Attack of the killer centrists Deranged moderates are taking up arms

The Right keeps waiting for the Weather Underground to shoot at President Trump. Not literally, not the specific organization — Bill Ayers is a comfortably retired professor in his 80s — but the type: the black-masked antifa supersoldier; the DSA chapter secretary with a tote bag full of Marx, oat milk, and bolt cutters; the blue-haired radical with a “Fuck ICE” bicep tattoo; the leader of a trans gun club called “Trigger Warning.” 

But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist.   

Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pa., shooter, was a registered Republican who once gave $15 to the Democratic Party through ActBlue. Ryan Routh, who aimed at Trump with a rifle on a Florida golf course in late 2024, was a pro-Ukraine obsessive who had previously supported Trump. Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner attack, if the resurfaced online footprint is correct, is less Che Guevara than a #Resistance liberal with an online diet of posts from the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse.

Oops. The deranged centrist is a much more mundane and annoying figure. Noting the connection, the Lefty British commentator Owen Jones suggested that “centrists appear to be behind all three of the main assassination attempts on Donald Trump,” and that perhaps it was time to start talking about “centrist terrorism.” The term is absurd, which is why it works. Nobody imagines a militant cell emerging from the Abundance book club. There is no armed wing of the Brookings Institution. Chuck Schumer is not slipping coded instructions into someone’s “Melt the ICE” beanie at a No Kings rally.

“Centrist terrorism” is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as “radical leftist terrorism.” In September 2025, Trump signed an order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. His administration is organizing an international summit this summer focused on countering what the State Department calls “the anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of antifa.” 

But where exactly have these antifa hard-liners been these days? They certainly weren’t battling ICE in Minneapolis in force; the top general playing 4D chess against ex-border patrol chief Greg Bovino was the dweeby center-Left pundit-cum-failed statehouse contender Will Stancil (who allegedly helped run an anti-ICE honeypot operation, in which local girls on Tinder would get inside information). Renee Good and Alex Pretti? A middle-aged mom and an intensive-care nurse, respectively.

Likewise, the men accused of trying to kill Trump didn’t emerge from among disciplined communist cadres. They aren’t Maoists arguing about whether Jacobin magazine is too Trotskyist. They look instead like loners from America’s vast political junk drawer: anti-Trump obsessives; Ukraine-war monomaniacs; disillusioned, lonely men marinated in online forums and animated by the belief that history requires their singular intervention.

This matters because the radical Left has become, in conservative discourse, a catch-all for everything the Right dislikes: Tim Walz, No Kings protesters, liberal prosecutors, suburban Biden voters, school administrators, Never Trump Republicans, trans activists, Justice Department lawyers, and anyone who has ever said “protecting our democracy from Trump” in a quivering voice — all treated as members of the same red-hued conspiracy. In reality, the anti-Trump universe isn’t one movement; it is a crowded room of mutually hostile tribes.

Just ask Trump’s would-be killers. Crooks produced a fog of clues but no coherent manifesto. His voter registration and tiny donation became ideological Rorschach tests. To the Right, the ActBlue donation proved he was a Left-wing assassin. To everyone else, the Republican registration complicated the picture. The more honest conclusion is that no faction could comfortably claim him, which didn’t stop everyone from trying to hang Crooks around the necks of their political enemies. Routh was stranger still. He supported Trump before turning against him. He tried to insert himself into a foreign war in defense of NATO and Ukraine. Calling him “the radical Left” would come as news to most Marxists, who aren’t usually known to be fans of the Western Alliance.

And then there is Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 and was promptly adopted as a folk hero by parts of the left. Mangione’s actual politics were what observers variously described as “new-tech centrist” — a Silicon Valley-inflected hodgepodge of libertarian instincts. He called Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? — essentially a centrist manifesto against political tribalism — “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.”

As for Allen, some have tried to pin his attempt on the president’s life on the fiery rhetoric of Hasan Piker. But the inconvenient truth is that he was no fan of the controversial Left-wing streamer. Someone compiled a ranked list of the social-media accounts Allen had liked most. Topping the list were Stancil, Kruse, and progressive video-clip obsessive Aaron Rupar. Allen’s archived posts show him retweeting the argument that Palestine protesters are “functionally speaking, Republicans” and reposting Bill Kristol. Not exactly a Bernie Bro.

Meanwhile, the actual radical Left is in New York City, smiling at Mets mascots and reading to kindergartners. I’m speaking of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. The great scandal of his first months in office is that he has questionable tastes in housing czars and is annoyingly cheerful. No gulags have been planned for the Upper East Side.

This isn’t to say the Left is innocent of overheated rhetoric or hasn’t been guilty of violent acts — in the past or present. It’s to say, rather, that the troubled political mood in America is ambient; it gathers in the culture like black mold behind drywall.

But, just to be sure, we should start keeping a closer eye on people who go to all The Bulwark’s live podcast tapings. We need a list of all pundits who endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020. And if Trump insists on a counterterrorism summit this summer, for God’s sake, don’t forget to warn heads of state about everyone who smashed the like button on a Matt Yglesias post. The new Weather Underground isn’t underground at all; it’s all BlueSky ahead. 

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