What Trump said in Port Huron on Sunday. “I’m here to keep a Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” He offered no evidence for the claim.
What the record says. A Bridge Michigan fact check found no evidence El-Sayed ever pledged support to the Muslim Brotherhood. Trump in Dearborn, November 1, 2024: “We want their votes and we’re looking for their votes and I think we’ll get their votes.” Marist, October 15 to 18: El-Sayed 50, Rogers 48 among likely voters.
Donald Trump told a rally in Port Huron, Michigan on Sunday that he had come “to keep a Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” The member he meant is Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, a doctor and former Detroit health director born in Michigan. Nine days out, the race is a coin flip.
The coverage has the quotes and the denial. It skips the ladder. The claim was condemned across party lines in 2018, revived by Mike Rogers in August, rated unsupported by a Michigan fact check in September, and escalated by Trump in two steps in ten days, from “100 percent” Muslim Brotherhood on October 15 to “jihadist” on October 25. And the man now calling a Michigan Muslim a security threat stood in a Dearborn coffee shop two Novembers ago asking the same community for its votes. The record, date by date, is below.
What He Said, in Order
Trump said El-Sayed “should never be allowed inside the halls of our great, beautiful Capitol building in Washington, D.C.” Then the airport line: “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane. They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate.”
He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate. I want him to have a metal detector.
He said that if El-Sayed reached the Senate “he would have access to our nation’s most closely guarded national security secrets,” and he accused El-Sayed’s family of terrorist ties without evidence, The Independent reported. To make the point land he brought up David Beamer, whose son Todd died on United Flight 93, and told the crowd that “Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol.” The 9/11 Commission found that the hijacker flying that plane meant to hit “the Capitol or the White House.” Trump used it to compare a Senate nominee to the men who were stopped.
El-Sayed did not respond on Sunday. He had already answered the premise at a town hall: “You assume that because I am Muslim that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.” His campaign is now putting his faith front and center in a new ad.
Where the Brotherhood Claim Comes From
It is eight years old. In May 2018, during El-Sayed’s run for governor, Republican Patrick Colbeck told a forum that El-Sayed’s membership in the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan tied him to the Brotherhood, and added that Muslim politicians wanted to “push Islam into our churches.” Colbeck was condemned by both parties.
Rogers revived it on August 5, the day El-Sayed won the nomination, saying he had “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood.” Bridge Michigan checked that claim on September 3 and found no pledge. What exists is a 2011 opinion column urging support for Egypt’s revolution, a 2012 group letter defending Egypt’s elected president Mohamed Morsi, and a father-in-law active in ISNA and CAIR, two groups named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case and never charged.
On October 15, at the White House, Trump took it further: “I call him Mohammed Al Fayed. His name is Abdul, but I think I call him Mohammed Abdul El-Sayed, and he’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100 percent.” The family claim rests on social media posts by a half-sister. El-Sayed told NBC: “I have no ties. We have no ties. I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother. You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.” Asked at a Caro town hall on October 17 whether he disavowed the Brotherhood, he said “Yeah, absolutely.”
Rogers did not stop. On October 23 he told Fox News that El-Sayed “has adopted the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood” and that “it is not how he prays, it’s how he thinks.” On Sunday morning he told Meet the Press, “I’ve never called him a terrorist.” Hours later the president was in Port Huron calling his opponent a jihadist.
The Same Voters He Courted Two Years Ago
On December 7, 2015, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
On September 22, 2024, Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, the only Muslim-majority city government in the country, endorsed him: “President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles.” Trump later nominated Ghalib as ambassador to Kuwait.
On November 1, 2024, at The Great Commoner in Dearborn, Trump made the ask: “We have a great feeling for Lebanon and I know so many people from Lebanon, Lebanese people and the Muslim population, they’re liking Trump and they’ve had a good relationship with him. This is it, this is where they are, Dearborn. We want their votes and we’re looking for their votes and I think we’ll get their votes.”
Four days later he won Dearborn with 42 percent to Kamala Harris’s 36 and Jill Stein’s 18.
On October 25, 2026, he told Port Huron that a Michigan Muslim with that community’s support “would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.”
The Race He Is Trying to Move
The seat is open because Gary Peters retired. El-Sayed won the nomination over a record $30 million in AIPAC spending. The Marist poll of 1,185 registered voters, taken October 15 to 18, has him at 50 to Rogers’s 48 among likely voters and 50 to 44 among all registered voters, inside the margin on the first number and outside it on the second.
Barack Obama rallied for El-Sayed in Detroit on Saturday. Trump has run five rallies in twelve days, with Georgia on Saturday and Michigan on Sunday. Senate control may run through this seat, which is why the closing argument is a metal detector.
Our View
A president told a swing state that a major-party nominee is a terrorist because of his religion, offered nothing to support it, and asked that he be screened like a suspect. That is not an attack ad. It is the 2015 shutdown applied to one American, born in Michigan, who is leading a Senate race.
Rogers owns it. He put the Brotherhood claim back in circulation on August 5, said “adopted the ideology” on October 23, and told a Sunday show he had never called El-Sayed a terrorist in the hours before the president did it for him. He can repudiate the word “jihadist” on camera this week, or he can accept it as his closing argument. There is no third option that a voter should believe.
We think the Dearborn quote is the one that matters. The votes were wanted. The voters, it turns out, were not. Dearborn gave him 42 percent two years ago. It has nine days to say whether it heard him this time.