How to Answer Yet Another Dumb Question About Hasan Piker

I confess that the vast majority of what I know about political influencer Hasan Piker came from this April interview he did with TNR contributor Aaron Regunberg. I’m constitutionally unsuited for that Twitch life, which isn’t a knock on livestreaming. And I opted out of the great postelection debate over whether Democrats needed a “Joe Rogan of the left” because I found it to be a tedious misdiagnosis of the party’s struggles in 2024. But Piker has found himself in a spot of bother of late, which naturally has become the entire Democratic Party’s problem because of the political media’s tendency to chase conflict, collapse distinctions, and reject nuance. These attendant controversies nevertheless provide a new way to learn some important lessons about how Democrats need to manage the tricks and traps of the infotainment industry.

Piker, by his own admission, earns a living at the intersection of high risk and high reward. He’s a compelling enough thinker and speaker to have built a massive audience—more than three million followers on Twitch and about a million more on YouTube. But there is a downside to speaking extemporaneously for hours and hours every day. “If you were talking for 10 hours a day,” he told Regunberg, “you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued.” Case in point: Piker has been getting barracked for lamenting recently that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, at a time when Israel’s popularity is at an all-time low, does little more than put Jewish Americans in danger. That sentiment is not materially different from what Ezra Klein had to say in his own recent essay about Piker—but when you’re a sainted member of the white intelligentsia, you are apparently allowed to say this. If you’re not, it’s head on a pike time (no pun intended).

But it’s not Piker who’s being forced to weather this storm, it’s Democrats—newly minted Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in particular. Having previously invited Piker on the campaign trail, El-Sayed now has to deal with the fact that the political media has made Piker its idée fixe. These preoccupations mostly run hand in hand with the most recent hype cycle over the alleged, and overblown, DSA takeover of the Democratic Party. The assumption that any leftist candidate must be palling around with Piker is so deeply entrenched that CBS News’s Gayle King (now working under Bari Weiss’s much dumber and race-baiting management) had a whole segment ready to spring on Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon for campaigning with Piker, only for Nixon to tell King that not only had she never campaigned with Piker, she—like most Democrats—wasn’t particularly familiar with him, either.

In a recent MS NOW encounter with anchor Katy Tur, El-Sayed reminded us that he is something of a novice at navigating the ins and outs of the cable news business. Pressed by Tur to account for his association with Piker, El-Sayed attempted a canned pivot: “This campaign is not about a streamer in California. This campaign is about affordability in Michigan. This campaign is about the ability to have health care,” he said. “This campaign is about the challenges Michiganders face. And I get that, in the media, it’s a lot easier to pick up one person and be like, ‘This is what this is about.’ But this is why a lot of people get so frustrated about politics and political media, because it doesn’t actually speak to the challenges they face.”

I think El-Sayed is largely correct on the merits here, but forget it, Jake, this is cable news, a forum in which merits don’t really matter and the attempt to reengage a news anchor with a more substantive conversation is always a waste of time. Tur actually did better than most during the longer segment: She led a discussion about money in politics and gave El-Sayed a chance to lay out his ideas on how to end the billionaire capture of our politics and implement Medicare for All.

But El-Sayed walked onto that set hoping that the headline was going to be his economic policy plans, and ended up with the brief conversation about Piker being the most widely talked about aspect of the interview. It’s worth learning about how that happened and what someone like El-Sayed could do differently.

Right about now, some of you are probably grousing about the differing standards the news industry applies to the two parties. Yes, Republicans learned long ago that if their response to some associate’s controversial statement is simply, “I didn’t see the tweet/post/video,” their interlocutor will move on, even when the person you’re claiming ignorance of is the actual president of the United States, whose every utterance is push-alerted right to our phones. The fact that the GOP has become so licentious in its corruption and so casual about lying works to its advantage. If the Democrats are the only ones who believe there should be high standards for public servants, they’ll be the only ones held to any.

But valid complaints about the cable news industry have been around for ages. What hasn’t arrived in their wake is any serious effort among the industry’s leaders to reform things. I cannot recall a time in my life when I thought cable news was getting better. (I no longer tune in, so in the extremely unlikely event that it does, it will go without my notice.) Democratic candidates hoping that a better media might be wrought from the current state of affairs will draw their last breath waiting for it to happen. There is no saving cable news from itself, there is only using what it offers to your advantage.

