Ryan Routh, the 59-year-old man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at his Florida golf course in 2024, was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, handed down the sentence in a Florida courtroom. It marks a win for the Justice Department, which had argued for Routh to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Routh was convicted last year of the attempted assassination after he hid out in the bushes with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course as the then-presidential candidate was golfing on September 15, 2024. Routh’s assassination attempt was thwarted by Secret Service Special Agent Robert Fercano, who spotted Routh near the sixth hole and fired at him. Routh fled the scene in a vehicle he had parked nearby, but he was eventually caught by officers with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office as he was driving north on Interstate 95.

Routh represented himself during the trial after firing his lawyers and argued that “merely” having a weapon “in the presence of another is not intent.”

A jury deliberated for two hours following a two-week trial before it found Routh guilty on all five counts, including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate and assault of a federal officer. After the verdict was handed down, Routh grabbed a pen in the courtroom and tried to stab himself in the neck, and law enforcement officers quickly restrained and shackled him.

Evidence used by prosecutors during the trial included some of Routh’s writings, where he discussed his displeasure with Trump and wrote that Iran is “free to assassinate Trump as well as me.”

The FBI also obtained a letter from Routh that was delivered to a civilian witness.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” Routh wrote in the letter. “I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.”

The letter also mentioned Iran and criticized Trump for ending “relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”

Officers who arrested Routh on the day of the attempted assassination also found cellphones and a list of flights out of the country when they searched his vehicle. The cell phone records showed that the phones had pinged near Trump’s golf course and Mar-a-Lago home multiple times between August 18 and September 15, 2024.

Routh had a fascination with Ukraine and was once quoted in The New York Times about his efforts to recruit fighters for the country. The Times reported that Routh had traveled to Ukraine for several months in 2022.

According to a Justice Department filing, Routh communicated with a person he believed to be a Ukrainian and requested a rocket-propelled grenade while lamenting that Trump “is not good for Ukraine.”

In a message to his contact, Routh wrote, “I need equipment so that Trump cannot get elected,” according to the DOJ filing.

Routh’s attempt to kill Trump came just two months after Thomas Crooks fired eight shots at Trump and struck him in the ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Two months after Routh tried to assassinate Trump, the Republican nominee won the 2024 presidential election.

Leif Le Mahieu contributed to this report. 

J.K. Rowling celebrated a detransitioner’s recent $2 million malpractice victory as proof that the narrative promoted by trans activists for years has begun to unravel under legal and medical scrutiny.

Rowling highlighted the case of Fox Varian in a post to X. “A young detransitioner, Fox Varian, has won $2 million damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit, in which she sued the psychologist and surgeon who approved her for a double mastectomy, aged 16,” she wrote. 

The Harry Potter author did not hold back her criticism of the trans movement in its entirety. “As the floodgates open, and more and more detransitioners sue the clinicians who subjected them to an unregulated medical experiment, gender identity activists will almost certainly continue to ignore any evidence that fails to support their preferred narrative,” she continued.

According to court testimony, Varian’s mother opposed the surgery but was warned that refusing transition would place her daughter at serious risk of suicide. The lawsuit is one of a growing number brought by detransitioners who say they were rushed into irreversible medical procedures while clinicians ignored or minimized dissent, as previously reported by The Daily Wire.

Rowling argued that the Varian verdict exposes what she described as a broader failure of medical oversight in pediatric gender care. Rowling described the practice as “barbarous” and said of the broader activism around trans ideology, “This will go down in history as one of the worst medical scandals of all time. Adults inside and outside the medical profession sold troubled young people like Varian the idea that all of their complex trauma would be resolved by removing healthy body parts.” The lawsuit, she said, shows what happens when those assurances collapse under legal scrutiny.

For Rowling, the case is not an anomaly but confirmation of what critics have argued all along: that pediatric gender medicine advanced at breakneck speed without the evidentiary foundation normally required for experimental treatments, let alone life-altering surgeries on minors.

Those concerns have been echoed by figures within the medical establishment itself. Speaking at a World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in 2021, British endocrinologist Dr. Leighton Seal acknowledged that clinicians were performing procedures “where we don’t have outcome data.” In another widely circulated exchange, a patient described the process more bluntly, saying gender clinicians appeared to be “winging it” as they went.

Despite these admissions, trans activists have continued to insist that regret is rare, that clinicians know exactly what they are doing, and that denying medical transition to minors could lead to suicide. 

On Tuesday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons released new guidelines recommending that gender-related surgeries should no longer be performed on patients “at least until age 19.” The updated guidance represents a notable shift from previous practices and challenges claims that such procedures are settled, routine, and unquestionably beneficial for minors.

Rowling is hardly a newcomer to this fight. Since late 2019, when she first publicly challenged gender ideology — particularly as it intersects with women’s rights, safeguarding for minors, and the medicalization of gender distress — she has been smeared as a bigot, subjected to cancelling, denounced by activists and celebrities, and effectively blacklisted in the cultural and publishing world. Despite the pressure, Rowling has continued to engage the issue directly.

Meanwhile, lawsuits brought by detransitioners are increasingly shifting the issue from cultural and political argument into courtrooms, where claims are evaluated through medical records, expert testimony, and established standards of care.

As additional cases proceed and medical institutions reassess prior assumptions, the debate over gender treatment for minors is likely to grow more contentious, with significant implications for clinicians, families, and policymakers alike. Rowling’s latest intervention signals her involvement with the legal and medical reckoning surrounding the issue is far from over.