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US president Donald Trump has already launched personal attacks on Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed ahead of next month’s midterms, with an “Islamophobic” Truth Social post taking aim at the Democrat and his wife, and referring to him by the wrong name “Mohammed” because he can “call him whatever the hell I want”.
Now, during a rally in the state on Sunday (October 25), the 80-year-old claimed that El-Sayed stated “that he and many people were sad” about the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei in February, adding: “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.”
The remarks concern an audio recording of El-Sayed obtained by the right-wing news outlet The Washington Free Beacon, in which he said “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today”. In a statement issued in March, El-Sayed’s campaign team said that Americans have “watched 13 brave service members lose their lives” since the beginning of the “illegal and unjustifiable war” in Iran.It continued: "We’ve watched our tax dollars wasted to raise our gas prices. We’re paying over a dollar a gallon more, making life even more unlivable. Americans are paying with their lives and livelihoods for a war MAGA swore they’d never take us into."
"The fact that a rightwing news outlet may have illegally and unethically obtained a deliberation about how to talk about this by way of a disgruntled former employee is only a distraction. They’re distracting from the fact that Donald Trump, Mike Rogers, the entire MAGA base doesn’t want to talk about the pain they’re forcing us all into."
Trump went on to tell the Michigan crowd that “they certainly should not give him [El-Sayed] a seat in the United States Senate”, and that “he would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate”.
“I want him to have a metal detector,” he said.
The Republican’s remarks have since been condemned as “racism”, with journalist Mehdi Hasan branding it “sick, sick stuff”:
Fellow reporter Aaron Rupar said: “This is just pure racism. Republicans objectively are campaigning on little more than bigotry”:
Democratic content creator and commentator Harry Sisson tweeted: “This is just straight up racist. The modern Republican Party, folks”:
Progressive news analyst Alex Cole responded: “El-Sayed is not a convicted felon, you are”:
And filmmaker Morgan J. Freeman accused Trump of “publicly profiling an American Muslim as a potential terrorist”:
indy100 has approached El-Sayed’s campaign and the White House for comment.
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