Movement vs. Episode – or Why Senator El-Sayed Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump

I. Preamble: The Episode and the Movement

I consider Abdul El-Sayed, since November 3, 2026 the elected U.S. Senator for Michigan, more dangerous in the long run for the liberal constitution and the libertarian spirit of the United States than Donald Trump.

That is a provocative thesis, and it met with a lot of pushback when I voiced it in passing on X:

Trump is president; El-Sayed is one of a hundred senators.
Trump imposes tariffs by decree, wages war without a congressional mandate, pardons his followers – El-Sayed is just one of 100 senators, his power limited.
And anyway, what is dangerous about him? He only wants to improve living conditions for many people and protect minorities.

At first glance, all of that is true – it is just very short-sighted.

Trump is a human being, a single person. And yes, his politics are often erratic – tariffs he threatens, imposes, suspends, doubles; a war against Iran that began on February 28, 2026, turned into a ceasefire in April, which he called “on life support” in May and declared “over” in July – without ever being finished. And yes, Trump’s style is often crude, off-putting, and not something I want to endorse.

That erraticism is expensive for the U.S. and the world economy. But it has no deep roots, no system. There is no Trumpism without Trump – the MAGA movement is not congruent with it and wants to defend precisely America’s foundational values, if at times with questionable means – and on January 20, 2029 his term ends by the very constitution he has so often strained.

Trump will remain an episode without a long echo, like so much in U.S. history – I am thinking, for example, of McCarthy.

El-Sayed, by contrast, is something else, something far more fundamental: the biggest electoral success yet of a movement that wants not only to govern America but to fundamentally rebuild it. Behind him stand Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, the Working Families Party, the big labor unions, and a fundraising apparatus of several dozen million dollars. His program – Medicare for All, a billionaire tax, a statutory “living wage,” union privileges, mandates for data centers, a total arms embargo on Israel, appeasement of antisemitism and Islamism – is not a bundle of whims but a coherent, largely anti-liberal worldview. And coherence is what lets movements and ideologies survive.

A president gets eight years; Trump has barely more than two left. But a senator who takes office at 42 likely has another 30. And as I said – El-Sayed has a movement behind him that is far more homogeneous and powerful than MAGA.

In what follows I will deal with El-Sayed, his milieu, and his ideas, where I consider them dangerous.

What this is not about: a personal discrediting of the man, or his personal practice of his religion. The individual religious freedom of a Muslim matters to me as much as that of a Baptist, and anyone who rejects El-Sayed solely because of his faith has not understood the American DNA he claims to defend. I will therefore also say where the accusations against him – antisemitism, Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood – overextend the evidence – even if they may be legitimate in the political discourse, especially on X: politics is no pony farm, and it thrives on pointedness too. Which, incidentally, Trump and El-Sayed have in common.

II. Who Is Abdul El-Sayed?

El-Sayed is no outsider who won by accident, but the product of a ten-year career at the intersection of medicine, media, and movement politics.

Born in 1984 in Michigan, the son of Egyptian immigrants – his father is an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University – he studied at the University of Michigan, where he was vice president of the Muslim Students’ Association in 2007, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his medical degree at Columbia University. At 30 he became Detroit’s health director. In 2018 he lost the gubernatorial primary to Gretchen Whitmer, but still won roughly 340,000 votes and the support of Bernie Sanders. After that: CNN commentator, the “America Dissected” podcast, the books Healing Politics (2020) and Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide (2021), and health director of Wayne County (appointed December 2022, in office until April 2025).

On April 17, 2025 he announced his candidacy for the Senate seat of the retiring Gary Peters – on the same day, with Sanders’ blessing (Metro Times). He won the August 4, 2026 primary by about 15,000 votes against Congresswoman Haley Stevens, after Mallory McMorrow had dropped out (ClickOnDetroit).

His intra-party opponents were powerful and influential: roughly $60 million in outside spending flowed against him in the primary, most of it from the AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project (Bridge Michigan). He won anyway – money does not beat a movement.

Before the 2026 midterms, Haley Stevens, his defeated rival for the Senate nomination, did something unprecedented in the party’s history: she endorsed the Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed’s campaign raised $2.4 million from 65,000 donors on that single day (IBTimes).

Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that El-Sayed “hates Jews and hates Blacks,” and called him a “jihadist” and a “Muslim Brotherhood member” at a rally on October 25 (Ynet).

On November 3, El-Sayed won with roughly 52 to 46 percent, and so in January 2027 he will become the first Muslim U.S. Senator – in a Senate where Democrats will once again hold the majority (more on the results here).

The third point is the money itself. I already said that a movement is more powerful than money. Even more powerful is a movement with money… El-Sayed took in $53.8 million over the course of the campaign, more than double Rogers’ total (Legis1); in the third quarter of 2026 alone it was $30.7 million, a Michigan record (Bridge Michigan). Ocasio-Cortez transferred a million dollars from her own campaign account. That is the best-funded left-wing Senate campaign there has ever been – and it won, in a swing state, against its own party leadership, against AIPAC, and against the president.

III. Economics: The Capitalist Who Wants to Tax Capital

El-Sayed says of himself that he is no socialist. “I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works,” he explained in the primary debate on July 27, 2026 (Boston Globe). To the New York Times he said: anyone who believes in capitalism must believe in government regulation to protect markets – and anyone who is a capitalist must be for taxing billionaires’ wealth (Fox News). To the Wall Street Journal he said he was “neither technically nor practically DSA” – the Democratic Socialists of America, at whose events he spoke six times between 2017 and 2020, and whose Detroit chapter described him as a “longtime friend” (Fox News).

But what is his actual program?

At the top of the list is Medicare for All, that is, moving the entire health insurance system into a single government payer. Then a wealth tax on billionaires (“I think we need to tax billionaires,” Detroit, May 3, 2026, alongside Sanders – Bridge Michigan), a statutory “living wage” instead of the minimum wage; easier union organizing, lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap, erasing medical debt, restructuring the Supreme Court, abolishing ICE, which he calls a “paramilitary force” that can neither be reformed nor retrained (Metro Times).

That amounts to a claim to rip the elements of an economy – health, labor, capital – out of the hands of markets and subject them to heavy regulation.

Here I want to bring Friedrich August von Hayek into play: Hayek’s central argument from The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) is that the knowledge an economy needs exists nowhere in collected form. It is scattered across millions of heads – what a raw material costs today, which nurse in Flint quits tomorrow, which medication runs short in Grand Rapids. The price is the only instrument that condenses these fragments into usable information; Hayek called the price system “a mechanism for communicating information.”

Whoever sets prices politically does not destroy the prices but this flow of information. In The Fatal Conceit (1988) he formulated the punchline: the peculiar task of economics is to show people “how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Apply that to El-Sayed’s core promise. “Medicare for All would be cheaper than the current system,” he said in August 2026 in Ann Arbor, because insurers’ administrative overhead “goes away” (Michigan Public). And that is precisely the error Hayek describes: the “overhead” of a market is not waste but the price of information processing. Replace it with a government monopoly buyer that dictates reimbursement to doctors and hospitals, and the costs do not disappear; they migrate into waiting lists. Canada, the model the movement cites, had a median wait time of roughly 30 weeks between specialist referral and treatment in 2024, according to the Fraser Institute. The 2018 Mercatus estimate put the additional federal cost of Sanders’ bill at at least $32.6 trillion over ten years – a lower bound, as the author Charles Blahous himself emphasized.

El-Sayed himself at least conceded that even Americans earning less than a million would pay “a little bit more” in taxes (Fox News).

The minimum wage is the same mistake: a wage is a price, and a price carries information – what an hour of work is worth to an employer in a specific environment. If Washington sets a “living wage” above that value, poverty does not disappear – first the information disappears, and in the end perhaps the job itself. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that a $15 federal minimum wage would in the median cost 1.3 million jobs – with a range up to 3.7 million. Hayek described exactly this mechanism in The Constitution of Liberty (1960): wage setting above the market level, whether by union power or by law, creates unemployment among those least able to bargain.

The Senator from Michigan does not know what a seventeen-year-old’s hour of work is worth in Saginaw. Nobody in Washington knows – the market does. Take that steering power away from the market and you destroy it.

