Vice President JD Vance claimed that Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El Sayed has been stoking “anti-white racial hatred.”
Vance made the comments en route to campaign for Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers in Howell, Michigan, after he was asked about Tucker Carlson‘s criticism of Rogers, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman, as a puppet of Israel and the country’s spy agencies.
“I think Mike is fundamentally a decent guy and the kind of public servant that you want in Washington D.C.,” Vance told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday. “Abdul el Sayed, who maybe more than any Democrat running in the nation, has engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred that has become common on the Democratic Party, I’d say that person should not be elected.”
Vance added that Republicans “stand for … everybody,” compared to el Sayed, “who seems to love to traffic in racial hatred.”
“We should reject that guy as conservatives,” he said. “We should reject him as Americans, and that’s obviously a big part of what I’m going to be saying later today.”
When asked whether he agreed with President Donald Trump that el Sayed is a “jihadist,” Vance responded that the Democrat “certainly has a lot of weird friends” and “said a lot of crazy stuff.”
Trump last weekend told a crowd in Port Huron, Michigan, that he was in the Wolverine State “to keep a jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” El Sayed’s relatives in Egypt have previously expressed support for the Muslim Brotherhood, though the candidate denies being affiliated with the group.
“He’s identified himself with a segment of the Democratic Party, which, by the way, I don’t think represents the most Democrats in the country, but unfortunately, it represents a lot of elected Democrats who seem to align with people who justify violence against the United States of America,” Vance said on Tuesday. “I don’t know what’s in the guy’s heart. I just know he has a lot of weird friends.”
Trump on the weekend told the rally that anyone “with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.”
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“They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate,” he said. “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.”
One week before Election Day, el Sayed and Rogers are in a margin-of-error race, with el Sayed, on average, having a 2.5-percentage-point edge, according to RealClearPolitics.