The Hasan Piker flap has been excellently instructive about one of my major points about the television news industry: Substance is not what they’re after; they want conflict, controversy, and cheap shots. Saddle a politician with an invented demon, and everyone eats that night. The way to win, in this situation, is not to make an appeal to Katy Tur’s sense of civic virtue but, rather, play her game with equal abandon by giving the hungry cable news maw another street fight to broadcast.

Oddly enough, El-Sayed had one pretty well locked and loaded, if his campaign’s press page is any guide. Instead of trying to force Tur to pivot back to the needs of Michiganders, he should have offered up his opponent Mike Rogers’s faith adviser, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who attended a hate rally put together by fascist gadfly and January 6 rioter Jake Lang, whose whole schtick is to show up places and try to provoke violence. Lang is a nasty piece of work and, unlike Piker, a vocally committed antisemite. El-Sayed’s campaign has done its homework, and has made an effort to tie Rogers to Lang, but he would have done well during his MS NOW interview to offer up Lang as a punching bag rather than try to steer the conversation back to the economy. On cable news, never opt for the high road when the low road is beckoning.

Democrats in general need to get themselves into the character-assassination business (though I suppose a few have imperiled their own party’s chances to take back the Senate by making Piker one of the few bogeymen they’re willing to publicly decry). As I noted a few weeks ago, one of the biggest bankrollers of Republican politics this cycle is Elon Musk, a guy whose cuts to USAID and other programs have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world and who is currently in court fighting the state of Minnesota for the right to create nonconsensual deepfake nudes of children. If Democrats raise the salience of this connection, and demonize Musk in aggressively grandiose terms, they will at least be giving the cable news industry what it wants: crass, cynical conflict.

Democrats need to better understand the cable news environment and its propensity for bad-faith attacks and controversy mongering. Does that mean that they should assume that every time they step on set, they’re going to get ratfucked? Honestly, that might be the best possible footing for future television news encounters. No one goes broke underestimating the civic virtues of the cable news commentariat. Rather than complaining about these practices, it’s better to understand the stupid games this industry likes to play, and master them yourself.

As I said a few weeks ago, I don’t really believe a lot of the hype about the Democratic primaries this year. I don’t think that the United States is in the throes of a socialist revolution that will decimate the moderates. What I do see is a lot of voter enthusiasm for Democratic candidates (even as the party as an institution continues to have a public image problem) and some eye-popping turnout numbers. A wide variety of voters seem ready to give a wide variety of candidates a chance in November.

If this time of choosing brings Democrats back to power in Washington, the time of proving will be at hand—and Democrats will have to show their mettle. As TNR editor Michael Tomasky recently wrote, they will have to follow the pugilistic lead of conflict-ready lawmakers like Jon Ossoff, shedding themselves of the tendency to seek bipartisanship (looking at you, Hakeem!), and dedicate themselves to sanding the gears of Trump’s authoritarian machine. They’ll also have to collectively set a bold tone for the 2028 presidential election.

Democrats are typically averse to any sort of politicking that seems divisive. They’d prefer to work in comity with their Republican colleagues—even the feral ones we have today. History teaches us that Democrats don’t really have the yen for accountability; “Look forward, not backward” has been the watchword that has allowed CIA torturers, rogue financiers, and a coup-inciting president who lost an election to get off scot-free. And the media has, over the years, shaped the public conception of the two parties like a bodybuilder wielding a meat tenderizer: Republicans are allowed to govern maximally, while Democrats serve as helpmates to trim their excesses. To be honest, I think many Democrats have allowed themselves to be inculcated by this false binary.

That has to end. As Lincoln once said, “The quiet dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present.” It’s time for Democrats to disenthrall. That means that the road ahead is going to take Democrats well outside of their comfort zone. Here, I have to caution those who are fretting about the new radicals in their midst: You’re all going to have to get a little bit more radical on a number of important fronts too.

As I’ve noted before, the biggest mindset change that Democrats will have to adopt is their view of the Supreme Court. Whether or not the high court ever had a period where it earned public esteem, this court as currently constructed has become naked in its partisanship, and it’s using its considerable power to enforce a line-item veto over Democratic lawmakers while simultaneously stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power.

