The smear that did not work

On 25 October, at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, the president of the United States told the crowd he was there "to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator". He was talking about Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor born and raised in Michigan, and none of it was true. Nine days later, Michigan elected El-Sayed to the Senate by about 340,000 votes. In January he will become the first Muslim ever to sit there. One might have expected the word of a president to count for rather more.

El-Sayed launched his campaign in April 2025 with a staff of four, and to win it he had to come through everything that was thrown at him. AIPAC's super PAC spent $30 million trying to beat him in the primary. When that failed, the president, his vice-president and Republican senators spent three months calling him a jihadist, a terrorist and evil, Fox News and the New York Post spent them tying him to terror, much of the rest of the press passed the claims on without saying they were false, and some of his own party joined in. The fact-checks calling the terror claims false were published weeks before polling day.

The campaign against him dressed anti-Muslim bigotry up as national security. Michiganders saw straight through it, and the people who ran it, from the White House to the newsrooms that carried it, found out that their word was not enough.

First, they tried money

Before anyone called him a terrorist, his opponents tried to outspend him. In the Democratic primary against Haley Stevens, AIPAC's super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $30.6 million, $20.1 million of it against El-Sayed and $10.5 million for Stevens. The Associated Press called it AIPAC's "largest investment in a single race".

Add every outside group together and filings with the Federal Election Commission show $54.2 million spent for Stevens or against him, and $5.0 million in his favour. For every dollar spent to help him, nearly $11 was spent to stop him.

Some of that money paid for adverts and mailers claiming he had a history of "disrespecting women". Bridge Michigan checked the examples they cited and found they "don't back up claims that he has a pattern of disrespecting women". So the money was lopsided, and some of it paid for a claim that did not hold up.

Not every attack was invented. The day after a man attacked Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in March, El-Sayed said in a video that "hurt people hurt people". His opponents used the line for the rest of the year, and in August he apologised, "I made a mistake." He owned that one. What came next was something else entirely.

He won the primary on 4 August by a single point, 48.5% to 47.5%. Thirty million dollars had not stopped him. Within hours, the lies began.

Then came the lies

The morning after the primary, Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social.

It set the tone for the three months that followed. Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote that "Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate." The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson posted a clip from El-Sayed's victory speech with a single line, "Muslim Socialist Candidate for Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed says "inshallah" during his speech on election night." That was the whole charge. A Muslim man had said "God willing" in Arabic. Nearly a million people have watched the clip, and Al Jazeera mapped "a network of 1,966 accounts" spreading it in its first 24 hours.

Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, went further on the first day. "Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11," he said in his statement on the result. El-Sayed never said that. The streamer Hasan Piker did, in 2019, and FactCheck.org found that El-Sayed "did disavow Piker's comment when previously asked about it". Rogers took another man's words and presented them as El-Sayed's beliefs.

By the end of the month the vice-president had joined in. JD Vance told a rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on 31 August, "I realize that there's something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today." In October the president took the attack on the road himself.

The bigotry came from the top

Start with his name. Trump called him Mohammad at rally after rally. He goes by Abdul. At a rally in Dalton, Georgia, on 16 October, Trump explained why.

It was no slip of the tongue. He did it on purpose, and he said so.

Five days later his party's Senate campaign committee turned the smear into a game it called "Jihad Jeopardy". Its spokesperson said, "Abdul El-Sayed and his family have such extensive ties to designated terrorist groups that it was easy to fill an entire jeopardy board with the specifics." Four days after that, at the same Port Huron rally where he called El-Sayed a jihadist, Trump went further.

Two days later, PolitiFact rated the jihadist claim Pants on Fire. It found that El-Sayed "has never advocated violence to promote Islam" and "has never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, has disavowed the group". It had already rated Rogers's claim that El-Sayed had not disavowed the Brotherhood False, because El-Sayed had been asked at a town hall the day before and answered, "Sure, yeah, absolutely."

None of it slowed them down. The next day Senator Ted Cruz, campaigning beside Rogers, said, "My nickname for the guy is the jihadist leprechaun." He warned that El-Sayed could end up on the Senate Intelligence Committee, "and if I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result." Two days after that, at a rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Trump turned on the voters themselves.

On 2 November, the day before the vote, the far-right activist Laura Loomer posted, "Every single American should be demanding the mass removal of Muslims from our country." And at 12.52am on polling day, the president posted this.

Look at what these attacks actually rested on. His name was used as an accusation. A common Arabic phrase was treated as evidence. The word jihad became a game show. None of these attacks was about anything El-Sayed had done. They were about his faith, and calling that national security does not change what it is. It is anti-Muslim bigotry, and it came from the president himself.

The right-wing press supplied the smear

The president did not invent the claims he repeated. When he told Michigan voters in a video on 15 October that El-Sayed was "a Muslim Brotherhood member, even though he denies it", a handful of right-wing outlets had spent the summer and autumn building that case. Insults prove nothing on their own, so the smear needed something that looked like evidence, and those outlets supplied it. Most of the stories about his family and his faith began with one of them.

