Bulwark Host’s Defense of Hasan Piker Exposes Never Trump’s Hypocrisy — And Hands a Massive Electoral Gift to MAGA

Screenshot via social media

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Never Trump movement was full of effective critics of President Donald Trump. They were undeniably part of the winning coalition for President Joe Biden in 2020, helping pull Biden over the line with swing voters in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan – but that time has long since passed.

The Bulwark was at the forefront of the Never Trump mission, to platform principled conservatives making the case against Trump’s MAGA-brand of populism in an effort to peel off right-leaning voters or at least ensure that conservative criticism of Trump didn’t get snuffed out entirely.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the Bulwark’s biggest star, host of their flagship podcast, Tim Miller, is arguing for a “big tent” opposition to Trump – one so large that it should include illiberal (by Miller’s own acknowledgement) influencer Hasan Piker. Miller’s argument landed him in hot water with many on the center right, who accused him of boosting the very same kind of figure he spent years railing against in Trump. Miller’s take also marked a watershed moment for him – an inflection point in which he undeniably morphed from effective critic to unwitting booster of the MAGA movement at the polls.

Last week, Miller laid out his case for Piker in a late-night “sermon” and then a day later participated in a debate with Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell on the topic, who made the case that Piker should be nowhere near Democratic Party electoral politics. Longwell, while appearing to try and do some damage control around Miller, made the case that he was minimizing Piker’s long history of bigoted and misogynistic commentary – while also ignoring Piker’s regular shilling for authoritarian regimes in places like China and Cuba, as well as his simping for terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

“He’s a China, Russia sympathizer who hates women, hates Israel. He’s all the toxic things. I was listening to you last night and I was like, my biggest problem with it, because I agree with you in some places, my biggest problem is I felt like you were soft-selling who this guy is. At one point, I think you called it impure thoughts or something,” Longwell told Miller during their debate.

Miller replied by suggesting that anyone on-air for dozens of hours a week will inevitably say a lot of inflammatory things, never really addressing the substance of the worst of what Piker brings to the table. Miller then laid out his case for why he wants Democrats to go on Piker’s popular show:

We can just be honest, it’s moving Hasan’s direction on the question of Israel. And you’re like, we’re going to pick a fight with him on that? Right now? I don’t get it. We did this already five years ago, where a bunch of liberals were like, you can’t go on Joe Rogan, he had some bad opinions. And it’s like, we can’t do this shit again.

As the debate went on, Longwell tried a few different lines of argument to try and bring Miller around, arguing that you can’t defeat Trump’s indecency and populism by embracing someone like Piker, who also plays on “people’s worst impulses.” Longwell compared the two and argued that Trump “appealed to the racism, the xenophobia, the hatred, the bad stuff” and that the left should not swing more to their extremes and try to win with the same tactics.

Miller conceded this point in a way, saying, “Who is the person in the Democratic Party that is advancing these real anti-Semitic views, like Tlaib sometimes in the House? I’m happy to condemn her when she talks. Tlaib, Omar. Okay, but all right, these are two random members of the House. So sure, I’ll condemn them. But the power structures in the Democratic Party, this is nothing like Trump.” Miller also made clear, under duress, that he doesn’t think Piker should be on the campaign trail for Democrats, and he disagrees with him on policy.

The debate only briefly touched on electoral politics, which was where Longwell really let Miller off the hook, given that Piker was making headlines in recent days for headlining a campaign rally for progressive U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. El-Sayed is running to the left of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) in a state that Trump won in 2024. El-Sayed is running competitively in the primary against the two more establishment Democrats, but would almost certainly cost the party a Senate seat if he were to advance to the general election – a likelihood ignored by Miller and made all the more real given his association with Piker.

To underscore that point, El-Sayed was condemned in the starkest terms for appearing with Piker by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who accused Piker of sounding “deeply anti-Semitic.” Slotkin, a former CIA agent, won her 2024 race in Michigan by running a more moderate campaign than Kamala Harris, who lost the state to Trump, and those split-ticket voters would all but guarantee the GOP nabs the seat if El-Sayed is on the ballot.

Piker, to Miller’s point, is certainly popular with a subset of the base on the left and is great at getting attention, but as Longwell so deftly points out, his views and associations are anathema to most voters outside the fringe – even if he’s trending in the popular direction on Israel. Furthermore, Miller appears completely blind to the fact that Piker and his ilk are going to go to war with the more moderate Democrats in the party. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) will undoubtedly be on the receiving end of the far left’s ire in the 2028 presidential primary, and elevating their critics will only serve to painfully split the party and push moderates out.

El-Sayed’s recent headline-grabbing scandals, warning his voters are “sad” on the day Ayatollah Khamenei was killed and saying that condemning an attack on a synagogue was a “risk,” also highlight why the GOP is salivating at the prospect of running against him. Make no mistake, the Republican Party and its boosters in the media are ready to do everything in their power to make Piker a household name in 2026 and 2028 to try to sink any candidate associated with him in a general election. For example, Piker’s name was mentioned some 50 times on Fox News in the past two weeks, according to a SnapStream transcript search. CNN has also dived into Piker’s history of bigoted comments in recent days.

The GOP also knows that by attacking Piker, they are helping rally the left around his chosen candidates in Democratic primaries, a page from the old political playbook that has paid dividends for Republicans for decades.

There is no doubt that Miller, a former operative for the Republican National Committee, knows all of this, which underscores the point that he has finally proven beyond any doubt what many have long suspected: that the Never Trump movement is dead and needs to evolve into something else. Too many of its former leaders have simply taken to preaching to the choir on the left, and in the case of Miller, are now going so far as to boost the progressive left at the expense of reaching out to new voters.

Democrats need to look for moderating forces, leaders who can fight the fight against the GOP but also win states like Arizona and Georgia – not people who will excite Taylor Lorenz and hang out with Mehdi Hasan at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party. There is little doubt the Democrats are going to ride an anti-Trump wave in the 2026 midterms to some kind of victory, but that confidence also poses an immense risk for them at this moment, to go too far to the left and allow the party to be defined by some of its most controversial figures, which is what Piker represents and why he’s being so loudly debated in the media right now.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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