We’re living in the imperial end times, argues Hasan Piker. With Trump entering a quagmire in Iran after having cast off America’s allies, a new era of belligerence, cruelty, and MAGA fascism looms over the home front.
As the post‑liberal world buckles with Donald Trump’s war on Iran, and the old certainties of American power fall away, few commentators have been as blunt about the stakes — or as darkly funny — as Hasan Piker.
In this episode of The Jacobin Show with David Griscom, Hasan joins David Griscom for a wide‑ranging conversation on the accelerating crisis of American hegemony, the rise of a Trump‑shaped political order, and the imperial boomerang now hitting the domestic front. From Europe’s shock at being treated like the “Global South” to the bipartisan collapse on immigration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in particular, Piker argues that the old liberal consensus is dead — and that only organized, disciplined working‑class power offers a path forward.
You can watch the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
We have a lot to talk about. I wanted to ask you up front: did you get, and will you accept, your invitation to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza?
Yeah, I mean, everybody always says I’m a billionaire champagne socialist. So they were right. That’s why I was actually raising all these funds. Of course, that’s why I went to China, so I could purchase a Chinese factory and keep extracting as much surplus labor value as I can, so I could finally get on the Board of Peace. Because I love peace. I didn’t realize that it was going to get leaked, but yeah, I’m doing it. I’m going to be a part of it.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re going to be able to do there.
Today we’re going to talk about the United States and what’s been going on in this country with ICE, but first: are we watching a full-on decline of US hegemony and the empire here?
I think that’s the easiest answer. I mean, it’s one that I’ve been talking about for quite a while, but I think in some ways Donald Trump, and this is going to come across as strange for me to say, but I think in some ways Donald Trump is actually moving America toward a different future. Like, there is definitely a future vision here with what he’s doing. And I think a big chunk of that is responding to what will inevitably happen to the new world order as liberalism is in crisis once again, only a hundred years after the last time this happened, where fascism rose from the ashes — but this time with anthropogenic climate change accelerating and tremendous migration patterns going from the developing world to the developed world.
A lot of these great powers around the world are going to drop their borders and try to secure spheres of influence or harden their position in their own spheres of influence rather than trying to maintain global hegemony as America has done since the end of World War II and the emergence of what we know as the liberal international rules-based order.
What he’s done has certainly broken that system. I do wonder if there will be some kind of revival, just in the same way as after Joe Biden won, when there was all this talk of a return to norms and normalcy in American politics.
I don’t know. It does kind of feel like the Democrats and their incompetence — again, something that we’ve seen from liberal parties in the past as well, only a hundred years ago — it’s all leading me to believe that they want to go back to consensus. They want to go back to consensus politics. They want to go back to maintaining liberalism, but a much more reduced version of liberalism.
Trump was able to single-handedly rewrite American politics according to his own vision. The last term, and this is something that was very obvious with the Biden administration, I remember seeing someone say, “Trump was treated like an aberration, but actually the real aberration is 2020 Joe Biden.” Meaning a return to the old way of doing business, and that the new way of doing business is going to be more Trumpian. Now, does any Republican have the same presence as Trump? Donald Trump can command a legion of mouth breathers. The ayatollah wishes he had that in his own base of support among the Shia fundamentalists. I don’t think there’s anyone that can spiritually succeed Donald Trump.
Having said that, does that even matter anymore? I don’t know. I mean, 80 percent of the country did not want Donald Trump to invade Greenland militarily and Trump still wanted to make a big show of it. And for all intents and purposes he was going to follow through on it regardless of what people were saying. It’s the same with Venezuela. My point is: Does democracy even matter if one of the two parties in the duopoly has decided “No, we’re actually moving in the direction of fascism”? Well, I don’t think it does. You don’t need popular consensus. You don’t need a popular mandate. Trump certainly doesn’t have it, and he’s doing whatever he wants right now anyway.
