The Administration Runs on a Muslim Enemy Because It Has Nothing Else

There is a pattern in how this administration campaigns when the numbers turn against it: it finds a Muslim to blame. On 3 November, voters decide whether Republicans keep control of Congress or Democrats take it to stymie Trump's agenda, and with that power up for grabs the president has chosen not to defend a record but to pick a target.

That target is Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, locked in a dead heat against Republican Mike Rogers. On Sunday, at a rally in Port Huron, Trump called El-Sayed a "jihadist". It was not an isolated slip. Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric against El-Sayed, portraying him as a threat to national security and questioning his loyalty to the United States. The move is old and ugly: the citizen reframed as the infiltrator, the believer reframed as the enemy within. It is the oldest play in the reactionary book, deployed against a man seeking office the same way millions of Americans do — and deployed precisely because he might win.

Ask why the president reaches for this now, and the answer is in the arithmetic. A handful of Senate races will determine which party controls the chamber next year. When a party cannot run on what it has delivered to working people, it runs on fear instead. The bigotry is not a distraction from the campaign; it is the campaign. It costs nothing to manufacture and it does the work of mobilization that a record of governance cannot.

The desperation behind it is visible. Republicans are already acting defeated before a single midterm vote has been tabulated. A party confident of its standing with voters does not spend the final week inventing enemies in a tied race. It defends its gains. The turn to religious scapegoating is the tell of a movement that expects to lose the argument on its merits and is reaching for something cheaper and more combustible.

And it is reaching while the president himself is under a cloud. House Judiciary Democrats released a 50-page report on Trump's alleged involvement in the Epstein files, issued just eight days before the election, detailing discrepancies in his statements about Epstein. The sequence matters. A man facing scrutiny over his own conduct answers not by clearing it up but by directing attention at someone else's faith. The louder the accusation against El-Sayed, the quieter the questions about the accuser. That is the function the slur performs.

Read the pieces together and the architecture of power shows itself plainly. The administration does not hold a winning position, so it does not contest the election on living standards, on wages, on what has been done to or for ordinary people. It contests it on identity, telling voters that the real danger is not the men who run the economy and the state but a Muslim candidate standing for a Senate seat. The maneuver demands nothing of those who hold power and everything of the one singled out.

The cost lands first on El-Sayed, who is forced to answer for his religion rather than his platform. But it lands wider than one candidate. Every Muslim in this country watches a sitting president brand one of their own a jihadist from a rally stage and understands the message is meant for all of them. When a losing campaign decides a scapegoat is its path back to Congress, the people turned into that scapegoat pay the bill. The ballot closes on 3 November. The permission the rhetoric grants does not.