President Joe Biden met this crisis with a milquetoast study. Whatever that was meant to accomplish, it didn’t work. Like it or not, Democrats have to expand the number of justices on the court if their party wants to survive (Republicans have fought just as hard to manipulate the high court’s membership, after all). It also means that Democrats should be making a sizable effort to drive down public opinion of the court. (Here’s the good news: The public has a considerable head start, so it’s best to meet them where they’re at.)

A few weeks ago, it was reported that U.S. debt had hit $40 trillion thanks to Trump’s tax giveaways, the Iran war, and his tariffs—which have become a tidy windfall for certain corporations as taxpayer money gets transferred to their coffers via tariff refunds. At first blush, this reads as damaging to Trump. But being well versed in the aforementioned asymmetry in the way the media treats the two parties, I know that if a Democrat were in power right now, their every plan or policy idea would have been dogged by chucklehead journalists asking them, “How will you pay for it?” Trump faced no such challenge. Republicans never do.

It’s a grim cycle: The GOP wrecks the shop, Democrats exhaust their political capital putting it back together. But the damage Trump leaves behind will be substantial, and it can’t be fixed for free. Just restoring the federal civil service to the sort of functional capacity that prevents lettuce from giving the populace explosive diarrhea will require a massive hiring binge, and I will promise you that the political press is going to be back, needling them with the same old question. Democrats can’t allow themselves to fear doing what needs to be done to eradicate Trumpism. When they’re asked how they will pay for it, they need to respond: “We will all pay dearly if we don’t undo Trump’s damage.”

And it goes without saying that Democrats will have to discover a new love of holding people accountable. That begins with offering the public a measure of justice for the harms meted out to them by the Trump administration. As I’ve written before, “Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.” Democrats need to be less like Merrick Garland and more like newly minted Minnesota Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan, who has vowed to “avenge” her state. The jokes about the grannies at the No Kings rallies baying for blood may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far off the current mood.

But accountability is due to a host of other non-Trump miscreants, as well. As Tomasky recently wrote, naming enemies and picking fights is now essential work for Democrats. There are many targets to choose from, including “Republicans and oligarchs and monopolists”—or, as Ossoff has collectively described the enemy, the “Epstein class”: that coven of elites that has been permitted to rule with impunity.

There are encouraging signs that Democrats are moving in the right direction. I took cheer at the news that the Democratic National Committee has added the abolition of ICE to the party’s platform. We have come a long way from the beginning of the year, when the notion that the agency could somehow be reformed or retrained was still annoyingly in vogue.

But this is just one of many matters that cannot simply be folded into a party document. As Brian Beutler recently wrote, Democrats must use this time to “normaliz[e] the kinds of things that will be necessary for American renewal in the post-Trump era.” That means taking these messages to the public, getting them used to hearing talk about abolishing ICE, packing the Supreme Court, hiring the next generation of public servants, and tearing down Trump’s vanity projects. It also affords you the opportunity to parry the political media’s brain-dead inquiries sooner rather than later.

I understand that Democrats would prefer a gentler and more thoughtful brand of politics and that they see uncommon virtue in finding common ground. That all sounds really nice; maybe one day that’s the way things can be again. But America’s Trumpian trajectory will not be gently turned aside. It will require a movement forceful enough to arrest MAGA’s momentum and bring the country—and the world—out of this era’s rack and ruin.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”

Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)

In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”

As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.

If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)

Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.

But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.

Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.

The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned families of troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)

Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.

While the media has been agog and aghast at the occasional successes of 2026 candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, I haven’t been feeling the hype. A canny read of the electorate reveals that establishment Democrats, like Xavier Becerra and Amy Klobuchar, are doing just fine. Many primary winners are getting lumped in with the DSA despite not being members, or even socialists, like Brad Lander and Abdul El-Sayed. And as Lander would attest, the electorate isn’t looking for leftist bona fides from their candidates; they simply want fighters, not fakers.

But no one is more choleric over the occasional success of progressive politicians than the dismal corporate dullards at Third Way. After the aforementioned El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan, the centrist organization announced that it was going to “war” with a $15 million campaign against democratic socialist candidates between now and 2028. Both the sense of aggrievement and the paltry amount of money being dispensed makes this extremely sad.

