DEARBORN, MICHIGAN — “A threat to America.” “Radical ideology.” “A jihadist.”
President Donald Trump and Republicans are ratcheting up their efforts to brand Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan-born Muslim whose parents emigrated from Egypt, as an “extremist” in the final days of the state’s critical Senate race.
It has sparked concern among some El-Sayed supporters, who fear the deluge of attacks could break through to some undecided voters. It has infuriated some of the president’s one-time Muslim and Arab allies in the state with the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, who view the comments as Islamophobic and racist. And it has caused some of them to lose hope in Republicans.
“You turned off a lot of people. Even people that were working to get Trump elected and get people to vote Republican here have flipped. We did all this work for them to turn around and use us as enemies, to be able just to win an election,” said Hassan Nehme, a GOP statehouse candidate and former Michigan Republican Party vice chair who helped lead Arab American outreach for the GOP in 2024. He is undecided in how he’ll vote in this year’s Senate race. “It’s to the point [where] I’m like, why am I even fighting to be in this party?”
Republicans’ increasingly incendiary rhetoric in the crucial Senate race is overshadowing the close of an already polarizing election.
“Michigan is a battleground. That’s the truth. And racism is real,” Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat in an Arab-majority city who is backing El-Sayed, said in an interview at his office Tuesday. “If you have folks who refuse to vote for somebody because of the direction in which they pray, it most certainly has an impact.”
Hammoud believes most voters will see past it. But Republicans are bearing down.
Trump, who has repeatedly mocked and mispronounced El-Sayed’s name, labeled him a “jihadist” during a rally for GOP nominee Mike Rogers in Port Huron this past Sunday and said he would “be unable to get a seat on an airplane.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a campaign event with Rogers in Grand Rapids on Monday, claimed the world’s 500 million Arabs no longer produce award-winning science or literature and instead create “stagnant societies that do two things — hatred and war and victimization.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), while campaigning for Rogers in Michigan on Wednesday, called El-Sayed a “jihadist leprechaun.”
Ads from Rogers’ campaign and allied GOP groups attacking El-Sayed in this vein run in rotation across Michigan television. Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP Senate super PAC, says El-Sayed gets “dirty money” from an “Islamic extremist group” that is “tied to Hamas.” Rogers, in a direct-to-camera clip, calls El-Sayed “a threat to America.”
Bishara Bahbah, an Arizona resident who founded Arab Americans for Trump and helped facilitate Trump’s 2024 outreach to Michigan’s Arab community, said Trump’s Sunday comments cross “a red line.”
“The only consequence that I can see from these comments is a complete reversal of the support in Michigan and other states where Arabs and Muslims vote, toward the Democratic Party.”
Rogers has been more specific in how he’s gone after his opponent. He has attacked El-Sayed for taking campaign donations from donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, which Republicans have long attacked as a terrorist group even though the U.S. government has not designated it as such. He’s alleged ties between El-Sayed’s family and the Muslim Brotherhood, in part through El-Sayed’s father-in-law’s involvement with CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America, another Muslim group. El-Sayed’s campaign referred to past statements from both CAIR and ISNA denying affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Rogers has also referenced El-Sayed’s mother’s work for a charity that the Bush administration classified as a supporter of terrorist groups, as reported by The New York Times.
El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood and said his family has “no” ties to it. El-Sayed’s parents separated when he was three years old, and he says he was raised by his father and stepmother. His campaign responded to Trump’s rally in a statement saying while Trump and Rogers “lie and resort to desperate, bad faith attacks, Abdul remains laser focused on his plans to bring down costs and stand up to the chaos and corruption in Washington.”
“I’m not worried,” El-Sayed told reporters at a Detroit union hall on Monday, “because just like I did 18 months ago when I kicked off this campaign, I am taking a bet on the bigness of Michiganders.”
And President Barack Obama, in a rally with El-Sayed in Detroit on Saturday, said: “This stuff didn’t work on me, not in Michigan. It’s not going to work on Abdul.”
But some of El-Sayed’s allies are concerned.
James Tate, president of the Detroit City Council noted that El-Sayed “can’t defend himself in every household.”
El-Sayed’s campaign and his allies are fighting back by knocking on doors and hitting the airwaves, a sign they’re cognizant the attacks could have an impact. One El-Sayed ad features his white step-grandparents responding to some of Trump’s attacks. “Communist? We’re Presbyterian!” his grandparents say in the spot.
El-Sayed cut another ad featuring images of a menorah and of him praying with Black parishioners.
“His faith — I think that scares some people,” said Dana Harris, the director of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, who was doorknocking for El-Sayed across northwest Detroit last Saturday. “But at the end of the day. he’s a human being like the rest of us. And he wants change.”
Rogers and his allies say questioning ties to extremist organizations doesn’t equate to Islamophobia. Rogers’ campaign referred POLITICO to comments he made ahead of Trump and Kennedy’s events.
“This is not about Islam. It’s not about how he prays,” Rogers said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning. “It is about his adherence to this radical Islamic agenda.”
In a statement, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump “will continue to unapologetically fight for American greatness and call out extremists like Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed without apology.”