When it comes to Trump’s particular style — he’s a unique individual for sure. But you look at what’s been happening here in Texas with Greg Abbott — Greg Abbott is not charismatic like Trump at all, but he has rewritten the entire rule book for how you govern the state. He’s spending his time harassing Muslims regularly. They’re making it a state priority to harass these kind of folks. That’s Trumpism. And that was something that might not have been part of his politics beforehand, but it shows how even somebody who doesn’t have the Trump style is ready to do this kind of thing because he sees that he doesn’t have any real threat from the Democratic Party. There’s nothing holding back the door — if they want to push it, it can go wide open.
It’s true. That’s why I think you don’t necessarily have to be charismatic if we do have elections. I don’t think J. D. Vance is capable of leading the Trump train. But if we do have elections again, and there isn’t some sort of martial law — some sort of Insurrection Act being utilized in one of these cities that Donald Trump decides to besiege and then decides we’re not going to have elections or something — we don’t really have anything that’s going to hold him back. I guess we have the courts, but the highest court is completely captive to Trump’s interests. And I guess the same question remains: it’s the order of capital. Is fascism going to present itself as a mechanism of stability once again for our capital owners?
So far it does seem like that. And you see the market reaction to Trump’s belligerent behavior, or what we perceive as belligerent behavior, when he says he is going to invade Greenland. And then Europe says, “Oh, we’re going to divest from America.” And the market suffers for one day. And then the next day Trump says, “Okay, we made a deal. I’m just getting some of the pieces of Greenland for the Golden Dome or for mineral extraction,” even though he also admitted that the mineral extraction is not really the main reason here. And then boom! the market recovers just like that. So for that reason it does feel like a lot of the super-wealthy capital owners, even those at Davos, seem to be fine with Trump’s behavior, even with “Liberation Day.”
For me, once Liberation Day happened and Donald Trump decided to rewrite the international trade design that America has fought long and hard for — where we have this system of IOUs that we get from all these other countries, and then we become the consumption engine of the planet and get to enjoy the labor of the hyper-exploited Global South countries — he decided to ruin that. He decided to basically drop a nuclear bomb on that international design. That was quite beneficial for us, and the expectation there was market volatility, instability — it came for a little bit.
But then, as far as stock performance goes, we’re still back to business as usual. Same with when he decided to engage in consolidation of power among capital, where he decided to utilize the Department of Justice to prosecute Jerome Powell. The market didn’t respond to that at all. That’s what’s really surprising to me. So I think the super-wealthy also see the writing on the wall. And they do think Trump, or whoever will carry the torch of Trump’s fascism, will create a system of stability that benefits them a lot more than the instability that comes from liberalism with a modicum of gains for social safety nets here and there.
What we’re seeing right now is certainly a rules-based order getting smashed by Trump. But all these Europeans hemming and hawing when we all watched the same thing happen to Gaza over the past few years — that was something that was so egregious that, on top of the loss of life and the horror of it, they didn’t even really feel the need to lie or cover it up. It was just a pure power grab by Israel with a blanket defense by the United States. So now for these Europeans to act surprised that that breakdown is coming for them, I find it to be a little bit rich.
I think the reason they’re surprised about it is because — I forget who said this, I think it was some dude from Denmark who said it on day two of [the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in] Davos — but he said, “to be a happy vassal is one thing, but to be a slave is another thing.” And I think these guys thought they were Israel. Like they thought that they could be Israel, or not even Israel, ’cause no one really is Israel, as we’ve seen before. As far as all of America’s vassals and trade and security partners, there’s only one Israel — no other country gets to have anywhere near the same level of control and influence over American politics, even at the domestic level. But they at least thought, you know, this system is fine.
They don’t disrupt our historically colonial operations in Africa. We get to do whatever we want. Really, we get to extract super profits from the Global South, just as the United States does. Sure, there is no sovereignty in this process because, thanks to NATO, our entire military is basically controlled by the United States of America. We’ve relegated defense to them and therefore we’re not real sovereign states. But things are fine overall ’cause we’re not under the boot. Right. And maybe every now and then they’ll ask us to also participate in crushing the Global South and we’ll go in — and Denmark is a great example of this, because they talk about how they lost the largest amount of people in the illegal occupation of Iraq, and that’s not exactly something to be proud of. But yeah, they thought that they would never get treated like a brown country. That’s in the simplest terms. You heard these exact same leaders praise the president for his illegal kidnapping of a head of a sovereign state, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. They thought that was awesome. And then right after Trump did that, he turned around and said, “Yeah, now I’m going to actually take Greenland.” And they were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on. We’re not brown. This is Europe. Like, what are you doing?” And it shows their hypocrisy. But I think what came after concessions for Trump, given regardless of his belligerent nature, is precisely what was expected.