The Washington Free Beacon reported in July that his father-in-law was among the "Top Leaders of Muslim Brotherhood Organization Linked to Terror Funding". The organisation is the Islamic Society of North America, which has never been charged with any crime. In August the same site claimed he had proclaimed an "obligation" to follow Sharia law until the day he dies, although its own article showed that the 2009 quote was about a Sharia-compliant mortgage on a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor. In October it presented posts his half-sister wrote more than a decade ago as proof that his family had "long been" in the Brotherhood. The story that his mother had once worked for a charity the US Treasury designated in 2004 came from a site called The Midwesterner.

Bigger outlets then carried those stories to millions of people. The New York Post reported on 18 August that his mother "once worked for an organization that was designated a 'global terrorist' group", and further down the same report that she "was never accused of any wrongdoing". Fox News repeated the Sharia story the day after the Free Beacon ran it, and did the same with the half-sister's posts. Sinclair's National News Desk sent the story about his mother to the websites of dozens of local television stations, under the headline "Abdul El-Sayed's birth mother worked for designated terror group IARA: Report". At CBS News, Semafor reported, the editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, "has repeatedly encouraged the network's journalists to dedicate serious resources to finding a potential link" to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Most of the press let the smear stand

Fox News and the New York Post carried the smear further than anyone. Between the primary and polling day, by our count, Fox ran 176 reports with El-Sayed's name in the headline and the Post 118. Two outlets out of the 137 we counted ran a third of all the coverage. They did not merely report what others said. Of their 101 reports that carried a terror, Islamism or Brotherhood claim, 52 made the link in the outlet's own words, and 22 put it in the headline. Only eight told readers that the claim was false or had no evidence, seven at Fox and one at the Post. Not one of the 101 called the attacks anti-Muslim.

The Post's opinion pages made the case outright. On 27 October Betsy McCaughey wrote that his academic research "reveals his anti-American Muslim supremacy", and on 1 November David Harsanyi's column ran under the headline "Yes, Abdul El-Sayed 'sides with' terrorists". Fox kept at it to the very end. On 2 November, the day before the vote, it ran this.

Fox knew of no tie, and said so in its own report. When the facts would not carry the accusation, its headline made his silence the accusation instead.

Yet the failure was not Fox's and the Post's alone. The other outlets we counted carried the claim in 163 reports. In 68 of them the outlet told readers, in its own words or by citing a fact-check, that the claim was false or had no evidence. In the other 95, readers were left with the accusation and, at most, El-Sayed's denial. Forty-nine quoted his denial and nothing more, and 46 did not question the claim at all.

Some newsrooms did the job. Bridge Michigan, the state's nonprofit newsroom, said the claim was false in all three of its reports that carried it, NPR in both of its, and the Guardian in five of eight. The Detroit Free Press, Michigan's biggest paper, said in endorsing him that Rogers's description of him as "dangerous" was "a descriptor laden with racist subtext unbecoming of any would-be leader". Many others did not. CNN said the claim was false in three of the nine reports in which it carried it, NBC News in one of five, and CBS News in none of three. The Jerusalem Post, Arutz Sheva and Ynetnews, three Israeli outlets, carried it 18 times between them and said it was false three times.

Even when a newsroom said so, it rarely said so where readers would see it. Of the 76 reports that told readers the claim was false or had no evidence, five said it in the headline and eight more in the first three paragraphs. In the other 63, a reader had to get past the third paragraph to find out. And only 54 of all 264 called the attacks anti-Muslim, Islamophobic or bigoted in the outlet's own words.

That is how a smear travels. Fox and the Post put it in front of millions of people for three months, and much of the rest of the press passed it on without telling readers it was false.

Some Democrats gave it cover

It would be comforting to say all of this came from one side. It did not. The day after the primary, the Democratic senator John Fetterman told CNN that El-Sayed had been "campaigning with a guy that loves Hamas", meaning Piker. Congressman Josh Gottheimer said on CNN, "There's no way I'm ever coming out for El-Sayed, right now."

On 1 November, two days before the vote, Haley Stevens, the Democrat he had beaten in the primary, appeared at church with Rogers and endorsed him. Fetterman told Jewish Insider she had "simply held Abdul El-Sayed accountable for his views on Israel and fixation with Jewish money", and that El-Sayed had "the worst case of little man syndrome I've ever seen".

When Republicans attack a Democrat, voters can put it down to an opponent's politics. When Democrats join in, they tell voters the attacks deserve a hearing. That is the cover Fetterman, Gottheimer and Stevens gave the smear.

The president and his party told the lie. The right-wing press built it and carried it to millions of people, much of the rest of the press let it stand, and some Democrats gave it cover. None of them could make it true, and none of them could make Michigan believe it. One election does not end their power. It does show its limit.

He answered with the price of gas

El-Sayed never ran from any of it, and he never fought on the ground the smear chose. On 24 August he sat with Jesse Watters on Fox News, the channel carrying the attacks, for 25 minutes, and told him this.

