Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

The second assassination attempt on the life of Donald Trump in the past two months is already being memory-holed by the mainstream media.

Who’s to blame for the second attempt? Beyond the obvious implications for society as a whole, the latest attempt will have major ramifications for markets and investors.

That’s because the economic and regulatory policies of the two candidates — Trump and Harris — could not be more different.

Trump wants lower taxes, less regulation, high tariffs to create high-paying U.S. jobs (a policy first advocated by Alexander Hamilton and later expanded by Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln), an end to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, a strong national defense and reforms to the FBI and the intelligence community (IC).

Harris wants higher taxes (including much higher capital gains taxes on stock profits), more regulations, open borders (which lowers average wages), a depleted defense posture, permanent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, censorship of dissenting views (under the false label of “misinformation”) and a continuation of the weaponized FBI and IC to wage war on domestic political opponents.

The choice is clear. Yet investors and voters won’t have that choice if Trump is killed.

Increasingly, it appears that the U.S. government operating through the Secret Service, FBI and CIA is at least complicit in the Trump assassination attempts.

They may be actively creating the conditions for an assassination through intentional gross negligence by Trump’s security detail and nurturing mentally deranged Trump-haters in a way that leads directly to the sniper’s nest.

Let’s explore these claims in detail.

The last attempted assassination of a president was the shooting of President Reagan on March 30, 1981, over 43 years ago. The last attempt before that was a shooting aimed at President Ford on Sept. 22, 1975, 49 years ago.

Of course, President John F. Kennedy was killed by an assassin on Nov. 22, 1963, almost 61 years ago.

That makes two shootings and one assassination of U.S. presidents in the past 61 years prior to July 13, 2024. President Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts in the past 80 days.

Something is seriously wrong with that timeline. One is reminded of the Ian Fleming quote from his James Bond novel Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

I’m willing to shorten Fleming’s timeline in the case of Trump — Twice is enemy action.

At this point, it’s fair to conclude that the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) is complicit in the Trump assassination attempts.

The security failures at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally site last July are well-known at this point and don’t have to be repeated at length.

The USSS failed to secure the perimeter, failed to secure the shooter’s rooftop location within 150 yards of Trump’s podium with a clear line of sight and didn’t notice that the shooter was using a rangefinder and a drone to survey the area and that the shooter was clearly visible on his rooftop position with a rifle.

Attendees at the rally tried to warn the local police and USSS. The local police tried to intervene but fell off the roof ledge when the shooter aimed at them. The USSS ignored the warnings entirely. Then the shooting began.

That kind of gross negligence is tantamount to saying, “Fire away, we won’t stop you” to the thousands of violent and mentally disturbed Trump-haters all over the country.

The FBI cover-up began almost immediately when the shooter’s body was cremated and the rooftop shooting location was scrubbed clean before intensive forensics could be concluded.

We still know next to nothing about the shooter, his motivations or his affiliations. We may never know.

Below, I address the second would-be assassin of Donald Trump. Who is he? Why would he want to kill Trump? Did he have any connections to the intelligence community?

Read on.

Who Is Ryan Routh?

The gross negligence continued at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the second attempted assassination took place. The golf course itself was not secured. The alleged shooter, Ryan Routh, had set up a sniper’s nest in some bushes near the green on the sixth hole.

Trump was playing on the fairway of the 5th hole when Routh (according to witnesses) was confronted by the USSS who were patrolling one hole ahead of Trump. Routh would have had a clear line of sight to shoot Trump at about 230 yards on the fifth green, 50 yards on the sixth green, and 135 yards on the seventh green.

According to witnesses and the criminal complaint, Routh was using an SKS-type 7.62×39 caliber long-barreled rifle with a scope. I’ve fired similar weapons and consistently hit the target at 100 yards with no scope and I’m not a highly trained marksman. There would have been no difficulty hitting Trump at the distances noted above using a scope.

It’s interesting that the rifle is Russian-designed and may have been manufactured in Russia. Was this part of a planned effort to somehow “blame Russia” or show a “Russian connection” once Trump was dead?

In any case, Trump was minutes away from being killed. Again, the USSS performance was so incompetent that they can fairly be considered accomplices to the attempted assassination even if they didn’t pull the trigger.

This Guy’s Unbalanced

In 2002, Routh was convicted of “possessing a weapon of mass destruction” (a fully automatic machine gun). He was arrested after barricading himself in a shack. He has eight other arrests on his police record.

Routh went to Ukraine in 2022 to volunteer to fight against Russia. He was rejected because of his age (he’s 58 years old) and complete lack of military experience or training. Routh tweeted extensively about these efforts and gave interviews to The New York Times and many other media outlets.

Undeterred by the rejection, Routh remained in Kyiv and later Lviv in western Ukraine where he organized a group to recruit foreign fighters to come to Ukraine and fight as mercenaries. His ideas were ridiculous, including attempts to recruit 10,000 Afghani fighters following Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. He got no more than a handful of interested parties.

The International Legion (a true mercenary group with seasoned armed fighters) considered Routh unstable and kept their distance.

