‘They Do What We Do’

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Do populists want to lose elections?

 

I mean, the president sure seems to. But what about everyone else? In their heart of hearts, do they secretly prefer the comfort of minority status to the responsibilities of power?

 

That question has been kicked around among egghead pundits intermittently for 10 years, and I still haven’t settled on an answer. The case for “no” is obvious: In 2020, populists so dreaded losing power that they attempted a coup to try to hold on to it. A few of them even tried to hang the vice president when he wouldn’t go along.

 

Does that sound like a group that’s chill about losing elections?

 

But the case for “yes” is pretty easy too. The joy of populism is getting to rage self-righteously against the fecklessness and corruption of the ruling elite. Becoming the ruling elite yourself and having to govern takes all the fun out of it.

 

See, e.g., Dan Bongino, who was made second in command of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency and peaced out after less than a year to return to podcasting. One job let him spin up right-wingers about a government cover-up involving Jeffrey Epstein, the other obliged him to debunk it. Bongino chose fun (and lucre).

 

I’d conservatively estimate that 80 percent of the reason Donald Trump has spent the last decade wheezing about the “deep state” is that it resolves the paradox that his electoral success has created. How can he be the duly elected president, the head of government, a dictator within his own party—and still also a smol bean populist outsider challenging a corrupt establishment?

 

Simple. The “deep state” is the real establishment, supposedly. Trump remains part of the blameless minority even as he goes about grabbing power remorselessly.

 

Whether populists prefer to lose is back on my mind because of leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. Piker is known for belching up hot takes on his livestreams about, among other things, America having deserved 9/11 and American Jews inviting violence against themselves by supporting Israel. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed, found his perspective valuable enough to have appeared with him several times at events this year.

 

He’s been paying for it ever since. With the general election approaching and polls in Michigan surprisingly tight, one might think Piker would want to do his friend Abdul a solid by lying low—or at least declining interview requests—until November.

 

Nope. He sat down with Axios this week and was asked whether he believes the United States is “worse” than al-Qaeda. The question was obvious bait, and Piker bit hard:

 

Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes. We have caused tremendous terror all around the world. I think that that is not only terror that we are waging on regular civilians in nations in the periphery, but it’s also having consequences on ourselves. It’s having dramatic consequences on the home front. One clear example of this is what we did in Minab [Iran], right? There’s no distinction between blowing up a school, triple-tapping it with Tomahawk missiles—if you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror. This doesn’t mean that all Americans are terrorists, but the reality of the matter is we have to create an environment of accountability to ensure things like that never happen again.

 

That answer is the political equivalent of a flaming bag of dog s--t left on El-Sayed’s doorstep. The candidate hurriedly disavowed his pal’s position (never mind that it sounds a lot like El-Sayed’s own position circa 2021) in a comment to Axios, even giving him the “Hasan who?” treatment: “I do not agree with this statement, nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.” He must be wondering the same thing I am: Does Piker want him to lose this election?

 

I don’t think so. “Pikerism is the future of the left!” is obviously a better headline for Hasan than “Pikerism is electoral poison,” and the former is possible only if El-Sayed wins while the latter is inevitable if he loses. Drawing moral equivalencies between America and its enemies isn’t a case of Piker trying to sabotage his friend’s campaign.

 

It’s a case of postliberals doing what postliberals do.

 

Denigrating America.

 

The president himself does it routinely.

 

He was asked this week about China providing satellite imagery to Iran to help the regime target U.S. bases in the Middle East, which would help explain how shockingly successful the Iranians have been at striking American assets. For a blowhard like Trump who’s obsessed with strength and got elected in 2016 as a China hawk, here was a golden opportunity to demonstrate toughness by warning the Chinese to back off.

 

Instead, he rhetorically shrugged. “They do what we do,” he said of China supplying military intelligence to an ally against a common enemy. Which is ironic, given that America’s allies in the Far East have never been less confident that the United States will be doing anything in the future to help them against Beijing.

 

The president has drawn even starker moral equivalencies when confronted about Vladimir Putin’s habit of murdering people who make trouble for him. When Bill O’Reilly called Putin a “killer” during an interview in 2017, Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. … You think our country is so innocent?” There isn’t much daylight between that answer and Piker’s musings on the United States and al-Qaeda.

 

It’s weird in some ways that a nationalist like Trump would resort to progressive-style sophistry about who the real bad guys are. For one thing, his movement is jingoist and chauvinist to the core; that America is great and good (at least when the right is in charge), not a nation of cutthroat “killers,” is normally an article of MAGA faith.

 

Stranger still, the president doesn’t typically measure whether an adversary’s conduct is acceptable by whether the United States engages in the same conduct. On the contrary, the point of “might makes right” as a worldview is to establish a double standard in which America gets to do things—like, say, forming alliances with Europe—that it won’t tolerate from less powerful countries. “It’s okay for China to help Iran kill Americans because we might someday help the Taiwanese kill them” is a glaring departure from that worldview.

 

Why are postliberals as far afield as Trump and Piker prone to answering questions about enemy atrocities with variations of “you think our country is so innocent”? I think it has less to do with wanting to denigrate America than with trying to move public opinion toward postliberalism by inviting Americans to reconsider their moral prejudices against illiberal entities abroad.

