A question must be asked. The question is this: Was Ryan Wesley Routh, the lunatic who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump earlier this month, radicalized by the inflammatory rhetoric of Ben Rhodes? Is the so-called Obama bro and mullah whisperer, best known as the failed novelist who nurse-mothered the Iran nuclear deal into existence, guilty of inciting violence against a political opponent?
If one applies the same rigorous standards as the mainstream media, the answer is a definitive yes.
For instance, Routh in a letter outlining his motivations specifically cited Trump's decision to withdraw from the Obama-Rhodes nuclear deal. "Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest know that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less a US president," Routh vented in the handwritten note obtained by authorities. "He ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled." The failed assassin went even further in the book he self-published in February 2023; Routh personally apologized to Iran and said the Islamist regime was "free to assassinate Trump as well as me."
Routh's screed could easily have been written by Ben Rhodes. "Donald Trump—let's be blunt—he's not respected. He's not taken seriously around the world. He's a chaos agent," Rhodes said during an MSNBC appearance on June 22. "Donald Trump's tearing up agreements contributed, I believe, directly to October 7, between Israel and Hamas, and so Donald Trump's not going to solve these problems and he's going to make them worse."
Rhodes, who cried like a little bitch the night Trump won in 2016, has been by far the loudest and most obnoxious critic of Trump's decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. A weirdo like Routh, who loved the deal so much he tried to kill a former president, was almost by definition influenced by Rhodes. The former Obama adviser bragged of creating an "echo chamber" to promote the Iran deal via useful idiots in the media who "literally know nothing." Anyone who has an opinion about the Iran deal, or even knows what it is, heard about it from Rhodes.
"There are very few things I've ever been a part of that I believe in more than the Iran deal," Rhodes told Politico in January 2017. Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the agreement in October of that year. Rhodes responded by shrieking hysterically. "A very dangerous thing," he told NPR. He warned that Trump would "manufacture a crisis" and "provoke Iran into doing something that gives a pretext for war." (Never happened.) He blasted Trump for creating "a major crisis by withdrawing from a Deal that was working, isolating the U.S., provoking the Iranians, risking both a resumed nuclear program and a war." (The Middle East was relatively peaceful until Joe Biden took office.)
Rhodes also cited Trump's reliance on "unspecified intelligence reports" to advance supposedly nefarious ends, a claim advanced—or echoed, if you will—by fellow "Obama bro" Tommy Vietor in 2018 with conspiratorial (and borderline anti-Semitic) flare. "Trump is now cooking up intel with the Israelis to push us closer to a conflict with Iran," Vietor wrote in a since-deleted tweet. "A scandal hiding in plain sight." Rhodes and Vietor frequently lament the demise of the Iran deal as cohosts of Pod Save the World, a podcast whose target audience is comprised of vehement Trump-haters with varying degrees of mental illness.
Earlier this year, Rhodes relaunched the anti-Trump advocacy group National Security Action to support then-presidential candidate Biden and "remind people that this is a choice[,] that Trump represents a different approach to foreign policy that is very dangerous, and rather than making the crises in the world better, he is likely to make all of them worse."
Several months later, a fully radicalized Routh brandished a rifle in Trump's vicinity before fleeing after Secret Service agents opened fire. Federal prosecutors would cite Routh's Rhodes-esque rantings about Trump's foreign policy in their decision to pursue a charge of attempted assassination. We may never learn the true extent to which Rhodes incited Routh to violence, but the available evidence—judged in accordance with the mainstream media's rigorous standards of discourse and accusation—is damning.
In any event, the case against Rhodes is far more compelling than what the media have alleged in recent weeks. In so many words, our esteemed journalists have blamed the victim. Trump brought the assassination attempt(s) on himself by being a racist, sexist, Putin-loving, Iran-hating threat to democracy. He shouldn't have worn that dress. It's his own fault for having such a shootable face. Never mind that Routh's anti-Trump grievances are echoed daily on MSNBC by hosts and guests alike.
In addition to his work on the Iran deal, Rhodes is best known for attending the funeral of Cuba's communist dictator, Fidel Castro, alongside delegations from China, Russia, and (of course) Iran. It is unclear if he cried for "El Comandante," but he probably did.