HuffPost: 'Unabashed, Unfiltered Bigotry': Experts React To Trump's 'Jihadist' Remarks About Democratic Candidates
Progressive Muslim politicians seem to be particularly triggering for MAGA politicians.
President Donald Trumpis turning up the anti-Muslim rhetoric, accusing Democratic voters Monday of electing “jihadists” in the 2026 primary elections.
“We have jihadists being elected all over the place,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Whether it’s communism, jihadism — a friend of mine called up. He said, ‘You know, really, we should use the word jihadist because that’s what’s happening.’ If you take a look at what happens in other countries, I think that’s not going to be necessarily the way we want to live.”
The spiel went on. Without naming specific candidates, Trump claimed that “these are people that have been not successful. They’re people that have been, in many cases, failures. They come from other failed countries, and they come here and they tell us how to run our country.”
The remarks come as Muslim candidates gain ground within the Democratic Party, including Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American physician who won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan.
Trump’s comment didn’t surprise Khaled A. Beydoun, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a scholar on Islamophobia and civil liberties.
“President Trump’s comments ... highlight one of the touchstones of his presidency: using Islamophobia to not only curry favor, but divide the country and expose Muslims to violence,” he told HuffPost.
“Conflating an entire religion ― Islam ― with terrorism ― jihadism ― is unabashed, unfiltered bigotry,” said Beydoun, who’s the author of “American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear.”
El-Sayed, a progressive candidate and a Muslim, has increasingly become a target for Trump. Despite Trump’s suggestion that “these people” are foreign-born, El-Sayed was born in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit.
On Saturday, Trump shared on Truth Social an image of himself and first lady Melania Trump in formal attire beside a photo of Abdul El-Sayed and his wife, who wears a hijab. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s,” the post read.
Trump has repeatedly used El-Sayed’s full name in his public attacks, much as he frequently invokes former President Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein — a tactic critics have described as a “dog whistle” for Islamophobia and xenophobia.
El-Sayed seems well-equipped to handle Trump’s attacks: “Yes, we got two different visions of America. Donald Trump’s vision is the one you are living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries?” El-Sayed said in response to Trump’s post during a CNN appearance this weekend.
The bigger issue, Beydoun said, is that anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republican politicians fuels prejudice and can embolden attacks on Muslim Americans.
“It enables the sort of anti-Muslim terror we saw in San Diego not long ago, when Islamophobic bigots attacked a mosque,” he said, referring to a mass shooting in May in which two white supremacist teens attacked a mosque and a private school filled with Muslim children. Three adults were killed: a security guard, a teacher’s husband and a mosque elder.
Two months after the attack, the president faced intense backlash after sharing an anti-Muslim social media post showing Somali American kindergarteners wearing hijabs at a graduation ceremony. The children’s faces were not blurred out.
Islamophobia is on the rise throughout the country.: According to ISPU’s 2025 American Muslim Poll, anti-Muslim sentiment rose among the general public in 2025, with the sharpest increases among white and Hispanic Americans.
Experts say turning Abdul El-Sayed into a political boogeyman is politically strategic for MAGA.
For MAGA politicians, painting elected Muslims as inherently aggressive towards the U.S. is a calculated move, said Jordan Esparza-Kelley, the communications coordinator at CAIR-Chicago, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group.
“Trump is intentionally trying to trigger his audience by manufacturing an enemy that is both external and internal,” Esparza-Kelley told HuffPost. “He seems to believe that a paranoid American people are more likely to be amenable to his autocratic tendencies.”
The president “also benefits by distracting Americans from actual problems plaguing their day-to-day lives like paying more for their essential goods, losing access to healthcare, increased food insecurity due to the federal cuts to SNAP, and the housing crisis.”
Ironically, Esparza-Kelley said, the Muslim elected officials Trump has attacked are among the few taking on those domestic issues and working to improve the quality of life for all Americans.
In the midterms, Republican candidates in states like Texasand Tennesseehave increased their targeting of Muslims in their campaign ads, noted Saher Selod, the director of research at ISPU, a non-partisan, non-profit research and education organization that studies issues that impact Muslims in the U.S.
In the case of El-Sayed, Al Jazeera reported on an orchestrated campaign on X against the progressive candidate, whose election win is seen as a setback for pro-Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC.
The attacks began with accounts clipping the phrase “inshallah,” which means “God willing,” from El-Sayed’s election night speech. The phrase is a common expression of hope among Arabic speakers, but right-wing influencer Benny Johnson posted the clip without its context, presenting it instead as evidence of a sinister political and religious takeover of the country.
“Muslim Socialist Candidate for Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed says ‘inshallah’ during his speech on election night,” Johnson captioned the clip, which has over 982,000 views.
Now that El-Sayed has won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, expect the anti-Muslim rhetoric to reach new levels. As Media Matters reported, leading up to and following El-Sayed’s primary victory, right-wing media have labeled the American-born physician a “foreigner,” a “jihadist,” and an “Islamo-Marxist.”
After his victory, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tweeted, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic. We refuse to be silent.”
When Muslims run for office, political opponents frequently weaponize Islamophobic rhetoric.
Then there’s Republican panic over Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor and a democratic socialist. When Mamdani ran for office last year, the level of Islamophobic attacks and accusations of him bringing sharia law to New York was unprecedented, yet he won that election.
El-Sayed “is the national version of Mamdani,” one national Republican operative working on battleground races told Politico under anonymity.
“What we are seeing with MAGA attacks on candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and Mamdani are hopes that the general public will buy into these Islamophobic tropes, that Muslims are violent, terrorists, misogynists, and that it will turn voters away from voting for them,” Selod said.
Islamophobia has intensified during these election cycles precisely because Muslims have stopped being objects of policy and become authors of it, said Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of the Islamophobia Studies Center.
“For 25 years the terms of Muslim American public life were conditional: moderate yourself, denounce on cue, demonstrate loyalty, and you may be tolerated,” he said. “El-Sayed and Mamdani won without accepting those terms. The reaction is to the breach of the condition, not to anything either man has done in office.”
It’s also a way to avoid actually engaging with their policies — many of which are popular with the American public.
“Both men ran on rent, healthcare and the cost of living,” he said. “Casting them as foreign spares their opponents from having to contest any of it.”
Beydoun finds it encouraging that so many Americans aren’t taking the bait.
“Many Americans, especially young Americans, are fed up with the racism and Islamophobia that Trump became famous for in 2015,” he said. “It’s not as effective as it once was, as illustrated by the electoral victories of Mamdani, El-Sayed and many more to come.”