 

Don’t get me wrong, it has something to do with wanting to denigrate America. To listen to Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 and 2024 was to hear that the land of the free and home of the brave had become a squalid anarchic hellhole on the brink of social collapse. To listen to Piker is to learn that America is an avatar of extraordinarily wicked belligerence, midwife to a “genocide” by Israelis in Gaza and potentially beyond.

 

At the risk of engaging in tautology: Postliberalism is a revolution against liberalism, and revolutions can’t succeed absent popular contempt for the governing regime. Convince Americans that the civic order to which they’ve traditionally pledged allegiance has crumbled into abject immorality—worse than al-Qaeda, full of “killers,” no more civilized than Putin’s Russia—and you’ve created political space for radical change.

 

Safe for illiberalism.

 

Most of the game being played by Trump and Piker, though, has to do with challenging Americans’ traditional hatred of illiberalism by challenging their suppositions about what makes “the bad guys” bad.

 

When the president handwaves away Russia’s persecution of dissidents and China’s military support for Iran, he does so because he admires those regimes and wants the U.S. to grow closer to them. It suits his “spheres of influence” approach to the world, in which the great powers collude to menace their respective “spheres.” (Might makes right!) And of course it suits his autocratic tendencies: Trump plainly wishes he could deal with his domestic enemies the way Xi Jinping does.

 

An America in which the public has been conditioned to regard illiberal governments as no less moral than our own is an America unlikely to make a fuss as the U.S. government slips further into postliberalism. We’re already so much like Russia and China, you see; what does it matter if we’re a little bit more?

 

Piker doesn’t want a government that resembles al-Qaeda, I’ll safely assume, but he does seem to want an American administration that’s neutral at worst between Israel and its jihadist enemies and an American public that treats Israeli military action as no more morally justified than Islamic terrorism.

 

How can he achieve that? By encouraging Americans to use the death toll in the war on terror as a yardstick for measuring which side has been more “terrorist.” (What he meant by “pound for pound” in his comment to Axios, I have no idea.) The question of who killed more? conveniently elides other factors people normally consider in weighing the morality of war: What are the two sides’ goals? Are they targeting civilians intentionally? Are they trying to mitigate harm? But that’s the point. Since powerhouse militaries like America’s and Israel’s will almost always outkill their enemies, they’re destined to be the bad guys in any conflict according to Piker’s math.

 

The death toll a government inflicts in executing its policies certainly is something to consider in weighing the justness of its cause. The wrinkle is that Piker has carved out big, big exceptions to that for foreign regimes that he’s more enthusiastic about. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson noted this morning, Piker is a Mao Zedong admirer who fangirled out during a trip to China upon being gifted a copy of the late chairman’s Little Red Book. Somehow, the man with the biggest body count of the 20^th century is seemingly exempt from his who killed more? moral calculus while America and Israel are not.

 

We all make moral allowances for political causes with which we sympathize. And to give Piker his due, he’s right to demand “accountability” for the U.S. bombing of the Iranian school in Minab at the start of the war. Last month, ProPublica revealed that one of Pete Hegseth’s many initiatives to make the U.S. military less squeamish about killing people was to gut a program aimed at protecting civilians during combat. Had it remained fully staffed, the attack on the school might not have happened. Putting a war crimes apologist in charge of the Pentagon does bolster the case for moral equivalence between America and its enemies.

 

But the fact that we all make allowances for causes we support doesn’t excuse moral perversion in choosing which causes to support. I understand the argument that Israel has gone too far in trying to avenge the slaughtered dead of October 7, turning its campaign to destroy Hamas into a campaign to level Gaza. But I don’t understand how that argument can be made in good faith while waving around the Little Red Book (“The Great Leap Forward had good intentions!”), just like I don’t understand how it can be made in good faith by turd-polishers of Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine like Tucker Carlson.

 

Intentions matter. Body counts matter, too. Postliberals make no pretense of moral consistency in caring about either.

 

Relativism.

 

Then again, why would they?

 

I’ve written many times that Trumpism is less a political movement than a revolution against traditional liberal political morality. From a piece on the president’s nascent slush fund for loyalist criminals: “For most of my life, the scourge of conservatism—in particular its Christian adherents—was moral relativism. Trump is moral relativism personified. Whether an action is right or wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not.”

 

There’s no inconsistency in Piker feeling incandescently outraged at Israel and giddy about Mao, just as there’s no inconsistency in Trump being angrier at Canada for wanting to join the European Union than he is at China for helping Iran to kill Americans. Consistency has nothing to do with anything. Under postliberalism, morality is a tool to advance one’s interests.

 

If you’re committed ideologically to left-wing postliberalism, there’s no contradiction in having a no-limits body count for communist rule in China while abhorring a “genocide” perpetrated by “Western settler colonialists” in the Middle East. And if you’re committed ideologically to right-wing postliberalism, there’s no contradiction in feeling more indignant about a liberal alliance in your “sphere of influence” than Xi targeting U.S. air bases or Putin murdering Ukrainians.

 

It’s all relative. They do what we do—and if anything, we’re worse: The muddier American postliberals can make the moral waters, the less of a political drag on their agenda voters’ moral impulses promise to be. America has spent most of the last 10 years being governed by a party in which that cynical attitude prevails, with predictable consequences. I’m not sure what happens if it ends up prevailing in both.