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President Trump has warned that “jihadists” are being elected across the country, a new line of attack aimed at Democratic candidates less than three months out from the midterms.
Getting into it: Asked in the Oval Office what advice he had for Republicans running in November, Trump credited the phrasing to someone else. “A friend of mine called up. He said, ‘You know, really, you should use the word jihadist because that’s what’s happening,'” he said. “We have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this whether it’s communism, jihadism.” He added that “people don’t want to have radical lunatics involved in running our country.”
Trump’s comment came after Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary last Wednesday over Rep. Haley Stevens, defeating a candidate backed by AIPAC money. El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health official and the son of Egyptian immigrants, would become one of the highest-profile Muslim officeholders in the US with a win in November.
Hours after the jihadist remark, Trump posted a photo on Truth Social of El-Sayed standing in front of a crowd that included two women in headscarves, captioned “They are coming for your home and your belongings.” Over the weekend he posted an image pairing himself and Melania Trump with El-Sayed and his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, captioned “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” Last week he called El-Sayed a communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.
El-Sayed took the framing and ran with it on CNN. “Yeah, he’s right. One in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other but joint in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you. Or, two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that that family is going to have the good thing,” he said.
This all comes as Republican lawmakers are also turning up the heat, with Sen. Tommy Tuberville writing that Democrats had “voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate” and Rep. Nancy Mace claiming “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”
Not every Republican joined in. Sen. Bill Cassidy broke with his colleagues on CBS’s Face the Nation, saying “I condemn language like that” and that “everybody should be treated as an individual.” CAIR, a Muslim civil rights group, warned the rhetoric is “putting a target on the back of Muslim elected officials.”