The winner is going to be military contractors and arms manufacturers because we’re definitely going to see a remilitarized Europe. There’s just no doubt about that.
Oh, for sure. Once again.
What we’ve seen out of Minneapolis has just been heartbreaking. We now have this autopsy of Renée Good, and something that we all knew — that this ICE officer just straight up murdered her — has just been proven beyond any shred of a doubt. The shot that killed her looks like it was directly to her head. Something that anybody who saw that video knew from the get-go.
Exiting from her right temple, and it was the third shot.
It is something that has been truly inexcusable. I’m just curious, as somebody who has been watching this unfold, what are your takeaways?
It’s the imperial boomerang. I used to talk about LRADs all the time — long-range acoustic devices, right? They were first implemented in Iraq for crowd control purposes. Then only a decade later they were being used in Portland, and now every police precinct has one. Same goes for all these different tools that we use first in the colonies and then at the home front. And the same systems of surveillance that people experiment with in places like Gaza. Maybe even AI targeting and drone warfare that we’ve seen happening to the captive Palestinian population in Gaza. And the genocide will inevitably happen to Americans on the domestic front as well. We’re not there yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.
Tying that back to Minneapolis and what’s going on there, I think we’re in a unique time as far as the administration not readily having an organized response or reaction. At least in the past there were boogeymen that you could point to, in the Cold War: communism, the Soviets, things of that nature. Right now, America in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR has been the domineering force, and it’s basically just hurting itself as the contradictions worsen. So now they’re just trying to invent villains, and sometimes the villain that they invent is a thirty-seven-year-old white mom who is in her Honda Pilot with plushy toys in the glove compartment. They tried to present her as a left-wing domestic terrorist, a left-wing extremist.
It doesn’t work. I don’t think many people actually believe it, with the exception of the 20 percent base of support that is firmly MAGA. How successful will that be? I don’t know. How much pressure will the public take from this administration, especially as their economic conditions worsen? That remains to be seen. I’m going to go to Minneapolis tomorrow morning to attend the general strike that’s taking place there. So I’m very interested to see what kind of labor initiatives could play a role in maybe stopping or offering pushback to these domestic colonial endeavors.
That’s been the one thing that has been fairly inspiring in this really dark moment — just seeing the willingness of everyday people to take tremendous risks, continuing to go out there even now, after we have seen that these agents literally will kill people, right? The fact that people continue to go out there and put themselves on the line has been something that I find to be particularly inspiring.
But there’s this fundamental question about whether that’s going to be able to be connected to politics in this country. We have seen, on some level, certain Democrats have upped their rhetoric around ICE. We’ve interviewed a few candidates here in Texas, even ones who have gone as far as to say that they support abolishing ICE. It is notable though, that neither James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett have come out and supported this, despite the fact that this is something that you see a lot of support for from everyday folks.
I think one of the questions is whether individuals in labor and working-class people can seize this and fight against the system, because I have serious doubts about whether we’re going to see serious political action from the Democratic Party on this.
They’re not going to save us. I mean, even the resistance liberalism of 2016 that treated Trump like a unique factor and not just a logical conclusion to the American reactionary movement, they presented at least a stronger opposition. In the process, they were able to tell people, “Look, liberalism is not failing. We’re still here. We still got it. This is not us.” They’re not even giving us the dignity at this point.
I read something last night, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Hakeem Jeffries has actually mounted this fake opposition toward ICE where they were able to cut some “must-pass” bills that were going to have ICE funding in them so that they could — instead of mounting an opposition toward ICE across the board and then having some sort of leverage — they decided, “No, we will present an opposition to ICE funding.”
