Abdul El-Sayed spent months dodging questions about a streamer who trashed America over 9/11.
Turns out the streamer wasn't the only one making ugly comparisons about that day.
A blog post buried on El-Sayed's own site puts him in the exact same company.
El-Sayed's Own Words Compare Trump to the 9/11 Mastermind
Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed wrote in 2021 that Donald Trump "recruited, radicalized and reassured" the Capitol rioters the same way Osama bin Laden built his hijackers.
He didn't call it a metaphor. He called it terrorism, flat out, in his own words.
Then he went further, arguing every member of Congress had a moral obligation to convict Trump and ban him from office for life.
The post ran under a headline that asked, point blank, why the country wasn't treating its own president like a terrorist.
That's not a slip of the tongue. That's a sitting Senate nominee putting Trump in the same category as the man who murdered nearly three thousand Americans.
El-Sayed has since made the blog private.
A Campaign Spokeswoman Scrambles to Clean It Up
His campaign is already in full damage control.
A spokeswoman is now claiming El-Sayed only wanted courts and Congress involved, nothing more.
Convenient, considering El-Sayed spent the same post praising the raid that killed bin Laden as proof that attacking America comes at a price, writing that the operation sent an unmistakable message to the world.
He can't have it both ways. Bin Laden's death was a righteous message, but the same reckoning for Trump is somehow off the table.
Democrats Have Reached for Terrorist Comparisons Before
El-Sayed is not the first Democrat to reach for terrorism language to smear Trump or the people who voted for him.
Rep. Veronica Escobar stood on the House floor and declared "terrorists attacked the United States" before Democrats voted to impeach Trump.
Former Trump White House aide Anthony Scaramucci went even further on CNN, calling Trump "the domestic terrorist of the 21st century" and putting him in the same sentence as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Fox News host Pete Hegseth once called that same style of comparison "patently absurd," that time aimed at a Democrat likening a Republican congressman to a Guantanamo Bay detainee, and warned it shows how far the left will go to paint opponents as terrorists rather than people who simply disagree.
El-Sayed's blog isn't an outlier. It's the same playbook, just with fewer cameras rolling when he wrote it.
Analysis
Strip away the campaign spin and this is bigger than one embarrassing post from 2021.
El-Sayed didn't whisper this to a friend. He published it, under his own name, for the world to read.
He's also spent this entire campaign standing next to Hasan Piker, a streamer who separately said America deserved 9/11 back in 2019, and he still hasn't cut him loose.
El-Sayed wants Michigan to believe standing beside Piker means nothing. Fine. But he didn't need Piker's help to make the bin Laden comparison. He got there on his own.
Michigan doesn't just get to pick a senator this November. It gets to decide whether a man who once put an American president in the same breath as bin Laden gets a seat that could hand Democrats the Senate majority back.
That's not an attack ad talking point. That's his own writing, sitting untouched online for years until he decided America wasn't ready to see it.
Sources:
- Robert Schmad, "Unearthed El-Sayed essay draws explosive Trump-bin Laden parallel," Fox News, August 14, 2026.
- Taylor Penley, "Michigan Democrat defends appearing with Hasan Piker, distances himself from podcaster's controversial remarks," Fox News, April 7, 2026.
- Fox News Opinion Staff, "Media ignores Hasan Piker's radical views in Michigan Senate race," Fox News, August 2026.
- Fox News Media, "Pete Hegseth, who worked at Gitmo, slams Dem who likened GOP lawmaker to detainees," Fox News.
- Time Staff, "Capitol Riot Fuels Calls for Domestic War on Terror," Time, February 24, 2026.
- Yahoo News Staff, "Anthony Scaramucci calls Trump the 'domestic terrorist of the 21st century,' compares him to Timothy McVeigh," Yahoo News.
