(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Monday that “jihadists” are being elected “all over the place” — trying a new, incendiary line of attack against Democrats with the midterm election just three months away.
“Well, the one thing is, we have jihadists being elected all over the place,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, without specifying who he was talking about or offering evidence of his claims.
“We have this whether it’s communism, jihadism,” Trump added.
The president has frequently cast Democrats and democratic socialists as communists, looking to portray the party as increasingly extreme headed into November — although portrayals of even the party’s most liberal candidates as communists are far from reality.
But calling them “jihadists” is a new escalation, which Trump acknowledged in his remarks Monday, recounting that a “friend of mine called up,” and told him, “’You know, really, you should use the word jihadist because that’s what’s happening.’” The president’s escalating rhetoric comes amid broad lines of attack from others in the GOP seeking to paint Muslim candidates as anti-American.
Trump said that, “as an example,” some of the candidates he termed “jihadist” are coming from countries like Somalia. The president has repeatedly criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who was born in Somalia, came to the United States as a child and is now a naturalized citizen. Trump has previously advocated for sending Omar and another Muslim congresswoman “back from where they came.”
He’s also unleashed increasingly provocative rhetoric against Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, saying at a campaign event in Las Vegas last week that he’s “full of sh*t” and is a “hater of Jews and hater of Israel,” without offering evidence. El-Sayed, who is Muslim, has been critical of the Israeli government.
On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social an image of El-Sayed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a Native American headdress, with the caption, “Pocahontas and ‘Abdul’ want to take your stuff, and Crash the Economy!!!” And over the weekend, Trump shared an image of himself and first lady Melania Trump alongside a photo of El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab. The caption read: “Two very different America’s.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper, El-Sayed agreed that the two images offered differing visions of America.
“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,” El-Sayed said. “So, yes, you got two different visions of America.”
And it’s not just Trump engaging in that sort of rhetoric. Shortly after El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination last week, national Republicans repeatedly started referring to him by his full name: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.
Previously, Trump has accused Democrats of being taken over by “godless Communists” who pose an existential threat to the country. And while the democratic socialist movement appears set to push the Democratic Party further to the left, the tenets of socialism — much less democratic socialism — are still far removed from the communist ideology that Trump has loudly, and inaccurately, portrayed as a rising threat.
On Tuesday, Trump again deployed the “jihadist” label while railing against New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax.
“Financial, and then Social, RUIN, is a 100% certainty – And then the Radical Left Jihadists charge Congestion Pricing on top of everything else,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, saying he was looking into whether the federal government “has any legal right to avert this disaster.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
The-CNN-Wire
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