This is the fundamental problem with the Democratic Party today, especially around immigration. They’re so scared because, after losing in 2024 — and losing across the board, not just with white voters but with Hispanic voters — the Democrats are afraid to touch immigration, despite the fact that, specifically on ICE, this is something that people are turning against — men walking around and ripping people out of their homes in their pajamas or in their underwear. They’re so afraid to actually take a stance on this. That’s why you get this half-assed measure that isn’t going to satisfy folks who correctly want to see the end of ICE. It’s also not going to do very much to bring over the moderates or the centrists into that kind of political program. There’s a fundamental cowardice of this party, and we are living the consequences of it right now.
Yeah, absolutely. No one is coming to save us. We have to keep organizing and we have to be militant in our organizing. We have to be disciplined in our organizing. We have to be there. We have to be an unstoppable force. We have to consistently show our discontent over and over again by way of protest, but also by pressuring the Democratic Party. By trying to unseat bad Democrats and replacing them with Democrats that will do the right thing.
But that’s obviously not the be-all and end-all either. I think that is at least trying to move this country in a positive direction by using the current instability to make way for more radical change, hopefully for down the line. At least that’s my vision for change. Having said that, I don’t know how successful that will be, especially when it’s very clear that the powers that be within the Democratic Party establishment are not even remotely invested in making any change whatsoever. I don’t think it’s necessarily fear, really. Maybe it is, I don’t know. I go back and forth on this quite a bit. This is a classic thing that I ask every politician. I ask them, “ Are your colleagues stupid or are they cynical?”
If they’re cynical, that means they’re aware of what’s going on and they just refuse to lean into it because they have some other perverse incentives, like corporate lobbying or whatever. Or are they stupid because they’re just oblivious to what’s going on? They’re so tunneled in, they’re so echo-chambered, so much a product of the system that they never, or rarely ever, encounter a real human being that tells them, “We don’t like when people are murdering us in the streets, or when the administration is saying that you can violate the Fourth Amendment with an administrative warrant and just break down people’s doors as ICE agents and do door-to-door operations demanding to see people’s passports, demanding, ‘Show me or papers.’”
Senator Chuck Schumer is not afraid to stand up for an unpopular issue if it’s Trump doing too much diplomacy with Iran instead of bombing them. But this stuff, I genuinely think he doesn’t give a sh-t. I think Renée Good is an inconvenience for him more than a political obligation for him to respond to.
It reminds me of the way that the Gulf Nations treat Palestinians. Like Chuck Schumer is basically Mohammed bin Salman in private being like, “I don’t f-cking care about these Palestinians. I hope they just go away so I could have direct flights from Riyadh to Tel Aviv. That’s what I want. But my people don’t want that. So in order to make sure that I never have any sort of revolt, I have to keep playing ball aesthetically.” But Chuck Schumer’s not even doing that.
You guys have all seen the polls. Democrats are underwater. And that shouldn’t be the case. But there’s a reason why Democrats are underwater. It’s because of the mass discontent due to their inability to meet the moment, due to their lack of interest in doing anything, really. They’re uninterested in even communicating some of the things that they’re doing! This was exactly what happened with Joe Biden as well. This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. Because Zohran Mamdani has been doing stuff with Lina Khan, you know, going after junk fees and things like that, right? This is stuff that Biden did as well. These are technically kitchen-table issues, bread-and-butter issues that would win you a lot of favors with the masses. And Joe Biden was so bad at communicating these things that they were doing that people simply did not care.
But now everyone’s celebrating Zohran. Like if I was Joe, if I was Brandon, I’d kill myself. I’d literally be like, “This is crazy. They got a Muslim thirty-four-year-old communist that’s doing the same sh-t that I did with my people, the people that I appointed, and everyone loves it when he’s doing it!” But part of that is because he couldn’t message it. He did not want to message around it at all. Or he was incapable of doing so because he was far too old. And Democrats don’t even do that either. Democrats don’t even put forth an aesthetic posture, let alone one that has some tangible results, like making it more difficult for the Republicans to continue dominating the American population in the ways that they are. It’s just all bad across the board.