that Vice-President Kamala Harris and Mr Biden should attend the funeral of Corey Comperatore who died during the first assassination attempt on Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.He claimed that attending the funeral was something "Trump will never do".
Overall, his X history offers few consistent clues as to his political motivation for attempting an assassination, beyond an expressed dislike of Trump.
Involved in recruitment of foreign fighters
Social media posts on X and LinkedIn indicate that Mr Routh has taken a keen interest in Ukraine's defence, including a willingness to fight. This evolved into actively recruiting foreign fighters for the war.
Even before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Mr Routh tweeted that he was planning to fly to Ukraine, likening Vladimir Putin to Hitler and urging others to also join in the fight.During February and March 2022 he said that he was prepared to lay down his life for Ukraine's defence in a series of tweets, including one in which he claimed he was willing to "kill Putin" and "end russia" (sic).
In late March Mr Routh travelled from Hawaii to Ukraine via Poland, according to tweets from his X account.
In June 2022 he appeared in an interview with Newsweek Romania while he was allegedly in Kyiv. The then 56-year-old described being rejected as a volunteer due to his age and lack of military experience, adding that instead he was focusing his efforts on recruiting other foreigners to join, mentioning that he had helped place a 74-year-old Japanese man in a Ukrainian unit and describing the fight as one between good and evil.
Mr Routh was also featured in a Central News Agency article in June 2022 in which he was described as "assisting" the foreign legion in Kharkiv, hanging banners of flags of foreign nationals who had volunteered for Ukraine.He was also the point of contact for at least two websites involved in the recruitment of foreign fighters both for Ukraine as well as Taiwan's defence.
The websites Fight for Ukraine and Taiwan Foreign Legion both list him as a recruitment contact and contain links to his personal social media and phone number.
His recruitment efforts for Ukraine were mentioned by other media outlets including The New York Times in March 2023 when he was described as spending several months in Ukraine and having plans to field recruits from around the world including Afghanistan.In March 2023 Mr Routh posted on his personal LinkedIn account that he had visited both Kyiv and Washington DC to "provide soldiers for the war effort" although it is unclear whether he visited politicians.
And in June that year he boasted on X that he had "250 soldiers who are ready to fly to Haiti" seemingly in response to a flooding disaster in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
According to Taiwanese sources, the ABC understands Mr Routh briefly travelled to Taiwan in June 2023 via Istanbul before departing to Japan.
However, Mr Routh's efforts at recruitment of foreign fighters for Ukraine appear to have hit some hurdles.
In August last year he posted: "Ukraine does not want Afghan soldiers. I tried for 6 months to get them to accept Afghans and they do not want them in their country."
That same month he promoted the "Taiwan Foreign Legion" on X, claiming that he wanted to start a foreign legion to "protect the shores of Taiwan".
In his desperation for support he even tagged Elon Musk in April this year asking him whether he could purchase a rocket from the billionaire owner of SpaceX for the purpose of using it to assassinate Vladimir Putin.
From tiny houses to international peacemaker?
Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine becoming a central focus for Mr Routh, he used social media to promote his business Camp Box Honolulu which advertised small affordable house kits aimed at Hawaiian residents.
Mr Routh, the owner according to LinkedIn, is seen in multiple photos and videos on the company's website working on tiny home kits.The two business reviews available on the company's Facebook page are negative, mentioning poor workmanship and an interaction with "the owner Ryan" who allegedly told an unhappy customer that "he was disappointed with the kind of human being" that they were.
Mr Routh's tweets prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 indicate he was focused on local issues such as road closures and homelessness.
Peppered among these posts on local issues, however, were several tweets dating back to 2020 suggesting that he fervently believed he could impact politics across the globe.For instance, in August and September 2020 Mr Routh attempted to contact the then-South Korean president Moon Jae-in, calling on him to work with North Korea to improve relations between the hermit kingdom and the United States.
This interest in peacemaking followed an earlier offer aimed at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in which he suggested he could work as an "ambassador and liaison" to help "end disagreement and sanctions".Throughout 2020 Mr Routh also posted about protests in Belarus and Hong Kong, suggesting that people fleeing those conflicts should come to Hawaii, including sharing his home address for anyone who wished to "come and stay forever".
What we have yet to determine from Mr Routh's eclectic and at times contradictory online presence is any indication or warning that he was allegedly imminently planning to attack Donald Trump. This is no doubt something that US authorities will be digging into further in the coming hours and days.
