Excerpts:
They say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but President Trump and his allies have found a new low: open bigotry against Muslims.
The bar for what can shock has been raised steadily over the past decade, but even by Trump-era standards, remarks that the president made yesterday at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, are astonishing: a straightforward assertion that a Muslim candidate for office is a terrorist by virtue of his faith.
Trump was campaigning for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, when he attacked Rogers’s opponent, the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Trump said. “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” Trump also said that “anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.” He added that if elected, El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.” (In fact, the only time that members of Congress have had to pass through metal detectors in the Capitol was on the House side, as a security precaution after Trump supporters sacked it on January 6, 2021.)
To be clear: El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, and no one has produced any evidence that he has ties to the group. Neither has anyone produced any evidence that El-Sayed has ties to any jihadists or is one himself. If he did, the Justice Department would presumably be prosecuting him—it certainly hasn’t shied away from politicized cases under Trump.
The president and anyone else are free to critique El-Sayed’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or any other policy matter, but that’s not what this is. Asking a candidate to disavow a foreign political group that has no American arm is a nonsensical and prejudiced thing to do, but Republicans have been trying hard in the past couple of weeks to draw some connection between El-Sayed and the group, despite a lack of evidence. Perhaps this is because they believe “Muslim Brotherhood” sounds shadowy and scary to voters. The new tack is also silly because the GOP previously spent months trying to connect El-Sayed to the Democratic Socialists of America, another group that he says he is not a member of. Historically, the Brotherhood, an Islamist organization, has typically clashed with socialists in the Muslim world.
Politicians allied with Trump are also getting in on the hate. Earlier this year, I wrote about a spree of bigoted remarks by GOP members of Congress. More recently, Representative Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, said that Somali Americans should assimilate or “go the hell back.” (He added that he wasn’t afraid of being called an Islamophobe.) And Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a tough reelection race, falsely claimed that his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, “supports Sharia law” because she received an endorsement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. You don’t have to think too hard to guess why CAIR opted to back someone running against Abbott.
Islamophobic rhetoric deserves condemnation on its own terms, but the attacks don’t just affect El-Sayed, Omar, or even Muslim communities in the United States. During the same speech, Trump—who has previously said that Jewish Democrats are “disloyal to Jewish people”—called for ostracizing any Jewish Michiganders who vote for El-Sayed. “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves,” he said. “You should never speak to them again.” Once bigotry against one community enters the mainstream, it tends to spread quickly to other groups.
Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/10/islamophobia-trump-midterms-el-sayed/689168/?gift=nSqsbq99G5aLifkdkvvyM30a7nuquaKiZRwzrOQvhR4
The American Dream belongs to all of us. — Kamala Harris