When Trump kept calling him Mohammad, he told a rally of his own, "I'll be Senator Mohamed to you, bro." He ran on "money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for all", and he took it to voters himself. He says he visited 110 cities and hosted more than 500 events. Half of Michigan's voters told NBC News's exit poll that someone had contacted them on his behalf, by phone, text or in person, against 44% for Rogers. While his opponents talked about his faith, he talked about what people pay for, and he made sure they heard it.

On election night he said what the whole campaign had come down to.

The voters answered the smear

The clearest answer came from the voters the president had insulted. Trump told Black voters they were not smart to back El-Sayed. Black voters in Michigan backed him 86% to 11%, according to NBC News's exit poll. Trump told Jewish voters the same. In West Bloomfield Township, which has a large Jewish community and is home to Temple Israel, Rogers did gain ground, from 42% in 2024 to 46%, but El-Sayed still won it.

Detroit gave him about 92% of its vote, and Rogers 5%, down from the 7% he won there in his 2024 race for the Senate. Dearborn, which Trump won by six points in 2024, backed El-Sayed by 65, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said the city's turnout was the highest it has ever had. In Oakland County, where El-Sayed grew up, he took 56%, more than the 54% Kamala Harris won there in 2024.

Nor did the smear keep new voters away from him. Voters aged 18 to 29 backed him 69% to 28%. People voting in their first midterm backed him 64% to 34%, and people who did not vote at all in 2024 backed him 83% to 15%. Union households backed him 61% to 36%, independents 58% to 39%, and 6% of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 voted for him. "We showed that in a battle between the money and the many," he said on election night, "the many really can win."

The smear outlived the vote

The smear did not end with the count, and it did not stay in America. On polling day, outside a polling centre in Detroit, El-Sayed asked a Sky News reporter, James Matthews, whether he was registered to vote in Michigan. Matthews said no. Two British papers then headlined something El-Sayed never said.

Neither paper's article contains the words in its own headline. The Telegraph's own first line says he told Matthews, "I do not care what you think." He told one reporter who could not vote for him that he would not answer his questions. Both papers turned that into an insult to a country and put it in quotation marks, which tell a reader that these are the man's own words. They were not.

The Jewish Chronicle wrote that the exchange came "following his win". Sky published it at 6.51pm Eastern time on polling day, more than an hour before Michigan's polls closed. It was not the JC's first error about him. Its headline on 6 August called him an "anti-Israel DSA candidate". He is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. CBS's 60 Minutes checked and found he "is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, nor has the group officially endorsed him", and the JC's own article does not mention the DSA once.

On election night, in his victory speech, he used two Arabic words, and translated them himself, for the benefit of the very people who had spent three months treating his faith as a threat.

They proved his point within hours. In America, The Free Press, owned like CBS by Paramount, posted that he "gave his victory speech in Arabic", and the next day corrected itself, "In fact, he said a few phrases in Arabic, but the majority of his speech was in English." In Britain, GB News made the same claim three times on 4 November, and when we checked on 7 November it had corrected none of them. Its live blog said he "addressed his supporters in Arabic during his first speech as senator", although he has not yet been sworn in. Its news report ran under the headline "Abdul El-Sayed speaks Arabic in Michigan victory speech after becoming US's first-ever Muslim senator". Lee Cohen's column declared "I just witnessed an American victory speech delivered in Arabic", while the picture caption on the same page says he "spoke Arabic in parts of his speech".

The Telegraph went further and called the two words taunts. Its analysis, headlined "Giddy Democrats let the mask slip with DEI boasts and Arabic taunts", quoted the passage up to "alhamdulillah", added its own translation in brackets, and left out the next sentence, in which he gave the translation himself. It said speaking Arabic "seemed like a move designed to provoke his political opponents". Nine hours earlier the Telegraph's own news report had said he "spoke in English but made a joke about an Arabic phrase".

Two Arabic words in a single passage, translated by the man himself, became a speech in Arabic and then a taunt. It is the same treatment of his faith as a threat, this time in British papers.

IPSO, which regulates the Telegraph, the Express and the Jewish Chronicle, says in its Editors' Code that the press "must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text", and that a significant inaccuracy "must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence". No press regulator covers GB News's website. When we checked on 7 November, none of these British pages had been changed.

What the smear could not do

None of this means the smear was harmless. 47% of voters told the exit poll that El-Sayed's views were too extreme, and 91% of them voted for Rogers. Three months of lies reached nearly half the state.

But 52% said his views were not too extreme, and 94% of them voted for El-Sayed. That was enough to win by 340,000 votes. In mid-October, with many of the attacks still to come, the RealClearPolitics polling average had him ahead by 2.6 points. He won by seven.

AIPAC's money could not stop him in the primary. The president, his party, Fox News, the New York Post and every newsroom that passed their claims on unchallenged could not stop him in November. El-Sayed kept taking his case to voters himself, and Michiganders saw past the lies.

In January, JD Vance, who called him "very, very evil", will swear him in as a senator.