On Saturday in Cleveland, Barack Obama said the Trump White House looks like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” The right lost its damn mind.
The talking point assembled itself within a day: Obama looks down on the places regular people eat. He sneers at chain restaurants. He disrespects working families who like a big menu and a slice of cheesecake on an anniversary.
It’s nonsense, and everyone involved knows it’s nonsense. It was also so predictable.
The next day, Sunday, Trump stood in front of about four thousand people in Port Huron, Michigan, and said this about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate:
“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator, and that’s the fact.”
It is not a fact. PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire on Tuesday, their lowest rating, reserved for claims that are both false and ridiculous. When they asked the White House for any evidence at all, the White House did not respond. El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood. Scholars who study the organization told PolitiFact its members would likely have expelled him — among other things, for supporting LGBTQ rights.
Trump kept going. El-Sayed should have to pass through a metal detector before he’s allowed into the Senate. He shouldn’t be allowed to fly. A Democratic win would “open the floodgates” to “hordes of jihadists to our shores.”
David Beamer — the father of Todd Beamer, who died on Flight 93 — stood on the same stage and told the crowd, “The enemy is right here among us.” He questioned whether El-Sayed is really an American at all, birth certificate or not.
Birtherism, as ugly as it was, at least pretended to be an argument about a document. Produce the paper and the question goes away. This is an evolution. This says the paper is irrelevant. They are now arguing that you can be born here and not be a real American.
From the same stage, Trump said that any Jewish person supporting Abdul El-Sayed “should be ashamed of themselves,” and that they should “never speak to them again.”
Racism. That is the closing argument in Michigan.
A Desperate Playbook
They are not doing this because it’s working. They’re doing it because nothing else is. Trump is at 35% approval. Democrats are up eleven on the generic ballot, the largest margin for either party in any cycle since 2008. Thirty million people have already voted, double the pace of 2022, and Democrats lead the early vote in eight of ten Senate battleground states. Trump spent the final week of the campaign rallying in Mississippi.
So out comes the oldest tool in the drawer.
This country has been running this exact play for more than a century and a half. The Know-Nothings built a national party in the 1850s on the premise that Catholics answered to a foreign power and could never be loyal Americans. Irish immigrants were drawn as apes in the national magazines and told there was no work for them. In 1928, the country was warned that electing Al Smith meant the Pope would run America. In 1960, John F. Kennedy had to stand before a room of Protestant ministers in Houston and explain that he could be trusted to use his own judgment.
And Jews. Jews have been on the receiving end of this in every century, in every country that has ever tried it. The charge has always been the same one: dual loyalty. Your real allegiance is elsewhere. You may have been born here, but you are not one of us.
The most infamous “America First” speech was delivered by Charles Lindbergh in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941. Its subject was which groups were secretly dragging the United States into a war against its own interests. One of the three groups he named was the Jews.
To Jewish voters in Michigan
Let me address Jewish voters in Michigan directly. Jew to Jew.
You have an obligation to vote for Abdul El-Sayed.
Not because your concerns about him are imaginary. El-Sayed has said things in the past that raise legitimate questions among Jewish Michiganders. He has walked some of it back. He may never have addressed some of it adequately. I am not here to tell anyone their discomfort is fake.
What I’m here to say is this. If you believe that those past comments represent a bigger threat to you and your family than the blatant othering and racism coming out of Trump, out of Mike Rogers’s campaign, and out of their allies — then you have not been paying attention to the history of Jews in the world.
Our history is not complicated. In every country, in every era, where racism went unchecked — where the othering of one group was permitted, where the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities was normal politics — Jews were not safe.
If you think the right is going to finish with Muslims and stop there, you have not been paying attention. If you think it ends with trans people, you have not been paying attention. It does not end. It never has. The machinery doesn’t get dismantled once it’s done with the first group; it just gets pointed somewhere new. And it always, always comes for us.
You can have your concerns about El-Sayed. Keep them. Hold him to them if he wins — write to him, show up at his town halls, make him earn it.
But a man standing on a stage in Port Huron telling Jewish Americans that the ones who disagree with him should be shamed and shunned is not protecting you. He is not courting you. He is assigning you a vote.
The far bigger threat to the Jewish community is unchecked bigotry and unchecked hatred. If this rhetoric works — if it moves votes, if it wins this seat — it will not stop. It will spread, and it will get louder, and Jews are always less safe in a country where it’s loud.
If you are concerned about Jewish safety, then your only option is to reject the politics of hatred and bigotry and cast your vote for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.