And the billionaire tax? El-Sayed may even be partly right when he says we do not live under capitalism but under “corporatism,” in which corporations buy policy (National Review). His refusal to take money from DTE Energy, while Democrats and Republicans alike hand data centers tax giveaways, is a corresponding signal that puts deeds behind his words. Only he draws the wrong conclusion: corporatism arises where the state has something to distribute; the more it distributes, the more worthwhile it becomes to buy it. El-Sayed’s remedy for the bought state is an even bigger state. That is like trying to fight a fire with more fuel because the previous fuel was in the wrong hands.

The crucial point for my thesis: none of this is erratic; it has been the same program since 2018, laid down in book form, repeated again and again, advanced by a man who trained as an epidemiologist to steer systems, and who believes in steerability.

Trump’s tariffs are the whims of a president; El-Sayed’s program is an ideology with which he wants to steer an economy – and that attempt at steering will destroy the system that made the U.S. a world power.

Popular ideologies survive the individual ideologues – that is what makes them so dangerous.

IV. Technology: “People Really Effing Hate Data Centers”

El-Sayed was the first candidate in the race to turn the mood against AI data centers into a program. On January 8, 2026 he published his “Terms of Engagement” for data centers – Metro Times called the plan “Our Communities, Our Terms” – an eight-point catalog of conditions every data center in Michigan would have to meet before being approved: no electricity rate increases for residents, water protection, community input, compliance with climate laws (Gander Newsroom, Metro Times). In July he stood with Saline Indivisible in front of the construction site of the 1.4-gigawatt Oracle and OpenAI project the developers call “The Barn,” speaking of “dirty data centers” that local politicians buy (campaign). Talking to reporters he distilled his diagnosis: people “really effing hate data centers” (GovTech). The agenda worked. A NYT/Siena poll on September 24, 2026 showed him leading Rogers 46 to 35 percent on the issue of AI and data centers; he had accused Rogers of investing up to $2.6 million in the “data-center boom” (Newsweek).

Admittedly, this case is more complicated than Medicare for All and other social-democratic to socialist ideas: Michigan lured data centers with tax exemptions in 2024/25, and El-Sayed rightly calls it “problematic” that these giveaways were waved through across party lines (Planet Detroit). Tax privileges for individual industries are corporatism, whether they benefit Oracle or General Motors (that taxes as such are the problem is another matter). And if a data center draws power from a regulated monopoly grid whose rate structure shifts costs onto households, then the problem is real – only it is a problem of the state-protected utility monopoly, not of the data center.

Were the energy market freer, this would sort itself out better: the libertarian answer is prices. Whoever buys electricity and water at market prices, without cross-subsidies and without taxes and tax gifts, harms no one; he pays.

El-Sayed’s answer is conditions. The “Terms of Engagement” are a permitting regime in which a new technology must politically justify itself before it is allowed to exist. The pattern is older than AI – it is the pattern of every technology skepticism, from the railroad to the cell tower to the German Greens’ fight against ISDN.

Hayek called competition a discovery procedure: nobody knew in 1995 what the internet would be good for, and nobody knows today what the computing capacity being built in Saline Township will be good for. A politics that sets conditions pretends it knows.

To El-Sayed’s credit: he did not support the national data-center moratorium that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez demand (E&E News). He told Newsweek that voters were not demanding the U.S. give up the AI race against China, but asking why their electricity bill should subsidize a tech campus they never voted for.

But my fundamental criticism stands: he translated a mood – fear of a technology – into votes, and when he introduces in the Senate the bill he has announced, every data center in America will become a supplicant at the mercy of politics – and in Washington, just as in Berlin, one quickly learns what one can extract from a supplicant.

V. Israel, Jews, Antisemitism: What the Record Shows

The same pattern can be seen with El-Sayed in another area: his relationship to Jews, Israel, and antisemitism.

The accusations against him here are massive: Trump wrote that El-Sayed “hates Jews.” The Republican Jewish Coalition called him “America’s most antisemitic Senate candidate” (Post Millennial).

I do not want to adopt these assessments blindly; I want to apply my own standard: antisemitic is whoever is hostile to Jews as Jews, whoever holds the Jewish state to standards he applies to no other, or whoever holds Jews accountable for Israel’s policies.

