Jurors began to deliberate on Tuesday over the fate of Ryan W. Routh, the man accused of plotting to kill President Trump at one of his Florida golf courses last year, following a fast-moving trial in which Mr. Routh chose to defend himself without a lawyer.
“Make no mistake: The defendant was going to kill Donald Trump,” Christopher B. Browne, one of the federal prosecutors, said during his closing argument. “The defendant was just one bullet away.”
He urged jurors to find Mr. Routh guilty of attempted assassination, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, as well as of assaulting a federal officer and several firearm violations.
Mr. Browne said the evidence showed that Mr. Routh, 59, planned the attack for months and tracked Mr. Trump for weeks before hiding just outside the fence of the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach on Sept. 15, 2024, with a semiautomatic rifle in hand, while Mr. Trump played golf.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Routh pointed the rifle, whose serial number was scratched off, at a Secret Service agent who spotted him in the shrubbery by the fence. The agent fired at him, and Mr. Routh fled without firing any shots of his own, they said. The police stopped Mr. Routh about 45 minutes later, driving north on Interstate 95.
In his closing argument, Mr. Routh spoke about himself in the third person and said that prosecutors had not proven “any intent” to kill.
“No one ever intended to kill anyone,” he said. “The rifle was never picked up from its resting place,” he added, disputing the accusation that he had pointed the weapon at the Secret Service agent.
Mr. Routh, who wore a dark jacket and a red striped tie in court, spoke for about 55 minutes, his voice at times sounding tired. The judge twice removed the jury to warn Mr. Routh that he was straying from rules governing closing arguments.
Later in his argument, he made references to the war in Ukraine; the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; the television broadcaster Edward R. Murrow; and the Revolutionary War. If the defendant were guilty of anything, he said, it was of caring “deeply for this country.”
“The opportunity was there for the defendant to shoot the president, and yet the trigger was never pulled,” he said. “This human being does not have the capability to harm another human being.”
The jury of seven women and five men went into deliberations just before noon at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., about 65 miles north of the golf course where the incident took place.
The apparent assassination attempt was the second against Mr. Trump last year, when he was running for a new term in office.
Opening statements in the trial began the day after the influential right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, adding to a national surge in political violence.
Mr. Routh’s decision to represent himself in court made the trial a lopsided one from the start, when Judge Aileen M. Cannon cut off his opening statement for lack of relevance. Mr. Routh’s brief cross-examinations of prosecution witnesses and the small number of defense witnesses he called made the trial much shorter than expected, lasting just 12 days.
Judge Cannon presided in 2023 over a federal prosecution of Mr. Trump involving the mishandling of classified documents, a case she dismissed last summer.
After Mr. Routh, an itinerant building contractor from North Carolina, was arrested last year, public records and interviews with people who knew him suggested that he had become increasingly concerned over the war in Ukraine and saw himself as an influential participant in world events. Earlier this year, he told the judge that he did not trust two court-appointed federal public defenders to represent him. Even so, they were kept on standby during the trial.
At one point on Monday, when the judge tried to explain certain rules of evidence, Mr. Routh responded, “I have no clue what that means.”
He offered little in the way of a defense and did not testify himself. He called three witnesses — a firearms expert and two character witnesses — all of whom testified on Monday morning, after seven days of prosecution testimony.
The firearms expert, Michael McClay, a former Marine, told the court that a rifle scope found at the scene had been mounted to the weapon with glue and tape, which would have probably made it less effective than if it had been mounted more securely. He said the scope was operational, though, and that it could have been used to deliver a fatal shot, “depending on the skill level of the shooter.”
A former employee and a friend of one of Mr. Routh’s sons each testified that they had never seen Mr. Routh be violent. Under cross-examination, they acknowledged that they had not seen Mr. Routh for years before he was arrested.
Mr. Routh’s questioning was interrupted often by Judge Cannon when he veered away from the case at hand. Putting the character witnesses on the stand gave prosecutors an opening during cross-examination to reveal to jurors details about Mr. Routh that they had not previously known, including allegations that he had not paid some of his workers.
Judge Cannon warned Mr. Routh about that risk, but he chose to call the witnesses anyway.
“We can analyze every moment of my life,” he said. “We are here to ascertain the truth.”
Prosecutors presented testimony and evidence from a large number of law enforcement officers and other witnesses. One witness, Special Agent Kimberly McGreevy of the F.B.I.’s Miami office, testified for more than six hours on Thursday and Friday, twice as long as all three of Mr. Routh’s witnesses combined.
One expert called by the prosecution testified about finding Mr. Routh’s fingerprint on the rifle scope. Another spoke about finding two bullet-resistant metal plates mounted to the golf course fence. A third said the rifle’s safety was in the off position when it was recovered. The Secret Service agent who spotted Mr. Routh hiding in an improvised sniper’s nest by the golf course fence described how he saw a rifle muzzle pointing through the foliage, and then a pair of eyes only a few feet away from him.
Special Agent McGreevy showed jurors how investigators had pieced together Mr. Routh’s movements in Palm Beach County using cellphone records, license plate readers, bank statements, retail store receipts and security videos.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Routh lived out of a Nissan S.U.V. for weeks as he cased the golf course, searched online for Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule and watched his private plane at Palm Beach International Airport. Among the evidence the authorities obtained were six cellphones, several license plates and notes about possible escape flights to Mexico and Colombia.
Mr. Routh had also left a box at a friend’s house in North Carolina months before his arrest. A letter in the box read, “Dear World, This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you.” The letter also offered a $150,000 bounty for killing the candidate.
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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