Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, August 10, 2026, three months before the midterms, Trump debuted a new attack line on Democrats: “Well, the one thing is, we have jihadists being elected all over the place.” He offered no evidence and named no one, and he acknowledged the phrasing was suggested to him, saying 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 remark came in answer to a question from Breitbart News.
Trump said “as an example” that some of the candidates come from countries like Somalia, a recurring line aimed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, came to the United States as a child, and is a naturalized citizen. Of such people he said, “they're not smart. They have no aptitude.” Al Jazeera described the remark as an apparent reference to Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim Democrat who had just won Michigan's Senate nomination. Trump had separately called El-Sayed “full of sh*t” and a “hater of Jews and hater of Israel” at a Las Vegas event the week before, again without evidence. The next day he used the label again, writing on Truth Social about “Radical Left Jihadists” in a post attacking New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the remark: “By describing American Muslim public servants as threats to our nation, President Trump is putting a target on the back of Muslim elected officials across our nation.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry described El-Sayed as a physician and closed with an editorial line saying Trump had labeled members of a faith “jihadists”; neither is in the cited reporting, and Trump named no group or person, so both were removed. CAIR's statement is now quoted in full.
Update (October 12, 2026): at an October 10 rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump said of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, “To me, it's Mohammed. I'm the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want. To me, he's Mohammed,” and, “he's a radical jihadist,” adding, “I don't want a jihadist as a senator from Michigan,” according to the Roll Call Factbase transcript. Time also reported the remarks.
Update (October 27, 2026): At 12:42 a.m. on October 25, hours after Barack Obama campaigned in Michigan for El-Sayed, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Obama “was a grossly incompetent President!” and that “Now he's campaigning for a Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist, who hates Jews and Blacks and AMERICANS and TRUMP, and he is going to lose, also.” He wrote that Michigan does not want “an arrogant, Open Borders, Fake Doctor, Jihadist” and urged votes for the Republican, Mike Rogers. HuffPost and PJ Media quoted the post in full, and Trump's Truth archive preserves it.
At a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, later that day, Trump said, “I'm here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator, and that's the fact,” and repeatedly called El-Sayed by his middle name, Mohamed, according to the Roll Call Factbase transcript. He said El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate.” El-Sayed, answering the rally remarks rather than the post, said at his own rally, “I'll be Senator Mohamed to you, bro,” the BBC reported.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the BBC, “President Trump will continue to call out complete and total extremists like El-Sayed without apology.” Bishara Bahbah, who founded Arab Americans for Trump, told the Associated Press, “They are crossing a red line. They are racist,” the BBC reported.