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The president who can’t say his name

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11.10.2026

Three weeks before Michigan decides whether to send the first Muslim senator to Washington, the president still cannot or will not say the man’s name.

“Mike Rogers, the great American Patriot and Republican Candidate for the U.S. Senate from Michigan, completely obliterated Mohammed El-Sayed in the big debate tonight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Thursday’s debate.

Rogers had skipped it.

“Mohammed is a Jihadist lunatic who hates our Country, the Black People of Detroit, and wants to see the U.S. fail.”

The candidate’s name is Abdul El-Sayed. Mohamed is his middle name, inherited from his Egyptian immigrant father. He rarely uses it. Yet the president repeats it so relentlessly that it reads less like a mistake than a strategy distilled into a single word.

The candidate’s name is Abdul El-Sayed. Mohamed is his middle name, inherited from his Egyptian immigrant father. He rarely uses it. Yet the president repeats it so relentlessly that it reads less like a mistake than a strategy distilled into a single word.

El-Sayed has stopped pretending to be surprised.

“He knows my name is Abdul,” he said. “He says it every day.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the attacks “bigoted bulls—,” adding that El-Sayed “is on the road to being the next Senator from Michigan no matter how much bigoted bulls— a weak and desperate Donald Trump throws at him.”

Dawud Walid, of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, recognized the tactic for what it was.

“He is intentionally saying his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, to say, ‘Look, this guy is outside what we would consider to be a normative America.’ It’s a political tactic, and we’ve seen it before.

READ: American Senate........

© Middle East Monitor