As the 2026 midterm cycle has entered its final days, with the Senate majority on the line, Trump and his fellow Republicans have pivoted to a vile level of Islamophobic rhetoric, leading Rolling Stone to declare the 2026 midterms “the most racist election in recent memory.”
Racism and xenophobia are nothing new for Donald Trump, of course. Whether it’s his years of pushing the birther conspiracy theory, his repeated use of “Barack HUSSEIN Obama,” his mass deportation program, his attempt to end birthright citizenship or his weaponization of the Justice Department to target Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump has a long history of targeting people of color by calling into question their American-ness, as if he were the ultimate arbiter of what a “real American” is.
As we head into the midterm elections next week, this is precisely what Trump has sought to do to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who would be the chamber’s first Muslim member. Trump and his MAGA allies have used El-Sayed’s name, religion and family to suggest he cannot be trusted: that he is un-American, loyal to America’s enemies before America itself.
But now, in the closing days of the campaign, after months of attack ads focused on transgender issues failed to halt what appears to be a growing blue wave, Trump and other prominent Republicans have escalated those attacks against El-Sayed, going beyond what we’ve seen in any campaign before.
How did an election about affordability take such an Islamophobic turn? And what does the latest data tell us about whether these attacks will work or cause a backlash that will help send Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to the United States Senate?
On Sept. 8, Elon Musk’s America PAC submitted a campaign expenditure filing showing it had spent about $608,500 on a new wave of digital ads attacking El-Sayed over, among other things, his position on “gender transition care for minors.” That brought the PAC’s spending on the race to more than $1 million.
By the time of that filing, according to Nate Silver’s forecast model, former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, whom Musk’s PAC is backing, had gone from a slight lead after El-Sayed’s narrow Aug. 4 primary victory to trailing by two points.
Musk’s infusion of cash, as in Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Alaska, was meant to protect the GOP’s Senate majority by halting the Democrats’ momentum--part of what The New York Times called Musk’s “Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans.”
A month later, what did Musk have to show for his spending in Michigan?
According to Silver, not only did the ads not appear to move the needle for Rogers, but El-Sayed actually grew his lead to 3.5 points over that time.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that on Oct. 7, Trump stepped up his own attacks against El-Sayed.
In early October, Trump and Republicans were trying to tie El-Sayed to leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker to drive a wedge among Jewish Democrats. The same day that CNN reported that El-Sayed asked Piker to tone down his anti-Israel rhetoric, Donald Trump 𝕏posted an attack against El-Sayed on Truth Social that feels mild compared to what followed.
In the post, Trump—misspelling El-Sayed’s middle name, Mohamed—wrote, “Mohammed El-Sayed is a Terrible Candidate” and “Mohammed goes back to the days of the Jihad. He is a radical Extremist Terrorist Sympathizer.”
A 2026 update to “palling around with terrorists.”
Trump also wrote that El-Sayed’s “values are not those of our Great United States of America.” The language echoed his past attacks on Obama.
Over the next two weeks, with the race largely unchanged, Trump’s rhetoric against El-Sayed would become far more extreme.
Consider a moment from the 2008 presidential campaign when John McCain corrected a woman at a town hall, who said she couldn’t “trust” Barack Obama because she believed he was “an Arab.” This followed years of unfounded rumors that Obama was a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya, claims that McCain could have leaned into and amplified.
Instead, just weeks before the election, McCain assured the woman that Obama was “a decent family man citizen.” At that same event, he told the crowd, to boos, that Obama “is a decent person and a person you do not have to be scared of as President of the United States.”
At the time, analysts saw this moment as a refreshing display of decency. Certainly in retrospect, it stands as an example of a candidate placing principle ahead of political ambition.
But McCain’s campaign was hardly blameless. Just six days earlier, McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, delivered her harshest attack yet on Obama, suggesting his past association with Bill Ayers, a 1960s radical activist and co-founder of the Weather Underground (a group that had been classified as a “domestic terrorist organization”) made him a threat to the United States.
“Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol,’” Palin said today, according to a transcript distributed by the campaign. “These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. This is not a man who sees America as you and I do — as the greatest force for good in the world.
“This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough
to pal around with terroristswho targeted their own country,” Palin concluded, in the hardest shot of the statement.
As The Atlantic reported in 2009, this was not Palin going rogue; it was an attack conceived and authorized by the campaign’s top strategists. Per Politico, McCain’s team took this route “in an attempt to move the conversation beyond the economic issues on which Obama looks to spend the last month of the race.”
Looking back, it’s striking that this was seen at the time as a particularly harsh attack. Compared with today, a vice presidential nominee accusing the opposing presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists” seems downright quaint.
For Trump and the Republican Party he has remade in his image, McCain’s principled restraint serves as a cautionary tale. McCain ended up losing that race. And in 2026, Trump is determined not to repeat that mistake.
In the closing days of the campaign, the president is accusing a U.S. Senate candidate not just of “palling around with terrorists,” but of being one himself.
The shift to a darker attack on El-Sayed began during the Oct. 8 debate between El-Sayed and Rogers in Grand Rapids, when Rogers went after El-Sayed’s mother, accusing her of working for an “organization that was indicted for funneling money to al-Qaida.”
