Trump wants Michigan-born Abdul El-Sayed to go ‘back to where he came from’

President Donald Trump has added a new line to his months-long campaign against Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. Speaking to Black supporters at a Friday rally in Florida, Trump said he hoped they would vote against El-Sayed and "send him back to where he came from." MS NOW columnist Steve Benen points out that El-Sayed is no immigrant: he was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan, so the place he came from is the state he already lives in.

Benen compares the remark to Trump's earlier social media attack on four progressive Democratic congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. After they voted against a border bill, Trump told them to go back to the countries he said they originally came from. Yet Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and Tlaib were U.S. natives.

Benen argues the pattern is racially driven. Trump attacks white opponents harshly and often, he writes, but has never told Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Jack Smith or James Comey to go back anywhere. In Benen's view, Trump treats nonwhite critics as foreigners even when they were born in America, and that habit reveals how he defines who counts as American.

Summarized by PolitiKool from MS NOW’s reporting. Read the full story at MS NOW →