PORT HURON, Mich. — President Donald Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday, portraying him as a threat to national security and questioning his loyalty to the United States in remarks that drew a sharp rebuke from a former top Arab American ally. Trump called El-Sayed, a former Detroit health official, a "jihadist" who was "on the side of the terrorists" and would "have to go through a metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate." He also repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, drawing a comparison between stopping El-Sayed from entering the Senate chamber and the passengers who fought back against the hijackers aboard United Flight 93. El-Sayed, who would become the nation's first Muslim senator if elected, has called attacks on his loyalty to the country "shameful" and repeatedly denied any ties to extremist groups.
The Republican president's remarks were condemned by Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, the group that helped lead the president's outreach to Arab American voters in 2024. "The president's statements are out of line," he said in a phone interview. "They are crossing a red line.
They are racist." With Republicans on the defensive over inflation, soaring fuel prices and the Iran war, the president has been trying to generate turnout by claiming that El-Sayed and other Democrats are existential threats to America, instead of electoral rivals. Michigan's Senate race between El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers is among a handful of contests that could determine control of the chamber. Trump made his remarks in Port Huron, a Canadian border city about an hour north of Detroit and near communities where he made significant gains among Arab American voters in 2024.
He became the first Republican presidential candidate since 2000 to win Dearborn, a city with one of the nation's largest concentrations of Arab Americans. Trump, who imposed a travel ban targeting several predominantly Muslim countries during his first term, has increasingly leaned into anti-Muslim rhetoric as Election Day approaches. He also attacked Democratic Rep.
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota at Sunday's rally, where he declared that he had come to Michigan "to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator." Responding to Trump, who also regularly mocks his name, El-Sayed told supporters at a rally in Grand Rapids later Sunday that he doesn't care how Trump pronounces or misrepresents it. "I don't even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me 'senator' after November," El-Sayed said, drawing cheers. "I will be Senator Muhammad to you, bro." Central to Republicans' strategy against El-Sayed in the final weeks of the campaign has been an effort to link him to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement with branches that the U.S. government has designated as terrorist organizations.
There is no evidence that El-Sayed has any affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. His half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, wrote on social media in 2012 that "my family has long been MB" and described a conversation with her mother about her involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1970s. El-Sayed was born in the United States to Egyptian immigrant parents who divorced when he was young.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