First, a superficial exoneration: El-Sayed condemned the October 7 massacre and accused Hamas of war crimes (Israel National News). He called the attack on Temple Israel synagogue on March 12, 2026 “without justification.” More than a thousand Jewish voters in Michigan publicly supported him (Ynet); the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc endorsed him. He promised Jewish voters he would “fight the fight against antisemitism” (Mediaite).

But the picture is more complex; some examples:

October 21, 2023: two weeks after October 7 and six days before the Israeli army entered Gaza in response, El-Sayed wrote on X of the “genocide being committed against innocent Palestinians today” (Jewish Insider). The false and slanderous framing was set before the ground offensive had even begun.
October 7, 2025: on the second anniversary of the Hamas massacre of Jews, his campaign sent out a fundraising email that opened with “Two years ago this month, Netanyahu’s military began a ground invasion of Gaza” and did not mention the massacre with a single word. After protests, a spokeswoman finally said the email had gone out “by accident” (Free Beacon) – there it was nonetheless, in exactly that wording.
March 1, 2026, one day after the killing of Ali Khamenei at the start of the Iran war, El-Sayed said in an internal meeting that there were “a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” which is why he wanted to say “nothing at all about Khamenei” (Mediaite). When Jake Tapper pressed him on it in July, he dodged (Algemeiner). A man who will not condemn a dictator because his voters might mourn has, in my view, revealed his priorities and unmasked himself.
March 13, 2026: one day after Ayman Ghazali drove an explosives-laden car into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield and shot at a security guard – while the preschool was in session; the FBI called it a “Hezbollah-inspired terror attack on the Jewish community” – El-Sayed released a video in which he said: “Hurt people hurt people. Violence is a cycle. Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week.” And: “Imagine if his family had never died” (Washington Examiner, PolitiFact). In an organizational call on March 18 he called the statement “a risk” and added that leadership means saying what no one else will say. In April, alongside the streamer Hasan Piker, he repeated: “hurt people do hurt people” (Jewish Insider). Only on August 29, when he needed Jewish Democrats for the general election, did he say: “I made a mistake” (NOTUS). This is the core. What was missing was not the condemnation – that was there. What El-Sayed added was a causal chain: Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, therefore attack on a synagogue in Michigan. With that, he made American Jews, preschool children, liable for the policies of a foreign state. That he did it knowingly and calculatedly (“a risk”) does not make it better – quite the opposite; it shows his perfidy.
May to November 2026: at a “Jews for Abdul” event, El-Sayed said he “often struggles” with the question of whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state; nobody asks him about Palestine’s right to exist, “because it doesn’t exist” (Jewish Insider). To CNN he called the question a “gotcha game.” Asked whether the Israeli government is as evil as Hamas: “Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both” (Forward). Whether the Israeli government should be classified as a terror organization: “It’s certainly a rogue state” (Jewish Insider). On the morning of his primary win: under Netanyahu Israel is “bloodthirsty,” but the “illegal apartheid regime” is older than Netanyahu (Jewish Insider). On 60 Minutes, two days before the election, Ross Douthat asked whether Palestine has a right to exist. “Yes.” Whether Israel does. “Yes, if there is a shared understanding” (Jewish Insider). A yes without conditions, a yes with conditions, a double standard.
The arms embargo: El-Sayed demands a complete embargo including defensive systems like Iron Dome – a position CNN commentator Van Jones, a Democrat, called “insane” (VIN News), and which the co-founder of “Jews for Abdul” acknowledged as one of his main problems with Jewish voters (Jewish Insider). Defensive weapons protect civilians from rockets. Whoever wants to deny them is saying Israeli civilians should not be protected. The day after his victory, El-Sayed welcomed Trump’s announcement that the $4 billion military aid would end – and went further: all arms sales should end too (Jerusalem Post).
The entourage: in June 2026 the Justice Department indicted eight, later twelve activists over an intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit; one of the defendants, Mariam Odeh, had worked hourly for El-Sayed’s campaign from February to April 15, 2026. The campaign initially spoke of two weeks and then corrected itself (Algemeiner). Hasan Piker, with whom El-Sayed held two rallies in April, had called the Israeli army a “Nazi army” and Orthodox Jews “inbred” (JNS); El-Sayed distanced himself only months later under pressure.

