The uncomfortable reality behind a toxic new wave of accusations

Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed leaves the spin room stage after speaking to the press following a debate with Republican rival candidate Mike Rogers, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, US, October 8, 2026.

Amid all the campaign nastiness, it apparently was okay in the Michigan Senate race for former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican, and his supporters to challenge the “patriotism” of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who proudly identifies as Muslim and an anti-Israeli government partisan.

Rogers and visiting boosters including Donald Trump and Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana have actively attacked El-Sayed as a “jihadist.” Rogers bluntly used the debate stage to present El-Sayed, an American citizen and doctor with whom there are plenty of other policy disagreements, this fundamental challenge: “Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?”

It’s obvious that Rogers and El-Sayed do not like each other, but reaching into the political beliefs of El-Sayed’s estranged mother who abandoned him at age 3 seems a little beyond the pale. Rogers has repeatedly tried to tie El-Sayed to overseas Islamic groups, playing on his ethnicity and his outspokenness on behalf of Palestinian rights.

Indeed, some Jewish Democrats in Michigan – as happened in the New York City election that voted in Mayor Zohran Mamdani — say they are torn about support for El-Sayed, despite his statements of commitment to safety of U.S. Jews. We all recognize that Israeli government policy has been conflated with views of antisemitism globally. El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and disavowed the organization. No evidence has been produced to show he has had any affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yet, the attempt to tag El-Sayed with “dual loyalties” – something that El-Sayed himself argues recalls the attempts to tie John F. Kennedy as a presidential candidate to papal loyalty rather than American policy – makes many of us uncomfortable. Where is the right to have an opinion, however justified or not, that varies from what is perceived to be the norm? Indeed, there is growing popular support for a different kind of approach to Middle East politics spreading, particularly among younger Americans, making Rogers’ argument even factually odd.

As with Mamdani or other progressive Democrats, there is a wide array of disagreements with the Trump government to which Rogers pleads total loyalty, from tax cuts to tariffs to war with Iran, without having to resort to ethnic stereotypes.

What About Patriotism?

The patriotism issue is weird. It seems to cut only one way for Republicans running all our government branches.

We have Trump himself making business deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin as Putin continues to kill civilians of our supposed ally Ukraine in the name of land-grab, and as U.S. intelligence says Putin is helping Iran to target U.S. military service members stationed near Iran. What could be more questionable about “patriotism” than aiding those who would attack U.S. interests in the name of a Trump foreign policy based on splitting the world’s spheres of interest?

We have yet another book excerpted in Vanity Fair with documentation showing years of reliance on U.S. foreign policy by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who was doing billion-dollar deals with Saudi and Middle Eastern leaders with whom we were supposedly seeking peace plans. We have his partner in negotiations, Steve Witkoff, the Trump business partner, who publicly called Putin a “humanitarian” for the release of a state-sponsored U.S. kidnap victim held and tortured over four years.

We have open Trump admiration for the tactics of global strongmen like the former Hungarian leader Victor Orban or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un or China’s Xi Jinping, along with the press restraints, neutering of Congress, defiance of judges that follow their patterns.

We have mass deportation campaigns that overrun law and humanitarian restraint, unleashed in the arrest, capture, deportation and even death of U.S. citizens who raise a voice in protest. We have refusals to follow court orders and a patently politicized Justice Department to pursue Trump enemies.

Even in the Iran war, we have government refusal to acknowledge U.S. casualties and public insistences that the military be a hub for a cultural war rather than an organization that can protect even its own military families at the Bahrain naval base or feed and supply its sailors and Marines aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

The polls, and shortly, the midterm vote, are yelling at us that voters see Trump caring about Trump rather than the country.

Where exactly is this “patriotism” line that Rogers wants to find only for a candidate who happens to be Muslim and thinks Palestinians shouldn’t be crushed?

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

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