A 2018 video clip becomes a 2026 campaign weapon in Michigan’s Senate race

Fox News published a piece on 24 September built on a clip in which Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, pushes back on accusations that he might have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The footage is credited to Patrick Colbeck via YouTube and dated 10 May 2018. The article characterises El-Sayed as denying the ties. No new evidence accompanies it: the source is opposition-research video, not a document, a filing or an official finding, and Fox News is a partisan outlet on this file. What has changed in eight years is not the allegation but its legal furniture. Executive Order 14362, signed by President Donald Trump on 24 November 2025, directed State and Treasury to assess the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters; on 13 January 2026 State designated al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah as an FTO and SDGT and Treasury designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as SDGTs. Florida’s rule, approved on 11 September, names the organisation directly.

Assessment: The story here is the transmission belt, not the candidate. Designation converts a vague insinuation into a sentence that sounds like it references a legal status — even though no US authority has designated any American organisation as a Brotherhood chapter, and the executive order itself designated nobody. The useful measure over the coming months is arithmetic, not rhetoric: count how many American Muslim candidates face the same accusation before November, and count how many times it is attached to an actual OFAC listing rather than a recirculated clip. So far the answer to the second is zero.