One may not be able to prove individual Jew-hatred in El-Sayed, and I do not claim to (even though I believe it). What I can prove in him is a pattern that is more dangerous for a liberal order than the hatred of any single individual, because it is socially acceptable:

The Jewish state is denied what is granted to every other.
Violence against Jews in America is explained by Israel.
Antisemitic companions are tolerated as long as they cost no money and no votes.

That is, at minimum, antisemitism as a side effect of a worldview in which Israel is the evil.

VI. Islam, Islamism, Appeasement: The Accusation and Its Limits

And further: where does Abdul El-Sayed stand on Islam – is he perhaps an Islamist?

At first glance, on many issues that matter to Islamists, El-Sayed seems at first to be on the opposite side:

He wants to codify Roe v. Wade and is supported by Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All. He calls himself a “lion for LGBTQ rights” and is endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). On gender-affirming care he said: “I don’t believe the government has a say in what health care is provided under what circumstances.” When Ross Douthat asked him on 60 Minutes whether he felt tension between his faith and the socially liberal party, he answered: “I’m a constitutionalist, and under the Constitution, rights are rights are rights are rights” (LGBTQ Nation). A Dearborn imam preached against him from the pulpit because of precisely these positions (Middle East Forum).

Visitors to the ISNA annual conference, however, told reporters they rejected his stance on abortion and homosexuality but would vote for him anyway (WFMD/Fox). That already shows the situation is more complex here too.

So first, on the accusation of Muslim Brotherhood membership: in 2018 Republican state senator Patrick Colbeck claimed El-Sayed was part of a Brotherhood “civilization jihad” because he had been vice president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan (MSA) in 2007. The MSA does appear on a list of 29 organizations in an internal 1991 memo by a Brotherhood functionary. Whether that suffices to incriminate every MSA alumnus, I consider a stretch. It does show, however, that the Muslim Brotherhood regards such organizations as useful at least as a front.

In 2026, though, something new was added: El-Sayed’s half-sister Eman Abdelhadi, a professor in Chicago, wrote on Twitter in 2012 about their mother’s “activity” “in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 70s” and, in the same year, that her family had “long been” part of it. In 2013 she publicly prayed for relatives who supported the Brotherhood in Egypt (Free Beacon). His mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked from 1999 to 2004 for the Islamic American Relief Agency in Missouri, which the Treasury Department sanctioned for terror financing in 2004 (Daily Wire). El-Sayed, who grew up with his father after his parents’ divorce, told NBC: “I have no connections, we have no connections,” calling the tweets “hearsay” and “not serious”; in the final TV debate he merely pointed out, according to the Daily Wire, that his mother had been a nurse in Missouri (Newsweek). Bridge Michigan examined Rogers’ claim that El-Sayed had “pledged his support” to the Brotherhood and found no evidence (Bridge Michigan).

My view of his relationship to the Brotherhood and the worldview it represents is twofold:

On the one hand: guilt by family is no category; nobody answers for his mother’s student years in Alexandria or his sister’s tweets.

On the other hand, a Senate candidate owes openness. “We have no connections” is a categorical sentence, and his own half-sister’s behavior contradicts it. That his mother was a nurse in Missouri is true – and false at the same time. The right answer would have been: yes, my mother was active in the Brotherhood in the seventies, yes, she worked for an organization that was later sanctioned, and here is what I think about it. That differentiated answer is not the one El-Sayed gave. That does not yet make him an Islamist. It makes him a politician who dodges transparency where it costs him, and who does not want to draw clear lines.

El-Sayed’s danger lies in what I call Islamist appeasement:

The silence on Khamenei, because parts of Dearborn are mourning.
The causal chain he draws from Lebanon to West Bloomfield.
His sentence on September 11: “9/11 scarred our country deeply, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of others. When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them” (ABC News 4) – a sentence Tucker Carlson, incidentally, defended.
And in 2018, in an exchange with Colbeck: “You may not hate Muslims, Mr. Colbeck. But I can tell you, Muslims definitely hate you.” (Fox News). That may be one of the moments when El-Sayed, in the heat of the debate, showed his true face.

Michigan, by the way, has already demonstrated how the ground for an Islamic agenda is prepared and how the revolution throws its supporters under the bus:

In January 2022, woke progressive Democrats celebrated Hamtramck as the first city in America with an all-Muslim city council – a victory of “diversity.” In June 2023 that Muslim city council unanimously banned the rainbow flag on city property, arguing it offended the religious sensibilities of residents (Michigan Advance). The LGBTQ activists who had helped elect the council spoke of betrayal.