The opening salvo in this supposed “war” is also pretty sad: a wan op-ed by the organization’s top dogs, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, in the pages of The Washington Post. The two combine for a few hundred words of grievance, in which they argue that the Democratic Party’s recent woes can be attributed to its extreme politics, which is a very strange thing to say about a party whose recent standard-bearers were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Cowan and Bennett, in fact, fault Harris for not doing enough to pivot from the leftier positions she espoused on the 2020 stump. This makes me wonder if they were in a coma during the 2024 election, because I distinctly remember Harris both veering wildly toward the center, abandoning previous positions with something approaching a frenzy, and even campaigning with Liz Cheney.

The op-ed is, nevertheless, revealing. Third Way’s politics seem frozen in amber. There’s scant evidence that Cowan and Bennett have spent any time ruminating on the political shifts we’ve undergone since the 2024 election. There’s no mention of the hot-button issues that are fueling the fires of the Democratic electorate, such as the high costs of early childhood, opposition to data centers, the war in Iran, or the GOP’s corruption. The only thing they point to that could be called “recent” is a New York Times poll showing that 62 percent of the Democratic electorate identifies as either somewhat or very liberal, and that most voters want “a fighter for working people who gets things done and is authentic in his or her beliefs.”

That doesn’t describe the kind of candidate that Third Way would support. As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)

Third Way’s limitations as a political organization stem from the fact that its leaders have an umbilical connection to Republican money and probably haven’t talked to a human outside of a cable news green room in years. In fact, the last time anyone from the organization sought to learn what life is like for normal Americans, it was chronicled by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, who trailed the researchers the organization dispatched to Wisconsin after Donald Trump’s first election to find the mythical 70 percent of the population that they believed occupied a position of non-partisan purity.

As Ball’s piece described, things didn’t go the way Third Way expected. Instead of finding a centrist majority out there in the hinterlands, it found a population that was extremely partisan—and fairly skeptical of the organization’s donors. But Third Way’s superpower, it turns out, is the ability to perform vertiginous mental hijinks when its priors are challenged. As Ball reported, the study that Third Way published after its tour of flyover country neatly omitted any of the doubts that she watched the researchers wrestle with on the road. “The report surprised me when I read it,” Ball wrote. “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”

This is the biggest irony: The successful politicians who so terrify Third Way are actually really good at listening to the concerns of voters and then organizing those voters around campaigns to address those needs. A recent New York Times report on the insurgent left reveals that these candidates aren’t really reinventing the wheel, they’ve just—well, mastered politics: “The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.”

In fact, if there’s one thing that the smattering of successful DSA-aligned candidates have done in recent campaigns, it’s been the thing Third Way refuses to do: show a willingness to abandon preconceived dogma when it doesn’t survive an encounter with reality. As Nathan Newman recently wrote, the local DSA-aligned politicians who are winning elections have learned something that the national DSA is still struggling to accept: “To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.” There’s something nifty going on here: It turns out that the successful socialists, through their mastery of retail politics, are showing that they’re capable of a little moderation.

Third Way could really stand to learn a thing or two from the politicians it disdains. But that’s not what the Republican funny money backing its every move wants. Instead, you are going to get $15 million worth of Red Scare fulmination. And that rhetoric will be used by the right to disparage every single Democratic candidate—not just the ones who want to enact Medicare for All. Third Way will be arming both the conservative media machine and the slop merchants at CNN and The New York Times with talking points, and using its phony-baloney identity as a liberal organization to color these attacks as coming from the illusory center.

Update: After this article was published, Bennett emailed TNR to say Third Way funds and partners with groups “to help Democratic legislators win and govern, offering them both policy and political insights and ideas.” He also noted that he’s spoken at Democratic Attorneys General Association meetings, and said his group has “worked closely” with Democratic attorneys general “to fight election interference from Republican AGs.”

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

At the start of 2025, Elon Musk looked as if he was going to become a permanent fixture in American politics. Strutting across the stage, giving the Sieg heil!, the far-right mogul set up shop in the Trump administration’s DOGE dojo and started chaotically pulling the load-bearing beams out of the civil service and heisting the private data of an untold number of taxpayers. In June of this year, however, Musk expressed regret over getting so caught up in the political scene. Ahh, but the ketamine has since hit: In recent weeks, Musk has said that he’s going back to being a GOP bankroller, to the tune of $120 million. And the first beneficiary of his dirty money is slated to be endangered Maine Republican Susan Collins. She should suffer for it.

