President Donald Trump painted a grim picture of a Michigan where Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed triumphs in November: a chaotic state, awash with terror, violence, and the elimination of Christmas.
“If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” Trump said during a rally in Port Huron this weekend, falsely identifying El-Sayed, a Rhodes scholar and former public health official, as a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member.”
Trump then brought out the father of Todd Beamer, who helped bring down Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, after members of al-Qaeda hijacked it. It’s believed the terrorists planned on flying the plane into the United States Capitol.
“Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight, just like Todd did, to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, drawing a direct line between El-Sayed and the nation’s most famous terrorist attacks.
The Islamophobic remarks have set the tone for the final days of the GOP’s attempt to defeat El-Sayed, who has a steady but narrow lead over Republican Mike Rogers in polling. An El-Sayed victory would make him the country’s first Muslim senator and deal a stinging defeat to the Republican Party.
The stakes are high: A Rogers victory in Michigan would mark the first time the GOP has held one of the state’s Senate seats in two decades and eliminate Democrats’ easiest path to taking control of the upper chamber, forcing them instead to win three states Trump won by more than 10 percentage points.
Democrats, including El-Sayed, predict the remarks will backfire, calling them reminiscent of ultimately ineffective attacks on former President Barack Obama. But Rogers and the GOP appear to have decided they are necessary to fire up an otherwise-depressed Republican base and scare security-conscious swing voters.
The attacks have alarmed Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“The political discourse, not just about Dr. El-Sayed, but Muslims in general, is truly unprecedented,” Walid told HuffPost, saying El-Sayed’s victory in a contested Democratic primary raised Islamophobia to an “all-time high” in the state. “In 21 years in my position as executive director of CAIR Michigan, I have not seen nor heard such vitriol.”
A Michigan State University poll released Monday found that 31% of likely voters said they would be “much less likely” to vote for a Muslim candidate, even as 58% said it would have no impact on their vote. The poll found El-Sayed ahead of Rogers by 48% to 44%.
Rogers, the former congressman and law enforcement agent who will face off against El-Sayed next week, has repeatedly called attention to his opponent’s Muslim faith. He’s tied El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, to the Muslim Brotherhood, and accused him of failing to condemn the terrorist group Hamas. (El-Sayed, a liberal who supports gay and abortion rights, has condemned both groups.)
The Rogers campaign directed HuffPost to Rogers’ remarks on NBC’s “Meet the Press” from Sunday, where Rogers asserted his comments admonishing El-Sayed were not about Islam as a whole, or about “how he prays,” but rather a belief that El-Sayed is linked to a “radical Islamic agenda.” Rogers suggested, too, that Muslim community members call his office to say they are “worried” about El-Sayed.
“This is not about Islam. It’s not about how he prays. It is about his adherence to this radical Islamic agenda. When you’re here in Michigan, guess what? A lot of the Muslims here are part of our community and are an important part of our fabric here. And what happens with that is they understand that they don’t want to bring that hate, that division, and that anger here,” said Rogers.
The open Islamophobia has come more from GOP surrogates than from Rogers himself. On Monday night at a rally in Port Huron, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went beyond attacking El-Sayed to slander Arab culture at large.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world,” said Kennedy. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.” (Arabs have won the Nobel, Fields and Wolf Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature.)
While campaigning with Rogers, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) previously said El-Sayed “sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey.” Vice President JD Vance, when asked if he agreed El-Sayed was a jihadist, told reporters the Democrat “has a lot of weird friends.”
El-Sayed, for his part, has consistently shrugged off attacks on his faith and ethnicity. The Democrat has jabbed Trump, who has repeatedly and intentionally misidentified him as “Mohammed,” saying on the campaign trail that the president will soon need to refer to him as “Senator Mohammed.”
During a campaign stop last month, El-Sayed went viral for his response to a questioner, later revealed to be a Republican political operative, who demanded he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. He pushed back on the notion that his faith and Egyptian heritage should bring questions about “dual loyalty.”
At the same time, El-Sayed has also embraced his devout Muslim faith — he prays five times a day and abstains from alcohol — in his campaigning, releasing an ad in which he refers to himself as “a man of faith” and argues there is too little of that particular virtue in Washington.
In a statement to HuffPost, campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak largely sidestepped the rhetoric, pushing back generally on what he called lies and “desperate, bad faith attacks” from the right.
“Abdul remains laser-focused on his plans to bring down costs and stand up to the chaos and corruption in Washington,” said Wozniak.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who has campaigned with El-Sayed ahead of the midterms, told CNN on Monday that she’d seen Republicans and the Rogers campaign adopt a “decidedly Islamophobic bent” in their messaging against him.
“I have no problem if people want to debate policy issues, but for [much] of the stuff coming out of their campaign, that’s not what we’re talking about — and I have a real problem with that,” said Slotkin. “I believe that voters can see through some of that.”
Obama, campaigning with El-Sayed in Detroit on Saturday, said the tactics the GOP was using against him were nothing new.
“Whenever a movement builds to challenge that broken system, the people who benefit from the status quo will say and do anything to stop that train from coming,” said Obama. “They may even use your name or your faith to somehow suggest that you are dangerous and less trustworthy and less patriotic and less American than they are. We have seen the movie before. I starred in it. I’ve got a long-form birth certificate to prove it. This stuff didn’t work on me, not in Michigan. It’s not going to work on Abdul.”
Obama handily won Michigan in both 2008 and 2012.