The president who can’t say his name

Three weeks before Michigan decides whether to send the first Muslim senator to Washington, the president still cannot or will not say the man’s name.

“Mike Rogers, the great American Patriot and Republican Candidate for the U.S. Senate from Michigan, completely obliterated Mohammed El-Sayed in the big debate tonight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Thursday’s debate.

Rogers had skipped it.

“Mohammed is a Jihadist lunatic who hates our Country, the Black People of Detroit, and wants to see the U.S. fail.”

The candidate’s name is Abdul El-Sayed. Mohamed is his middle name, inherited from his Egyptian immigrant father. He rarely uses it. Yet the president repeats it so relentlessly that it reads less like a mistake than a strategy distilled into a single word.

El-Sayed has stopped pretending to be surprised.

“He knows my name is Abdul,” he said. “He says it every day.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the attacks “bigoted bulls—,” adding that El-Sayed “is on the road to being the next Senator from Michigan no matter how much bigoted bulls— a weak and desperate Donald Trump throws at him.”

Dawud Walid, of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, recognized the tactic for what it was.

“He is intentionally saying his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, to say, ‘Look, this guy is outside what we would consider to be a normative America.’ It’s a political tactic, and we’ve seen it before.

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The cruelty is not what is remarkable here. The timing is.

A sitting president does not usually spend the final weeks of a campaign fixated on a single state’s Senate race unless he believes something larger rides on it.

Something does.

Michigan’s open Senate seat, vacated by retiring Democrat Gary Peters, sits inside a chamber Republicans currently control 53 to 47. Democrats need a net gain of four seats on Nov. 3 to take it back, and Michigan would not count among those gains. It is a seat they already hold, and one of the two Democratic-held seats Republicans most want to flip.

A Rogers victory would enlarge the Republican majority and make an already narrow Democratic path elsewhere even tighter. An El-Sayed victory would leave the arithmetic exactly where it stands.

The real stakes, then, are not whether Michigan can flip the Senate in a single stroke. The question is whether Republicans can afford to miss even one opportunity to widen their majority, particularly in a state the president carried twice.

The polling suggests they may not be able to.

El-Sayed led by just over three points in the RealClearPolitics average through Oct. 6, 48.1 to 44.9. Marist put him up seven points in late September. So did Suffolk. Even Fox News, hardly a sympathetic outlet, found him ahead by one point among likely voters in its most recent poll. That marked a reversal from August, when Rogers led by four.

Bettors on Polymarket now give El-Sayed a 69 percent chance of winning.

Money has followed the nerves.

Through Oct. 10, Republican-aligned spending in the race had reached $78 million, compared with $63 million from Democrats. Nearly all of it has been funneled into advertisements branding El-Sayed, a Rhodes Scholar and physician, as “dangerously radical” and “too extreme.”

The ads tie him to Hasan Piker, a streamer who once said America “deserved 9/11,” in the hope that the association will stick where attacks on his policies have not.

Trump himself has yet to set foot in Michigan to campaign for Rogers. El-Sayed has turned the president’s absence into a taunt of his own.

Standing before a crowd in Port Huron this month, dressed in a black V-neck shirt and gripping a handheld microphone, he issued a challenge.

“Donald, if you’re watching, don’t wuss out, man.”

He has called Rogers a coward. He has called the president afraid.

The nerves extend far beyond Michigan.

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Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by roughly nine points in Nate Silver’s running average, their widest margin of the cycle. For the first time, they have broken 50 percent support. Trump’s approval rating sits in the high 30s across most tracking polls.

Forecasters now give Democrats an 82 percent chance of retaking the House and better-than-even odds of capturing the Senate.

Should both chambers fall, the final two years of this presidency would unfold before a Congress armed with subpoena power and with nothing left to trade.

That is the arithmetic from which a lame duck is made. It is why one Senate race in one Midwestern state has drawn the kind of presidential attention usually reserved for an election with Trump’s own name on the ballot.

El-Sayed is not without self-inflicted wounds.

Leaked audio captured him declining to take a clear position on the death of Iran’s former supreme leader, out of deference to grieving constituents in Dearborn. The recording gave Republicans an opening they have refused to relinquish.

Some Michigan Democrats, including strategist Adrian Hemond, have worried aloud that El-Sayed’s reluctance to court skeptical factions within his own party could cost Democrats a seat they should hold comfortably.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who remained neutral during the primary, has since worked to unify the party behind him. The alternative, she warned, is a senator “beholden to President Trump.”

Even El-Sayed’s allies acknowledge that his candidacy is built on remaking the electorate, not courting its center.

None of this guarantees him a seat in the Senate.

Three weeks is a long time. Leads within a poll’s margin of error can vanish overnight. Michigan Republicans have not won a Senate race since 1994, for reasons that reach far beyond any single candidate.

Rogers knows that history better than most. He lost to Slotkin by less than a point in 2024—close enough to keep him running, but not close enough to make Republicans comfortable about running him again.

Yet a president reduced to repeatedly misnaming his opponent on a platform built for far graver pronouncements is offering an answer of his own.

Strength does not usually sound like that.

Fear sometimes does.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.