(CNN) — On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in Michigan gave a double-digit victory to a congressional candidate who had dropped out of the race, choosing him over Amir Hassan, a President Donald Trump-backed former Muslim with an identifiably Arabic name.
On Wednesday, some people attending a Trump speech in Las Vegas booed the mention of another Arabic-sounding name before GOP Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo urged them to stop. Austin Abdelnabi was a police officer recently killed in the line of duty, and his brother once worked at the White House.
Either of these episodes could be dismissed as coincidences — as one-offs that say little about much of anything.
But it would seem little coincidence that they happened as Republicans this week launched an overtly Islamophobic campaign against the new Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.
Trump has toyed with and even employed Islamophobia for political purposes over the past 20 years. His “birther” campaign against Barack Obama, which implied that Obama might be a secret Muslim, helped launch Trump’s political career.
But in his second term, he’s increasingly flaunted — and encouraged his party to flaunt — prejudices and xenophobia out in the open.
And the GOP’s response to El-Sayed’s nomination shows how it has embraced these ugly politics. Some of it’s thinly veiled, but much of it doesn’t even bother with subtleties.
National Republicans on Wednesday quickly greeted the former public health official’s victory by repeatedly employing his full name — Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed — in a press release and, soon after, in an ad.
Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana went on to refer to El-Sayed on Fox News as “Abdulrahman,” as did Fox host John Roberts. Fox host Jesse Watters started his show that night with a clip of El-Sayed helping people pronounce “Abdulrahman.”
It all harked back to Trump repeatedly invoking Obama’s middle name, Hussein.
It’s true that Republicans cited El-Sayed’s full name. But campaigns don’t tend to use people’s full names in campaign ads unless they’re trying to convey something. In this case, it’s pretty clear what that something is.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama on Wednesday posted that “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST” and even called him a “TERRORIST.”
The Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s super PAC, warned that El-Sayed will “unleash terror.”
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas late Tuesday on Watters’ show called El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “Islamist[s].”
“You see the green-red convergence where the communist and the Islamists – they want Sharia law,” Cruz claimed. “They hate Jews. They hate Christians. They hate capitalism. They hate America.”
(There is no evidence that El-Sayed or Mamdani supports Sharia law. El-Sayed has described himself as a capitalist and, while he’s critical of Israel, there is no evidence he has used hateful rhetoric toward Jews or Christians.)
Trump also repeatedly said at the Las Vegas speech that El-Sayed hated Jews.
Cruz then held a hearing Wednesday focused on the alleged threat of the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating American society. He featured a poster of El-Sayed titled “From the Middle East to the Midwest” and said Democrats are “now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war in America.”
(Republicans have pointed to a 2011 El-Sayed op-ed in which he urged the US government to support anti-government protesters in Egypt, even if a revolution could empower the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Trump administration has declined to officially label the entire Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, instead doing so only with some of its branches.)
El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas both falsely attributed a comment from left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed, to the Democratic candidate.
“Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11,” Rogers said.
But it was Piker who said in 2019 that the United States “deserved 9/11.” (He later walked back that comment, saying it was “inappropriate.”)
Cotton later corrected his post.
But as the Piker situation shows, there are some legitimate related issues here.
El-Sayed made a choice to campaign with the controversial streamer during the primary — which drew criticisms even from his Democratic opponents, Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. El-Sayed defended his decision to campaign with Piker and decried the left’s “penchant for cancel culture.” But with El-Sayed now the nominee, some Democrats fear what that partnership will mean in the general election.
Still, it’s a significant leap for Republicans to go from that decision to labeling El-Sayed a terrorist and using his Muslim faith to otherize him.
But it’s also not at all surprising in context.
While Trump has used Islamophobia and xenophobia for years, it’s much more blatant these days.
He’s admitted to calling some majority-Black countries “shithole” countries, after denying it during his first term. He campaigned in 2024 on a false conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He’s regularly derided Somali immigrants, including by calling them “garbage” and saying he didn’t want them in the United States. He’s doubled down on rhetoric urging certain migrants to “go back” to where they came from. And he’s shared racist videos and declined to back away from them.
Some congressional Republicans have picked up that ball and run with it — particularly when it comes to Islam.
They’ve said “Muslims don’t belong in American society”; labeled Muslim congresswomen “terrorists”; expressed a preference for dogs over Muslims; told Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” because he ate rice with his hands; and said that Muslims “breed their way through our society.”
Some Republicans rebuked some of these comments, but there has been nothing in the way of a true reckoning.
El-Sayed responded to the tactics Wednesday by urging people to correctly pronounce his full name if they are going to use it.
He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the GOP using his full name and invoking his faith is meant “to insinuate that somehow I’m less American.”
“My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries,” he said at a separate press conference. “You know what is? Their BS policies.”
It’s not clear whether this strategy will actually pay dividends for the GOP.
A Gallup poll in 2024 showed 25% of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim presidential candidate. But that was down from 38% in 2015, and it’s been disproportionately Republicans (who likely wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed anyway) who have said that.
At the same time, even as the Democratic base has turned sharply against Israel, it’s possible having a vocally anti-Israel, Muslim nominee like El-Sayed could turn off some voters who feel strongly about that issue. Party leaders have generally resisted landing firmly on either the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis for a reason.
But regardless of the efficacy of the GOP’s strategy, it’s a pretty stunning moment to have a national political party so openly and quickly embrace it.
Just six days after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and said the “face of terror is not the true faith of Islam” and that intimidation of Muslims “will not stand in America.”
Then-Sen. John McCain at a town hall late in the 2008 presidential campaign sought to dissuade supporters who suggested Obama might have terrorist sympathies and said he couldn’t be trusted because he was “an Arab.”
“No, ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
We’re a long way from the party of Bush and McCain.
One of the other candidates who ran against Hassan in the Michigan congressional GOP primary, Al Lemmo, acknowledged to The New York Times this week that his campaign staff had run an explicitly anti-Muslim campaign against Hassan.
Lemmo said he didn’t like that strategy because he knows lots of Muslims and they’re “really nice,” but that his ads “didn’t so much appeal to bigotry against Muslims as kind of counted on it.”
There’s apparently going to be plenty more where that came from.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.