Part of me wonders if Elon’s willingness to spend his cash is any great concern. His investments seem to often make things more janky than they were before. He turned Twitter into a hellsite dominated by like-minded thugs that is essentially a GOP super PAC. He’s soiled the legacy of Tesla’s founders by creating a “giant rusting dumpster swasticar” that’s recently been compared to the Edsel. He just crashed a rocket into the moon. His most recent foray into political kingmaking—the $25 million he injected into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race—was a Cybertruck-level flop. And he may end up catching a criminal charge for election bribery to boot.

If Collins actually needs Musk’s money, maybe that’s a sign she’s worried that her new Democratic opponent, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, won’t be the same type of cakewalk as Graham Platner, whose Nazi tattoo put his campaign into a permanent “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” doom loop that ended last month with sexual assault charges. Still, Musk’s close-up involvement with Susan Collins should come at a high cost to the incumbent senator.

Here’s one big reason why. The guy who’s pitching himself as the GOP’s next big megafunder has spent much of his time “out of politics” becoming a pioneer in the field of manufacturing nonconsensual pornographic images of minors. Perhaps the one thing that differentiates Musk’s Grok from other AI products is that it’s become regarded as a one-stop shop for the production of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. This has already spawned a class-action suit against Musk’s firm, xAI. He seems very concerned that his company may be further restricted from promulgating deepfake pornography: xAI attorneys are suing the state of Minnesota over a state law banning apps from generating nonconsensual deepfake nudes of people.

My thoughts on this are pretty straightforward: In a normal country, it is scandalous for a politician to fund their campaign on the proceeds of CSAM and the like. Courtesy of DailyKos writer Oliver Willis, here is a succinct and correct English-language sentence on the matter: “Susan Collins is financed by a man who wants to make it easier to create nude pictures of children.”

Musk is hardly some lone-wolf pervert skulking around Republican politics. These days, the whole party seems more or less bent on proving “pedocon theory” correct. The anti-trans panic promulgated by the right has been slowly transforming into the drive to pass laws that would put the state’s hand down the pants of women and girls all across the country. As reporter Jessica Valenti recently put it, Republicans have lately adopted what could rightly be called an agenda of “upskirt politics”:

If Democrats want a message for the midterms and 2028, that’s it right there. The GOP is the party of Peeping Toms, obsessively watching what women do with our bodies and inventing ever more ways to get a closer look—from Republican AGs fighting court battles just to catch a peek at women’s abortion records to a prosecutor so desperate to see inside a miscarriage patient’s toilet that he had it ripped off the wall.

None of this is new. As TNR contributor Graham Gallagher wrote back in 2022, prominent Republicans were hard-veering into the wilds of antisocial strangeness. “Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites,” he wrote, “there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.” Two years later, “Republicans are weirdos” became a clarion call among Democrats. Kamala Harris is often accused of abandoning this line of attack, which is not exactly true. Still, there was some internal debate over its efficacy.

To my mind, it’s worth reviving. The GOP has only gotten stranger since 2024. Just this week, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan wrote at length about the GOP’s widening weirdo problems as the youngest in the party veer in the direction of off-putting, far-right grotesqueries. One anonymous Republican staffer put it like so: “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” Sounds like an assembly line of Elon Musks.

There is perhaps no Republican lawmaker who has been treated with more undeserving gentleness than Susan Collins. Beltway reporters tend to fall for her prevarications with incredible ease; it was one of my first lessons in how many intellectual lightweights are out here cosplaying as my industry peers. Even Democrats tend to treat her with kid gloves. As TNR contributor Meredith Shiner noted back in 2020, when the party had the opportunity to showcase Collins’s then opponent, Sara Gideon, at the Democratic National Convention, Gideon was instead assigned to introduce musical guest Maggie Rogers. “The words ‘Susan Collins,’ ‘Supreme Court,’ ‘Brett Kavanaugh,’ and ‘Mitch McConnell’ were never uttered,” wrote Shiner.

Elon Musk is a weird, unpopular scoundrel with perverted tastes who’s had a direct hand in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. That he’s decided to tether himself to Collins gives Democrats a chance to make up for the shortfalls of the past and hammer Collins for what she is now: the candidate in the race with the Totenkopf tattoo (metaphorically speaking). Musk is the ripest of targets, Collins is one of the most deserving people to catch some strays. But these two won’t take themselves down—Democrats will need to take their shots, early and often.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.