That is the fatal pattern: colorful identity is celebrated, the ideological content is never examined, and when the content then unmasks itself as illiberal, it is too late.

El-Sayed is not, of course, the Hamtramck city council. But he leads a coalition of which that council is a part. And El-Sayed has shown that he does not want to alienate the council if it would cost him votes.

For women and for Jews, El-Sayed in the Senate is perhaps (not yet) the immediate danger. The danger is a politics that has learned that elections can be won with religious-conservative blocs as long as one does not contradict them.

And that prepares the ground for Islamism in a free society that is not yet ready to defend itself against this power.

VII. The Network: The Movement That Stays

One senator alone does not change a country. A movement that produces senators does. El-Sayed is not the beginning of this movement but its high point so far:

Actor	Role in the network	Source
Bernie Sanders	Mentor since 2018; endorsement on the day of his candidacy; “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Michigan	Metro Times, April 2025
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez	First primary endorsement of the cycle; $1M from her own account; campaigned in the Upper Peninsula	Bridge Michigan, Oct. 2026
Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Summer Lee	The entire “Squad” endorsed him before the primary; Tlaib shared the Detroit stage	Fox News, Aug. 2026
Zohran Mamdani	Mayor of New York (DSA); publicly defended El-Sayed against “blatantly racist attacks”	Yeshiva World, Oct. 2026
Shawn Fain / UAW, AFSCME, CWA	Labor-union infrastructure; Fain on stage at the Detroit rally of July 18	Campaign / AP
Working Families Party, MoveOn, Indivisible	Organizational apparatus outside the party	Campaign, Sept. 2026
Detroit DSA	Called him a “longtime friend”; he headlined their 2019 fundraising gala	Free Beacon, 2026
Hasan Piker	Streamer with an audience of millions; two joint rallies in April 2026	JNS, July 2026
Chuck Schumer / Senate Majority PAC	Party establishment after the primary: $30M for Michigan	Newsweek, Oct. 2026
Donavan McKinney	Sanders-backed House candidate; joint rallies	Fox News, 2026

The logic of this network is that of a movement, not a party:

It has a fundamentalist ideology (the alleged “oligarchy” as the enemy), a program (Medicare for All, billionaire tax, arms embargo), a fundraising machine (ActBlue: in the final days El-Sayed ranked number two on the entire platform, ahead of Talarico and Ossoff – Ground News), cadres (the Squad), a media environment (Piker, podcasts, the “America Dissected” cosmos), and by now mandates at every level:

Mamdani in New York, El-Sayed in the Senate, Adam Hamawy as the first Muslim congressman from New Jersey, Rashida Tlaib reelected. By the end of May 2026, so-called progressive candidates had won more than 60 percent of Democratic primaries (The New Arab). When Graham Platner in Maine had to drop out after a rape allegation, Ro Khanna said no single candidate is “a test for the progressive movement,” which is “so much bigger than any individual” (KIRO 7/AP).

And that is precisely my argument:

Trump’s movement has no program that works without Trump. It has his person, his instincts, and his enemies. “Trumpism without Trump” is a question nobody has an answer to, not even his vice president.

The Sanders-Mamdani-El-Sayed movement, by contrast, is already independent of its founder. Sanders is 85. The movement has chosen its successors, and one of them will sit for six years starting January in the Senate of a country where his party now controls both chambers.

A word on the party leadership. Schumer and Gillibrand backed El-Sayed after the primary, $30 million flowed from the Senate Majority PAC. That shows two things: first, that the Democratic establishment will accept and support the movement for now. Second, that El-Sayed’s anti-corporatism ends where his own side’s money begins – the Soros-adjacent Democracy PAC put nine million into exactly that pot (Newsweek). A candidate against billionaires, elected with billionaires’ money.

VIII. El-Sayed and the Power of “Ballot Jihad”

The term “ballot jihad” has its roots in the formula of “civilization jihad” from that 1991 memorandum that surfaced in the Holy Land Foundation trial and that Patrick Colbeck cited against El-Sayed in 2018 (see above). Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy has spoken for years of “electoral jihad”: mosques as voter-registration offices, “ninety-plus percent engagement,” and bloc voting for “approved candidates” (Securing America). On August 19, 2026 the RAIR Foundation published “Ballot-Box Jihad – How Islamic Networks Are Weaponizing Elections to Conquer America From Within” (RAIR).

