Trump spent Michigan’s final week calling a Senate candidate a Brotherhood man
On the day Michigan votes, the Muslim Brotherhood has become a US campaign epithet — attached to a candidate who disavowed it, under an executive order that so far designates nobody.
In the closing days of the Michigan Senate race, President Donald Trump repeatedly attached the Muslim Brotherhood to the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. On Sunday 1 November he called El-Sayed a “jihadist” and a “Muslim Brotherhood guy” while praising Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens for endorsing Republican Mike Rogers; that account reached us through a Yahoo News syndication whose originating outlet we could not establish. At a rally in Port Huron on 25 October he warned El-Sayed could gain access to sensitive national security information if elected. At Salina Regional Airport in Kansas on 1 November, Al Jazeera reported, Trump said: “We’re gonna have to get a special metal detector for Abdul.” El-Sayed disavowed the Brotherhood on 17 October at a town hall in Caro, Michigan, CNN reported, during a heated exchange with an attendee, and criticised the implication that he holds “dual loyalty.” The attacks followed the resurfacing of a 2012 post by his half-sister referring to their mother’s activism in the Brotherhood “during the early 70s.”
The legal architecture behind the word is thinner than the rhetoric. Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025 and published at Federal Register Vol. 90, No. 227, p. 55033, is titled “Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists” — but, as the Charity & Security Network notes, it designates no person and no group. It creates a process for designating chapters and “other subdivisions,” which CSN argues “tries to circumvent the legal and practical guardrails to these designations.” Actual designations have come separately: on 13 January 2026 State listed the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood (al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah) and its secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, with OFAC designating the Egyptian branch the same day. The statutory route has stalled: H.R.3883, Rep. Nancy Mace’s “Muslim Brotherhood Is a Terrorist Organization Act of 2025,” was introduced on 10 June 2025 and has not moved out of House Judiciary.
Assessment: Tonight is the first electoral test of the Brotherhood label in American domestic politics, and the result will be read in Cairo and Abu Dhabi before it is read in Lansing. New Lines Magazine’s argument piece of 2 November is the useful corrective: the framing is new to US voters but old to regional governments, which have used it for a decade against domestic challengers rather than foreign networks. Distrust two things. First, syndicated quote chains — the “jihadist” line reached us third-hand and the Kansas quote came with an ellipsis and a bracketed insertion. Second, the assumption that designation has happened. If the label is rewarded at the ballot box, the designation push accelerates into 2027; if it is punished, EO 14362’s empty list stays empty.