Abdul El-Sayed called out the Trump official he would most like to see testifying before him, naming the MAGA figure on CNN Wednesday after winning the Michigan Democratic primary nomination for U.S. Senate.
“I can’t wait to sit across from RFK Jr. and actually grill him,” El-Sayed told “The Source” host Kaitlan Collins about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently addressed widespread affordability concerns by telling struggling voters to eat liver.
“Dude uses big words he does not understand, and I happen to go to medical school, so I kind of understand them. It is going to be a good time holding him accountable for all of the grift that he has pushed on the American public,” the Democrat said.
Asked if Kennedy is the official he’d most like to question, El-Sayed doubled down.
“I think it’s the Trump official that most people would probably like to see me stand up against, because look, I’m a guy with a doctorate in medicine and in public health,” he said. “He’s a guy who takes his kids swimming in shit’s creek.”
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, admitted on social media last year that he took his grandchildren for a swim in Rock Creek, a body of water in Dumbarton Oaks Park in Washington, D.C., known to be teeming with sewage. He shared photos of the outing, which occurred on Mother’s Day.
El-Sayed earned his medical degree and worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, received his doctorate in public health from Oxford University, and later served as the executive director of the Detroit Health Department.
The Michigan-born lawmaker launched a gubernatorial campaign in 2017 after being inspired by the deadly water crisis in Flint. He lost to Gretchen Whitmer but beat establishment figure Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination this week.
El-Sayed has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s war on Gaza. He also said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who endorsed Stevens, “doesn’t want to see” him “on the inside of the U.S. Senate,” but kept it cordial when asked about his post-win chat.
“I think we had a good, meaningful, heart-to-heart conversation about what it takes to win in a state like Michigan,” he said.
El-Sayed continued, “So I’m looking forward to partnering alongside him to win the Senate majority, to win back — to keep — the state of Michigan, and to win back the gavel for Democrats so that we can start holding Donald Trump accountable.”