In India, incidentally, the same phenomenon is called “vote jihad” – there, in 2024, a Muslim local politician coined the phrase herself when she urged Muslims to unite against the BJP, thereby making it easy for the Hindu-nationalist right to portray Muslims as a monolithic bloc (CSOH, Organiser). U.S. politics has adopted the term.

What does the term describe? It bundles together real observations. At least 51 Muslim Americans ran for office in 23 states in 2026 (Dawn via UA.news). Muslim organizations mobilized voters, often out of mosques and in religious language; the platform Muslims.vote speaks of 2.5 million Muslim voters. RealClearInvestigations reported in August 2026 on plans by Islamic organizers to support candidates with over $140 million in annual donations, and counted $315,000 in “Brotherhood-adjacent” donations for El-Sayed – where “Brotherhood-adjacent” there means: from people with CAIR ties, including El-Sayed’s father-in-law Tayeb Jukaku, formerly president of CAIR-Michigan, who gave $300,000 to a super PAC (RealClearInvestigations, Newsweek). And there was rhetoric that feeds the term: commentator Wajahat Ali warned that “the fire will rise” should El-Sayed lose – which the Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser denounced as “Jihad First” thinking, “and everyone else can go to hell, including patriotic Muslims” (Fox News).

It is the crux of democratic systems that they can be captured by such collectivist ideologies: legal democratic participation can be warfare against the free society. An ideologized religious minority can have a plan and act as a unit. Voting, when Muslims do it as a collective, can therefore be something other than free voting.

A democracy of free individuals, however, lives by citizens voting as citizens, not as members of an ummah, a church, an ethnicity. When an imam says from the pulpit that it is a religious duty to vote for a particular candidate, that is a problem for freedom – on the individual and the societal level. Incidentally, it is also a problem when the same is said from a Christian pulpit about whom the faithful should or should not vote for.

El-Sayed spoke “for the Muslims” in 2018 (“Muslims definitely hate you”); in 2026 he courted “the [Muslim] community,” whose mourning for Khamenei he did not want to disturb. Even if he has not yet outed himself as an Islamist, he uses the power of the Muslim collective, profits from ballot jihad, and makes use of it – even if he would distance himself from the term.

IX. Trump: The Erratic and Its Limits

On many points I am no defender of Trump:

Trump’s tariffs, for example, were the biggest peacetime tax increase in decades, imposed by decree, on the basis of a 1977 emergency-powers law that was never meant for tariffs. The Supreme Court found so on February 20, 2026 by six votes to three, after more than $142 billion had already been collected (ABC News). Trump’s response: a new global 10 percent tariff under a different paragraph, the same day (Avalara).

He began his – in my view necessary – war against Iran on February 28, 2026 without a congressional mandate. The conflict has since taken every form a war can take except one: an end. Ceasefire in April, “hostilities over” in May, “on life support” a week later, a signed agreement in June, “over” in July, and on October 8 the promise not to attack Iran again before the midterms (E&E News, Al Jazeera). He did not finish the actual objective, with fatal consequences for the American and the world economy.

Why do I still consider him the lesser danger than El-Sayed? For four reasons, all having to do with time.

