When Kevin Bell, 46, told a plainclothes law enforcement officer last weekend that he wanted to kill U.S. President Donald Trump, it wasn’t the first time the Bridgton man mused publicly about his desire to inflict violence on others. While it might be tempting to write off such declarations as the ravings of a madman, his profile is not entirely dissimilar from the man arrested with a weapon in the woods adjoining then-candidate Trump’s golf course in Florida last September.
Bell, a.k.a. Ronen Stoloff, announced his intention to kill his psychiatrist to a help line operator in January of this year. Two years ago, he managed to get himself on the FBI’s radar screen by saying he intended to overdose on a commercial flight to force its emergency landing.
The emotionally-troubled man, who at least until 2020 held a license to pilot an aircraft, had also declared his intention in the past to kill former President George W. Bush, whom he said, like Trump, he dislikes.
According to multiple press accounts, on Saturday, Bell approached either an investigator for the Maine Department of Public Safety and/or Secret Service Agent Bradford Nunan (reports vary) in a Bridgton restaurant where he engaged in a conversation of at least 15 minutes and said “I wanted to shoot Bush but didn’t, but now Trump is in and I don’t care for him,” adding “I’ll try to shoot him” or “I’ll just shoot him.”
Around the same time he made threats against his psychiatrist, Bell was fired from a Missouri-based aviation company where he was employed as software engineer.
Hawaii man Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, drew live fire from Secret Service agents in Trump’s protective detail last fall when he crouched in the bushes next to the golf course where the now president was playing. Routh left bizarre notes about his intentions at the time in a postbox, including one suggesting he didn’t think he would be successful. More recently, a Signal chat obtained by investigators indicates Routh was trying to acquire a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) in August from Ukrainians he had met during a volunteer visit to the ongoing war there.
Less is publicly known about Thomas Matthew Crooks, 21, who managed to graze Trump with a bullet while killing another man and critically wounding two others in the audience in Butler, Pennsylvania last July. Secret Service shot and killed Crooks at the scene. As is often the case with killers, Crooks’ neighbors told media at the time that he was a quiet boy.
A startling one-third of respondents told a pollsters engaged by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab that it would be “at least somewhat justified” to murder either Trump or tycoon and Trump advisor Elon Musk. Among left-of-center respondents, that finding leapt to more than half (48 – 55 percent respectively).
What the NCRI/Rutgers survey found was a broad uptick in the proclivity of Americans towards political violence. It also looked at attitudes around the murder last year of UnitedHealthCare’s CEO in New York City and ongoing property destruction at Tesla dealerships and concluded that an “assassination culture is emerging among certain segments of society” that correlated with “a hyper-partisan left-wing ideology.”
According to a feature story in the April edition of Texas Monthly, “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a real medical affliction.
“Trump’s first election, in 2016, provided a donation in kind to the therapy industry. According to an analysis of a Centers for Disease Control survey of nearly half a million citizens, the number of self-reported days of poor mental health in states where a majority of voters supported Hillary Clinton rose by 15 percent from the month before the 2016 election to the month after. Meanwhile, the number in Trump-voting states stayed flat,” the article suggests.
While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), a central resource for therapists, has yet to categorize Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) as a bona fide mental disorder, five Republican legislators in the Minnesota state legislature last month introduced legislation to recognize it as a medical affliction that that state.
Because the vast majority of therapists, social workers and psychologists practicing in Maine — and elsewhere — tend to be liberal in their political orientation, getting a professional read on cases like Bell’s proves challenging. But The Maine Wire has reached out to a half dozen practitioners across America and will report on its findings when available.
Research on the linkages between TDS and actual violence remains nascent, yet attitudinal studies like that conducted recently by NCRI/Rutgers are chilling. In the meantime characters like Bell, who was released on $20,000 bail pending his next court appearance on April 16, walk among us every day.
I love Maine Wire’s content, and I feel they fill a much needed void within Maine media, but you guys gotta proof-read these articles better. The grammatical errors are at times embarrassing. If MW wants to be considered legitimate news that readers can use as a bonafide source, they’ve got to do a better job in this regard. That being said, keep up the good work.
Can’t we find a prison cell for this guy ?
Creeps like this seem to be in abundant supply here in Maine .
Euthanasia might be an efficient option for decreasing our surplus population .
We are altogether way to nice to these dregs of our society .
Let’s get rid of them !
He was in the Harrison, Maine, Library on Monday while an FBI agent was perusing children’s books