Routh was photographed smiling with members of the Azov Brigade in Ukraine, a self-declared neo-Nazi fighting unit that proudly displays insignia used by the Nazi Waffen-SS in World War II. Routh’s neo-Nazi connections and failure as a Ukrainian recruiter didn’t stop Western media from interviewing him.

He was held up as an exemplar of U.S. support for Ukraine and the need to do everything possible to help the corrupt Zelenskyy regime. Routh was perfectly in sync with the Biden-Harris propaganda machine generating support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine even though he was regarded by those who knew him as mentally unstable.

But Routh is not stupid and speaks clearly and grammatically. Instead, his mental illness takes the form of delusional thinking. He talks about the importance of peace, love and understanding among people and then says the way to achieve peace is to take up arms and kill Russians.

His call for mercenaries from around the world is completely detached from the reality of how mercenary armies actually work.

The scariest part of Routh’s interviews is that he precisely mimicked the talking points you hear every day from MSNBC and CNN. Routh says that Trump is an existential threat to humanity and a threat to democracy. He says that Trump must be stopped at all costs. He says that Trump is an enemy of peace and freedom.

Sound familiar? It should. These are exactly the lies and propaganda that corporate media spew every day and have for the past nine years.

Who Bankrolled Routh?

MSNBC and CNN and the rest of corporate media put out these lies about Trump as a form of propaganda. The lies are aimed at a target audience of Trump-haters and progressive lightweights. Routh was the target audience.

Corporate media are too cowardly to take direct action against Trump. But by putting out propaganda, they hope to trigger those who are prone to such action.

The triggering propaganda was not limited to the media. Kamala Harris said of Trump, “Does one of us have to come out alive? Ha, ha, ha, ha!” Joe Biden said, “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”

Tim Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz, said, “Buh-bye, Donald Trump.” Democratic member of Congress Dan Goldman said about Trump, “He is destructive to our democracy and… he has to be eliminated.”

I could offer 100 similar quotes but you get the idea. The media class and the political class are calling for Trump to be killed. It’s just a matter of triggering someone to do it. In Routh’s case, he was completely triggered. Then he picked up his rifle.

Just as the USSS are responsible for letting these assassinations happen, corporate media and many Democrats are responsible for triggering unstable individuals to conduct the assassination attempts.

It’s not a stretch to say the USSS, corporate media and many Democrats are all out to kill Trump. They simply rely on mentally ill zealots to do their wet work.

Routh told the court on Monday, Sept. 16, that he had no material financial assets and owned no property. The court has appointed a public defender to represent Routh. If he has no assets, how was Routh able to afford his move to Hawaii? His travels to Ukraine? How did he finance his recruiting effort while in Ukraine? Where did he get the rifle? How could he afford to travel to Florida to carry out the assassination plan?

It seems clear that Routh has a hidden source of financial support. The CIA typically deals in cash while running covert operations. Was Routh a CIA asset turned loose on a rogue mission with a predictable outcome?

I worked for the CIA for 10 years in various capacities, including special operations. Ukraine has been a CIA outpost since 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation. Ukraine is riddled with CIA operatives, bioweapons labs and forward-deployed assets intended to destabilize Russia.

It’s impossible that a high-profile American like Routh could run around Ukraine recruiting mercenaries without coming to the attention of the CIA and coming in direct contact with CIA assets.

This likely scenario strongly suggests that Routh may have been financed and otherwise assisted by the CIA to carry out his assassination plan. The fact that Routh was using a Russian-designed rifle (which would have been plentiful in Ukraine as Cold War surplus) is another tell.

The parallels with Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a U.S. defector to the Soviet Union and who later returned to the U.S. and had contacts with anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA, are too obvious to ignore.

As for Trump’s so-called protection, why was the golf course not secure? How did Routh set up a sniper’s nest on the sixth hole of the course without being detected until minutes before Trump came into sight?

Routh stayed in his sniper’s nest for over 12 hours before he was confronted. Why was that area not swept several times in the period? How did Routh even know Trump would be playing golf there that day without a leak from Trump’s security detail?

These and many other questions need to be answered quickly before the cover-up goes much further. The FBI official in charge of the Florida assassination attempt investigation is Jeffrey Veltri, a notorious Trump-hater who was ordered by the FBI director to scrub his social media accounts of anti-Trump posts.

One bit of good news is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will be conducting his own state-level investigation with full subpoena power and expert forensics.

Reduce Stock Exposure

The corporate media, Democrat politicians, the USSS and other branches of the deep state are largely to blame for these two assassination attempts because of their constantly repeated lies about Trump’s character, political platform and ostensible “threat to democracy.”

Calling Trump “Hitler” (as the media continually do) offers deranged individuals like Routh a license to kill. In Routh’s case he apparently took up the challenge and almost succeeded.

Saying the assassination attempt failed is not a source of comfort. One is reminded of the IRA’s near assassination of Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in 1984. After the bombing, the IRA boasted to Thatcher: “We only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” In other words, the assassination attempts will keep coming.

Investors need to prepare for the eventuality of more assassination attempts on Trump and his possible death on the campaign trail. The CIA doesn’t give up on targets that easily. The White House has done nothing to increase Secret Service assets or to improve Trump’s security detail.

The message to shooters is: “Try your luck.” It’s a good time to reduce stock exposure and increase your allocations to cash and gold.