WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance ripped the “very evil” Michigan Senate nominee Abdul el-Sayed during a Monday visit to a Detroit suburb — while telling the Democrat to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth.”
“There’s something about Abdul el-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” Vance said, describing the candidate as “a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion,” but “nothing for people who don’t.”
Vance ripped el-Sayed, who is Muslim, for insinuating that the vice president’s late grandfather might have disapproved of his marriage to second lady Usha Vance, an Indian-American Hindu.
“Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league,” Vance said to cheers inside a Sterling Heights warehouse.
Vance urged Michigan voters to support Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in the Senate race as he rattled through controversial remarks by political commentator Hasan Piker, whom el-Sayed has refused to disavow.
“One of his main campaign surrogates suggested that America deserved 9/11, and you know, I was trying to understand what would motivate a person to say these things, what would motivate a person to do these things,” Vance said.
“When I see Abdul el-Sayed talk about white supremacy being the root of opposition to Sharia law; When I see a guy like Abdul el-Sayed empathize not with the innocent children at Temple Israel or the security guards, but empathize with the person who committed that atrocious crime.
“When I see Abdul el-Sayed campaign around the state with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11; What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t.”
Vance accused el-Sayed and Piker of seeing themselves “not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person — whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or black or brown — but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others.”
He said that “when you have people who start to say my ethnic group deserves something and yours doesn’t, or that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad, that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation,” Vance said.
“If you look at his politics, if you look at his policy, it is all about saying, ‘This group of people is good, this ethnicity is bad, and I’m gonna fight to give from the bad group of people to the good group of people. And I think that’s a despicable way to think about your fellow Americans.”
El-Sayed responded to Vance on X, writing that Vance’s description of us-versus-them politics was “basically how I feel about working people v. billionaires and Michigan v. Ohio.”
Ahead of the vice president’s rally with Rogers, El-Sayed scoffed at the Ohio native’s swing through the Wolverine State and decried the Trump administration’s trade flap with Canada.
“Who better to invite to Michigan to declare war on Michigan than Ohio[’s] JD Vance,” El-Sayed chided at a press conference beforehand on Monday. “Who do you like better, Canada or Ohio? I think all of us will tell you we’re good with Canada. It’s Ohio we got problems with.”
