Like late-summer humidity, Hasan Piker hangs heavy over the discourse.
At a rally on Monday, Vice President Vance brought up the hard-left streamer in an attempt to paint the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as anti-American. Last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Piker’s recent statements about Jewish Americans “dangerous and anti-Semitic.” Senators Jon Ossoff, Cory Booker, and Jacky Rosen said much the same. Facing questions about a totally different set of Piker comments, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hustled into an elevator.
Some Democrats are trying to dismiss the 35-year-old political commentator as irrelevant. He’s just “a streamer in California,” El-Sayed said on Saturday, waving off questions from reporters. Piker himself has spent the past week casting himself as the victim of hysteria. “I have become this media cycle’s ‘trans athletes’ or ‘migrant caravan,’” he posted on X.
But it was El-Sayed who first made Piker central to his campaign by bringing him out on the trail, partying poolside with him at an influencer event, and celebrating with him during his Election Night rally. In his thousands of hours of streaming, Piker has produced a dense catalog of comments spanning the spectrum from stupid to incredibly offensive, including several iterations of the phrase “I hate America” and, perhaps most memorably, that “America deserved 9/11.” (He quickly attempted to walk it back.) Piker also flaunts his authoritarian sympathies, calling Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world” and counting the collapse of the Soviet Union among the “catastrophes” of the 20th century. Last week, he warned that “eventually someone is going to come around and take action” against American Jews who are “singularly invested in Israel.”
Hasan Piker is part of the conversation now. He has become central to the Republican strategy in Michigan, where El-Sayed will continue to be asked about him. So, too, will Democrats across the country. The question ahead of November is whether their answers will satisfy voters.
El-Sayed has moved away from Piker since winning the primary last month. The streamer has not been on the trail in Michigan. “I have spoken with the good doctor,” Representative Jim Clyburn told reporters of El-Sayed, who has a medical degree. “He has apologized. He says he will not campaign with Piker anymore.” After Piker’s comments last week about American Jews, El-Sayed said in a statement that anti-Semitism is a “scourge” and that “I stand against any rhetoric that puts the community at risk.” When asked about Piker at a meeting with a group of Jewish Democrats on Saturday, though, El-Sayed declined to disavow him. “If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you’re missing the boat.”
Anyone could have predicted the Piker blowback. Plenty of people did. In March, one of El-Sayed’s primary opponents, Mallory McMorrow, compared Piker to the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, and leaders of the centrist think tank Third Way wrote a column urging Democrats not to associate with Piker. “Everyone saw it coming from a mile away, so they should’ve been better prepared to handle it,” one Democratic strategist told me. Even some of El-Sayed’s own backers felt similarly. “Not all socialism is toxic to the Democratic brand, but Piker certainly is,” one progressive strategist told me.
(None of the Democrat-aligned operatives I reached out to would agree to speak on the record for this story, citing their support for El-Sayed as well as their fear of reprisal from Piker’s rabid online fans.)
The Piker drama is a ribbon-wrapped gift to Republicans in a year when so much else—inflation, high gas prices, an unpopular president—is working against them. They seem well aware of this. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, refers to Piker as El-Sayed’s “running mate.” “When I see Abdul El-Sayed campaign around this state with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11, what I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but has nothing for people who don’t,” Vance said at the rally on Monday. “What I’d ask you to remember is that whoever you send to Washington, whatever policy views you have or you don’t have, send people of good heart who focus on the right issues, who fight for the right people, and who love the United States of America.” The strategy is obvious: Identify every repellent thing Piker has ever said, tie Piker to El-Sayed, and advertise the relationship at every opportunity.
There is more than a hint of irony in this situation. President Trump has shown a strong affinity for shock jocks and trolls. In 2020, he awarded Rush Limbaugh, who had a recurring segment celebrating the deaths of gay people from AIDS, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and an ally of Trump’s, last week referred to a Senate candidate as a “ghetto black communist bitch.” Some Democrats, seeing Trump suffer little political consequence for such associations, believe it’s unfair that El-Sayed should have to answer for Piker’s actions.
But politics, like life, is famously unfair. Democrats are constantly being asked to condemn Piker in cable-news hits and hallway interviews, even outside Michigan. Several Jewish Democrats have weighed in too. Through a spokesperson, Ossoff said he “unreservedly rejects reckless and dangerous rhetoric suggesting that policy advocacy invites violence against the Jewish community or any community.” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey said that “anyone who campaigns with Piker or elevates him is complicit in the rising antisemitism and anti-American hatred in this country.” Moderate Democrats are seizing the moment as a chance to engage in a little centrist posturing. Senator John Fetterman went on Fox News and delivered a challenge to El-Sayed: “I’m offering $50,000 for you to do a rally with Hasan Piker” on September 11, he said. Piker was not immediately available for comment for this story. But last week, after several Jewish Democrats criticized him, he dismissed their concerns by implying they reflected an orchestrated conspiracy against him, writing on X that an “aipac boss call was made.”
Maybe El-Sayed could quell some of the frenzy himself. In 2008, controversial comments from Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright threatened to upend Obama’s bid for the White House. In a sermon shortly after September 11, the pastor said that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Later, Wright said, “No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people.”
Obama chose to address the controversy directly, and delivered a speech condemning Wright’s remarks while offering context about America’s racial tensions. That speech “was a masterpiece of empathy, and at the time it felt that it changed the trajectory of his campaign,” Michelle Goldberg wrote this week. At the very least, some Democrats argue, El-Sayed could more plainly denounce his friend. “Say, ‘Here’s what I condemn; here’s what I disavow. I disagree; it was wrong and hurtful,’” the progressive strategist said. “If Piker says something new that’s bad—which, if I was a betting man, I’d say will happen—you come out against it swiftly.”
Michigan, a state that Trump won in 2016 and 2024, was never going to be an easy win for El-Sayed. His relationship with Piker, who is paid to provoke, not persuade, isn’t going to make that task any simpler. The good news for Democrats is that most people don’t actually know Piker; polling from earlier this year showed that 60 percent of likely voters have never heard of him. The bad news for Democrats is that Republicans will spend the next two months working diligently to change that.
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