As Politifact reported
El-Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency from 1999 to 2004, the conservative Michigan publication
[The Midwesterner reported]. Court documents said that[Elkomy was involved in wire transfers]prosecutors said violated sanctions, but the records don’t establish that those funds went to finance terrorism.In 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department
[designated]it for supporting terrorism, including providing financial support for Osama bin Laden.
Not only does the substance of the attack fall short, but El-Sayed was not raised by his biological mother; his parents divorced when he was 3 years old.
After that attack fell flat, Republicans shifted from focusing on El-Sayed’s supposed familial associations to claims of his direct support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Based on what? As The Hill reported last week:
In an essay published on HuffPost in January 2011, El-Sayed argued that if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power in Egypt after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the result wouldn’t be as bad as some critics feared.
And
Republicans are also pointing to a statement El-Sayed signed in 2012 after Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi gained power in Egypt, urging him “to purge the media and police as quickly as possible.”
“We affirm, as Egyptian Americans, that we strongly reject those voices that are courting America and Europe to take a position against the Egyptian regime,” the letter’s signatories declared.
Plus:
El-Sayed has now been thrust into the awkward position of having to defend years-old social media posts from his half-sister claiming their family has long had ties to “MB,” referring to the Muslim Brotherhood. She also said that some relatives had been jailed in Egypt because of activism in the group.
And as this strategy has morphed from his mother’s associations to El-Sayed’s own sympathies, Trump’s remarks have ratcheted up accordingly.
By Oct. 15, Trump was calling El-Sayed a “Muslim Brotherhood Guy,” emphasizing his middle name for extra fear-mongering effect.
“His name is Abdul, but I call him Mohammad Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy 100%.”
Two days later came this viral exchange in which El-Sayed confronted a right-wing operative’s demand that he “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” which El-Sayed promptly did, before offering a lesson in first amendment rights.
On Oct. 21, Rogers took the Muslim Brotherhood attack line to the debate stage, saying El-Sayed represents “a risk to our national security.”
By Oct. 23, that had morphed into the attack that we see today. It’s not just about El-Sayed’s sympathies. No, now Trump is outright calling him a “violent jihadist.”
As Trump said to reporters,
“His name is Abdul Muhammad...He was a member, probably still is, of the Muslim Brotherhood...He’s a vicious, violent jihadist. And he has no place in our government.”
Trump went further still at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday. During his remarks, Trump said the quiet part out loud:
“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 then introduced David Beamer, the father of Todd Beamer, a Flint native who was among the Flight 93 passengers who fought back against the 9/11 hijackers causing the plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.
As an MS NOW column recounted,
“Mike Rogers is an American,”
[Beamer said]of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, as President Donald Trump looked on. “Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.”“[El-Sayed] demonstrates with his view of what our world should look like that he’s not an American, he’s anti-American,” Beamer said at the rally.
“He has blood that’s red,” Beamer said. “However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.”
As the column’s headline put it, “The right has zoomed past ‘birtherism’ to something far darker.”
Trump capped off the attack by likening a vote against El-Sayed to the Flight 93 passengers’ fight against the hijackers.
“Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd Beamer did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol. Todd Beamer gave his life for America, and you have to give your vote for Todd Beamer.”
The implication of Trump’s words was lost on noone.
This episode is not just about Trump’s own racism,. It also shows what the Republican Party has become under his leadership.
While Rogers has stopped short of outright accusing El-Sayed of being a terrorist, he campaigned Wednesday with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas as a surrogate to help make those associations clear.
As Cruz put it,
“If Abdul El-Sayed becomes the senator for Michigan, there is absolutely nothing to stop Chuck Schumer from placing [him] on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Senate Intelligence Committee has access to our most closely guarded secrets. And if I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result. We have American servicemen and women in harm’s way fighting Muslim Brotherhood terrorists right now…We have every reason to believe that Abdul El-Sayed, if he found out that they’re about to apprehend these terrorists, that he would let those terrorists know.”
Cruz went well beyond merely suggesting El-Sayed is un-American with “dual loyalties.”
As CBS reported,
Asked after the event if he believes El-Sayed would have dual loyalties, Cruz demurred.
“I don’t know about dual loyalties. The demonstrated loyalties he has are to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Cruz told reporters. “He tries to say, ‘It doesn’t matter how I pray.’ I agree. It doesn’t matter how he prays. I’m not talking about how he prays. I’m talking about ideology and advocating for and supporting a terrorist organization.”
And other Republicans have gotten in on the act.
During a Republican campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said,
“There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. 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.”
Kennedy tried to connect this claim to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and by association to El-Sayed. Per The Associated Press:
“All that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Kennedy said. The U.S. has
[labeled several Middle Eastern branches]of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. “They’ve created stagnant societies that do one, two things: hatred and war and victimization,” Kennedy said.
The remarks drew multiple fact-checks laying out just how wrong Kennedy was on the substance, noting just how many people of Arab descent have won Nobel Prizes among other contributions to culture.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations [called out](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/uss-rfk-jr-claims-arabs-dont-produce-science-why-hes-very-…
