El-Sayed Shrugs Off Hasan Piker’s 9/11 Comments

Kristen Welker asked a pretty simple question. Do you disavow the guy who said America had it coming on 9/11? And Abdul El-Sayed, standing in for the party that wants Michigan voters to trust him with a Senate seat, basically shrugged. That's not a gotcha question. That's the floor.

Here's what makes it worse: this isn't some rando El-Sayed shared a stage with once by accident. Piker is a fixture of his campaign's online ecosystem, the kind of streamer whose audience gets courted, not tolerated. When you build a coalition around a guy, you don't get to act shocked when someone points out what the guy actually said. You knew. Everybody knew. Piker's comments about 9/11 weren't whispered in a back room, they were said out loud to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

El-Sayed had an easy out here. "That's disgusting, I don't agree with it, next question." Instead he chose the mush-mouthed dodge, which tells you something about where his actual priorities sit relative to his coalition. Politicians triangulate constantly, fine. But there's a difference between hedging on policy and hedging on whether 3,000 dead Americans deserved it.

Michigan voters can draw their own conclusions about a Senate candidate who won't cleanly say no to that. We think they will.