Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent his Saturday posting attacks aimed at Second Lady Usha Vance and a female Trump aide, and drew sharp criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.
El-Sayed, who is running against Republican former Congressman Mike Rogers for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, posted a message on social media that appeared to reference Usha Vance's Indian ethnicity in connection with Vice President JD Vance's grandfather. The post followed a Vance rally in Ohio where the vice president criticized El-Sayed for what Vance described as El-Sayed's "stated adherence to Sharia law."
El-Sayed wrote: "So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no..." The implication, that Vance's grandfather would have objected to his grandson's wife on the basis of her ethnicity, drew immediate condemnation across the political spectrum, as Fox News Digital reported.
Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, challenged the premise directly on X:
"Why does Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just assume that all White midwestern grandparents are racist?"
Commentator Ryan Girdusky framed the post as an insult to El-Sayed's own would-be constituents. "If you're a rural White American living in Michigan, just remember El-Sayed believes you're a racist," Girdusky wrote on X. Journalist Emily Schrader was blunter, calling El-Sayed "a racist creep."
Former Florida state Rep. Ben Graber posted: "El Sayed is now attacking Wives [sic] of US leaders? What a guy."
El-Sayed's campaign did not return Fox News Digital's request for comment. The vice president's office and a representative for Usha Vance also did not immediately respond.
The Usha Vance post was not El-Sayed's only provocation that Saturday. Earlier in the day, he directed a separate social media post at Natalie Harp, an aide to President Trump. The post came after Trump criticized El-Sayed at a rally for campaigning alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been attributed the statement that "America deserved 9/11."
Rather than respond to Trump or to the substance of the criticism, El-Sayed addressed Harp directly:
"Natalie, I think he's had a little too much iPad for the week. He needs his rest."
The remark landed in the middle of a period, roughly two weeks, per the Fox News Digital report, during which some far-left media figures and Democrats online had been implying an improper relationship between Harp and the president. El-Sayed's decision to single out Harp by name, rather than address Trump or the policy argument, fit a pattern his critics were already identifying.
Tudor Dixon, the Republican former gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, connected the two posts and drew a pointed conclusion. Dixon said on the record:
"He goes after Usha. He goes after Natalie [Harp]. This coward picks on women who are not in his fight. Imagine how he would treat female staffers in the halls of Congress."
Dixon's argument was straightforward: El-Sayed's targets were not his political opponents. Vance and Harp hold no office in Michigan. They are not running against him. He chose to go after them anyway, and both happen to be women.
GOP strategist Matt Whitlock posted screenshots of both El-Sayed posts and offered his own assessment:
"This is what I'm talking about. Just a bad campaign, bad candidate, bad instincts. Sitting at home on a Saturday morning tweeting bad takes that any normal campaign would shut down."
The criticism did not come only from the right. An X account run by Democrats supporting El-Sayed's Republican opponent Mike Rogers posted a sharp rebuke that referenced the Democratic primary itself:
"This is why there were ads in the primary correctly highlighting how sexist and misogynistic Abdul is. He has so much contempt for women. If you're over the politics of division. Reject Abdul El-Sayed."
That a Democratic-aligned account would publicly label its own party's Senate nominee "sexist and misogynistic", and urge voters to reject him, signals a deeper fracture. The post referenced primary-season advertising that had already flagged El-Sayed's conduct toward women as a liability. His Saturday social media activity handed his critics fresh material.
The weekend posts added to an accumulating record. On August 3, El-Sayed held a "Get Out to Vote" rally in Detroit. That same day, he appeared poolside at a party for content creators supporting his campaign, where he was photographed talking with Piker, the streamer whom Trump later criticized El-Sayed for associating with.
Vice President Vance, at his Ohio rally, had singled out El-Sayed's past comments on Sharia law. The specifics of those earlier remarks were not detailed in the Fox News Digital report, but Vance's decision to call them out by name at a rally in a neighboring state reflects the national attention El-Sayed's candidacy has drawn, and not the kind a Senate campaign typically wants.
El-Sayed's response to that elevated scrutiny was not to moderate, clarify, or pivot to policy. It was to post a racially charged insinuation about the Second Lady and a dismissive jab at a female White House aide. Both posts bypassed the men who had actually criticized him, Vance and Trump, and targeted the women around them instead.
Fox News Digital reached out to El-Sayed's campaign for comment on the posts. The campaign did not respond. That silence left the posts to stand on their own terms, unexplained and unretracted, while the backlash continued to build from both parties.
Whitlock's critique, that "any normal campaign would shut down" this kind of conduct, pointed to a basic competence question. Campaigns that want to win Senate seats in swing states do not typically spend Saturday mornings posting racial insinuations about the vice president's wife. They do not usually single out female aides to the president of the United States for personal dismissal. And they do not ordinarily hand their opponents, and even dissident members of their own party, ready-made attack lines about sexism and contempt for women.
El-Sayed did all three before lunch.
When a candidate's own party is running ads calling him misogynistic, and his idea of a rebuttal is to go after two more women who aren't even on the ballot, voters in Michigan have all the information they need.
