While slouched at his desk in the Oval Office this month, Islamophobe — among many other phobes — Donald Trump told reporters that a friend had suggested he start calling his political opponents “jihadists.”
He made clear he had one candidate in mind — Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan physician who won the Democratic Senate primary and would be the state’s first Muslim senator.
He also posted a racist, side-by-side photo on Truth Social featuring himself and his estranged wife — what else do we call her, absent? — Melania Trump next to a photo of El-Sayed and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, to frame them as different, “other than” and “scary.”
Trump also intentionally emphasized the candidate’s full name, Abdulrahman Muhammad El-Sayed, a tactic he also uses to emphasize Barack Obama’s middle name.
But it’s the jihadist moniker that had me thinking it takes one to know one. In this case, El-Sayed is not a jihadist, and it’s Trump who, in the broadest definition of the word, is.
A jihadist actually is someone who advocates or uses violence to impose religious rule by force. That doesn’t sound anything like El-Sayed. He is a doctor. His life’s work has been keeping people alive, treating patients, running Detroit’s health department, building a campaign around expanding healthcare access.
El-Sayed actually cares for people as opposed to someone like Trump who, for example, callously said that he loves inflation.
Back to jihadist. It’s an offensive Islamophobic slur aimed at a man whose only offense was winning an election while Muslim.
If we’re going to use the word “jihadist” loosely, as a shorthand for someone who endangers lives in pursuit of an ideological project, it’s worth asking who actually fits that description right now? Because to me, the answer is obvious.
On the same day Trump was hissing the slur, he was also signing an executive order that cuts the list of universally recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association said the move puts children’s health at risk.
So did Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, like El-Sayed a physician, a Republican, and the senator whose vote helped confirm RFK Jr. to lead Health and Human Services, a crime he will have to live with for the rest of his life.
In other words, Trump is an accomplice in killing children — that’s a cold, hard analysis that, in my estimation, will come to fruition in the years ahead.
That’s one thread of a broader pattern. Trump pushed the country into an unnecessary, stupid, and impulsive conflict with Iran. In the process, he has humiliatingly depleted America’s own munitions stockpiles, leaving less weaponry to protect U.S. troops and, by extension, ordinary Americans. Our lives are at risk because of Trump’s ignorance.
At Health and Human Services, the anti-vaccine nutcase RFK Jr. has overseen the departure of large numbers of career scientists and surrounded himself with vaccine skeptics, a combination public health experts say leaves the country much more exposed heading into the next pandemic. RFK Jr. has no medical background and no research creds — other than eating animal roadkill.
Trump knew what America was getting when he nominated the most unhealthy and lethal person to lead our nation’s health system.
At the FBI, a drunk and paranoid Kash Patel has presided over the loss of experienced agents and the hollowing-out of units that track domestic extremist threats, the very infrastructure meant to keep Americans safe from political violence.
What exists is an agency predominantly focused on Trump’s retribution campaign, and not on Americans’ safety. The FBI’s current incompetence is a time-bomb waiting to go off.
Under the Trump administration’s militarized and unchecked approach to domestic deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations have repeatedly descended into fatal chaos, leaving a trail of bodies across the nation.
The fatal shootings of innocent citizens like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were carried out by a system of law that has become a state-sanctioned execution squad.
It’s a strange thing to watch all of this unfold alongside a political coalition that includes Christian nationalism and self-described pro-life evangelical voters, a group that has become, arguably, the single most loyal bloc behind Trump. Yes, their support has declined, but so has the rest of his MAGA support.
By ignoring Trump’s own personal shortcomings, which are far too many to list here, and all the ways he’s endangering the lives of Americans, the religious right gets judicial appointments, restrictions on abortion and reproductive care, rollbacks on transgender rights, and an administration that has woven religious expression into federal institutions.
In Trump’s case, Christian nationalists fill out the rest of the religious extremism definition of jihadist.
OK, I get it, it’s a bit of a stretch because none of this is “jihad” in the literal, technical sense, and it shouldn’t be described that way. But if the word is going to be thrown around loosely, as Trump did yesterday, then loosely applied it describes something closer to his own record. So, if anyone has earned the right to be called a jihadist, it’s Donald John Trump.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed spent his career trying to keep people alive. It takes real audacity for the man attacking him to reach for the ugliest word he can find, on the very day his own administration was making decisions that public health experts say will put children’s lives at greater risk.
If anyone in that Oval Office yesterday deserves scrutiny for policies that endanger American lives, it isn’t the doctor running for Senate.
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