PolitiFact rates Trump’s Brotherhood claim against a Michigan Senate candidate false
The president called Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed “a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” at a 25 October rally. Two days later the fact-check came back “Pants on Fire.”
PolitiFact published its assessment on 27 October 2026, recording that Donald Trump said at a rally on 25 October that El-Sayed is “a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member,” and finding there is no evidence that the Michigan Senate candidate is either. El-Sayed has not advocated violence, has disavowed the group and has said he has no ties to it. Whether the campaign repeated or withdrew the line is not established. The phrase does not arrive from nowhere. Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025 and titled “Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” initiated a process for designating specific chapters under existing US law, with the order directing that within 45 days of the required report the Secretary of State or the Treasury take all appropriate action consistent with 8 U.S.C. 1189 or 50 U.S.C. 1702.
Assessment: The order is careful where the rally is not. EO 14362 designates chapters, named and bounded, through a statutory process with a clock attached; the rally line applies the label to a US citizen with no organisational connection and no process at all. That gap is the whole story of what designation does once it leaves the register: it supplies a vocabulary that costs nothing to use and almost nothing to be wrong about. Note also what did not happen this week — no new designation surfaced between 22 and 29 October, and recent crawl dates on State Department pages are not new actions. The Jordanian file shows the same word doing legal work; the Michigan rally shows it doing electoral work.