Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed fired back at Vice President JD Vance’s condemnation of a jab from the progressive politician involving the vice president’s wife.
“Look, I’d rather not talk about spouses at all,” El-Sayed told CNN host Kaitlan Collins Monday night. “The truth of the matter is that Donald Trump, almost as soon as I was nominated, tweeted a picture of me and my wife relative to him and his wife, trying to highlight the fact that my wife wears a hijab, as if to make an argument that that’s somehow less American.”
The current spat between Vance and El-Sayed began in August, when Vance spoke at a rally and imagined going back in time to tell his “papaw” about El-Sayed, claiming the candidate was in favor of “Sharia law.”
“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed wrote on X after the rally, referencing the second lady’s Indian ancestry.
The vice president shot back Monday at a Michigan rally, calling El-Sayed “very, very evil” and saying during a speech that he should “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league.”
Speaking to CNN, El-Sayed challenged Vance and Trump to “face down their own hypocrisy.”
“The point that I’ve been making about his wife is that he believes in a political philosophy that says that some people are somehow more American than others,” the Michigan Democrat said.
He then posed the question, “Why would you invoke your long-since-passed grandfather to make an argument about me if you’re not trying to take us back to a time when people like me were less than normal?”
“But then that raises the question about who else might not be normal in that kind of an America, who else might not be included in the broad spectrum of who can be an American,” he continued.
He then accused Vance of wanting to “dogwhistle” about diversity while refusing to engage in a straightforward discussion.
“When you actually call him out on it, he acts like he would never bring anything like that into our political conversation, despite he and his boss doing that every single day,” El-Sayed concluded.