Trump ends. On January 20, 2029 he leaves office, and he does so through the constitution of the United States. His erraticism is bound to his person; what he builds, he builds not as theory but as instinct. El-Sayed, by contrast, now has six years ahead of him, then presumably another six – and on the basis of an ideology that is building an ever larger following.
The system reacts to Trump because Trump is visible. The courts struck down his tariffs. The voters took both chambers from him on November 3 – including dozens of districts he had won by double digits in 2024. The antibodies work. Against El-Sayed’s program there are no antibodies yet, because it is not perceived as an attack but as care. Nobody marches against Medicare for All. You only notice in socialism what you have lost – just as the progressive supporters of the Muslim city council noticed too late whom they had actually helped into office.
Trump is no adherent of pure libertarian doctrine economically either, but he is an opportunist, not a true believer. He imposes tariffs because he regards them as bargaining chips, not because he considers the market a problem. On November 3 he cut Israel aid on the grounds that it had become a “Democratic talking point” for people like El-Sayed (WLOX/AP) – politics as a transaction, not as ideology. That is unworthy, but it is not dangerous in the sense of my thesis, because transactions can be undone. El-Sayed wants the same outcome out of ideological conviction, and he wants more: no arms sales either. Ideology is far more dangerous than pragmatism.
Judges appointed by Trump returned the abortion question to the states with Dobbs. In Michigan, voters then wrote the right to abortion into the constitution in 2022. No woman in Michigan lost a right because of Trump; she secured it through her fellow citizens. That is federalism, and federalism is the opposite of danger – it is the insurance against it. And the Jews? Trump’s relationship to them is that of a man who reliably supports Israel. El-Sayed’s movement, by contrast, has a worldview in which the attack on the synagogue in West Bloomfield is a consequence of events in Lebanon.

Certainly, a president who wages war without Congress and imposes tariffs without law strains the constitution. ICE shot two American citizens in Minneapolis in January 2026, and El-Sayed’s description of the agency as a “paramilitary force on peaceful streets” is one that even quite a few libertarians would sign (Gander Newsroom). Whoever measures danger by today’s damage can call Trump the greater danger.

But what matters is what will still be there in twenty years: Trump’s tariffs will then be a footnote. Medicare for All, once introduced, will never be abolished again – that is the lesson of every country with comparable systems.

X. Conclusion: No Saving Truth Exclusive to Me

I have declared El-Sayed more dangerous than Trump, and I stand by it: because he is more durable. Trump is a weather event. El-Sayed is climate change: quiet, reasoned, carried by a movement that will outlive him, and with a program that sells every single measure as help and in sum replaces what has so far distinguished America from almost all other countries – the trust that people manage their affairs better than the state that wants to do it for them.

Hayek titled his 1974 Nobel lecture “The Pretence of Knowledge” and said in it that the insight into the limits of one’s own knowledge should teach whoever studies society “a lesson of humility.”

I take that seriously: I am not in possession of a saving truth exclusive to me. It is possible that I overestimate the waiting times in Canada and underestimate the medical bills in Michigan. It is possible that the two million voters who chose El-Sayed know something about their lives that does not appear in my models – Hayek would say: that is even likely. It is possible that Trump is the founding of a movement and not its episode, and that in ten years I will have to rewrite these reflections under different names. Whoever holds the future to unknowable may not exempt himself.

What I am nonetheless convinced of: that the order which El-Sayed has carried into the Senate is worth defending.

That is why the open society in the U.S. must now supply arguments: show what Medicare for All costs in Canada. Show who ultimately pays the minimum wage. Show what a synagogue in West Bloomfield has to do with Lebanon – namely nothing. Show what AI can do for humanity – and for that, data centers are needed.

The most dangerous ideas and ideologies never arrive as danger. They arrive as help and promises of salvation. They are best fought with facts and deeds.

And El-Sayed must be fought, if freedom matters to you.

Sources and Further Reading

Election and biography

Economics and technology

Boston Globe: “a capitalist who understands how capitalism works” · National Review: “corporatism”
Michigan Public: “Medicare for All would be cheaper” · Bridge Michigan: billionaire tax with Sanders
Metro Times: “abolish ICE”
Gander Newsroom: data-center framework “Our Communities, Our Terms” · E&E News: no moratorium · Newsweek: NYT/Siena poll
Hayek: The Use of Knowledge in Society (American Economic Review, 1945); The Constitution of Liberty (1960); Competition as a Discovery Procedure (1968); The Pretence of Knowledge (Nobel lecture, 1974); The Fatal Conceit (1988). CBO, The Effects on Employment and Family Income of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage (July 2019). Mercatus Center, Blahous, The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System (2018). Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn (2024).

Israel, Jews, Temple Israel

Muslim Brotherhood, Islam, women’s and LGBTQ rights

Network and “ballot jihad”

Trump

ABC News: Supreme Court strikes down IEEPA tariffs, February 20, 2026 · E&E News: Iran ceasefire “over” · AP/WLOX: end of Israel aid, November 3, 2026 · Al Jazeera: Trump’s Truth Social post