MARQUETTE, Mich. — Abdul El-Sayed likes to say that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance “can’t seem to keep my name out of their mouth.”

And the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan is more than happy to return the favor.

Rolling through the Upper Peninsula last week on his “It shouldn’t be this hard” bus tour alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., El-Sayed carried his progressive message into traditionally conservative territory.

At all three stops, he leaned into taunting the president and vice president. Hard.

In Escanaba, El-Sayed called Trump “the worst symptom of the disease of our politics.” In Iron Mountain, he called the president “a punk” and “a good old billionaire who has never cared about people in his life.” When he asked the crowd what else Trump is, they yelled back: “A pedophile.”

“I was just gonna say he has very small hands,” El-Sayed responded.

El-Sayed saved some of his sharpest jabs for Vance, an Ohio native, who had campaigned earlier that day in Monroe with former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee. At that rally, Vance called El-Sayed “a little weasel.”

Within hours, El-Sayed fired back from his own stage in Marquette.

“You know it’s funny, he called me a — JD Vance called me a ‘little weasel’ today,” he remarked on stage. “I’m like ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a fucking wolverine.’”

He mocked Vance for holding a “cute little rally” with the “five people who like him” — and reached for the storied rivalry between Ohio State and the University of Michigan.

“Imagine being the candidate from Michigan and having to invite somebody from Ohio to campaign for you,” El-Sayed said. “I was like, Ohio? Bottom of the barrel, bro.”

The trolling, to be sure, is not unprompted. Trump has taken a particular interest in El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. The president has referred to him by his middle name, Mohamed, labeled him “a Jihadist lunatic” and, earlier this month, released a video from the Oval Office calling him “bad news.”

“We cannot take a chance of having this guy be in the United States Senate,” Trump said.

But it is set to come to a head Wednesday night, when El-Sayed and Rogers meet for the second, and final, debate in Michigan’s marquee Senate race. In their first meeting on stage, sparks flew. Their second go-around is certain to showcase more.

The escalating rhetoric reflects the stakes. Michigan’s Senate race is rated a toss-up, and the winner could help determine which party controls the chamber for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. El-Sayed and Rogers are set to meet for their final debate. And the name-calling is only intensifying ahead of Trump’s planned Oct. 25 rally in Michigan — a visit Rogers himself has been noticeably reluctant to embrace.

Asked by MS NOW after the candidates’ first debate on Oct. 8 in Grand Rapids whether he wanted Trump to come to Michigan, Rogers was noncommittal.

“Yes, he’d be welcome — I’d love to have him talk to those people and get them fired up,” Rogers said, after commending Trump’s no-tax-on-tips policy and touting the positive effects the tariffs have had on cherry farmers and automakers in the state.

Pressed on whether he would appear alongside Trump, Rogers moved on without answering. He shared a stage with the president at a rally in July.

Rogers’ caution reflects how closely divided Michigan is. Trump carried the state by 1.4 percentage points in 2024. That same year, Rogers lost his Senate bid to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by about a third of a percentage point.

And the president’s standing there has slipped. A Marist poll in September found that 41% of Michigan voters approve of the job Trump is doing, while 57% disapprove.

El-Sayed is trying to capitalize on both Trump’s poor numbers and Rogers’ ambivalence. In Escanaba, he dared the president to come to Michigan and cast the election as a referendum on Trump’s agenda — turning one of the president’s own lines against him.

Expletives flew. Again.

“Donald is thinking about coming to Michigan,” he said, drawing boos from the crowd. “But it’s OK, actually, you know what? Donald is going to come and remind everybody that Donald is on the ballot.”

“Donald, come,” he continued. “Tell everybody in Michigan that you are on the ballot. Your shit tariff war is on the ballot. Your dumbass war with Iran is on the ballot. Your Medicaid cuts are on the ballot. Your ballroom’s on the ballot. So come tell everybody about it. And if you won’t, I will.”

The back-and-forth is also a window into what politics has become in the Trump era. Since Trump burst onto the national political scene in 2015, his brash, insult-first style has seeped into politics more broadly. El-Sayed — a former college athlete who is fluent in social media, takes questions from reporters at nearly every turn, relishes the back-and-forth of a Fox News interview and rarely backs off a position under criticism — is in many ways a product of that shift.

Trump likes to spar with his opponents. El-Sayed is meeting him in the ring.

Asked about his jabs at Trump in an interview with MS NOW, El-Sayed smiled slightly as he addressed the crowd’s answer in Iron Mountain.

“When it comes to Trump, like, I didn’t say anything about his proclivities, that was the crowd,” he said.

“They know,” he added. “They understand.”

El-Sayed has also shown a knack for turning Trump’s insults around — and, in some cases, back on the president.

At the Iron Mountain town hall, he said Trump used to mispronounce his first name, Abdul. After El-Sayed called him out for it, the president switched to his middle name.

“Now that I called it out, he likes to call me by my middle name, which is Mohamed. And the funny thing about it is, Abdul means servant. Abdul El-Sayed means servant leader,” El-Sayed said. “Mohamed means the praised one. So he took me from servant to praised one.”

The crowd erupted in laughter and cheers.

“Whatever you want to call me,” he continued, “I’m going to make sure you’re going to have to use the word senator in front of it in November.”

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s answer to Trump’s attacks: Hit back harder appeared first on MS NOW.

For the second time in two months, President Donald Trump is heading to South Carolina to try to save a Senate seat Republicans considered safe until recently.

The reliably red bastion hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1998. But Republican Sen. Darline Graham is locked in an unexpectedly close race with Democrat Annie Andrews, and the GOP is pouring money and manpower into South Carolina in the campaign’s final stretch.

They have their work cut out.

Trump’s rally Wednesday in Clemson comes at a precarious moment for the party. On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report shifted the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.” It was the outlet’s second downgrade of Republicans’ grip on the seat in recent weeks, and comes as recent polls show a close contest.

The race has been a rollercoaster from the start. After the shocking death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republicans scrambled to coalesce around his sister, Darline, who was appointed to the seat. Then, during a high-stakes debate on Aug. 18, she said she was “not that informed on national security,” setting off a frenzied effort to pick up the pieces.

Republicans in the state are clear-eyed about where the problem lies.

“There’s no question that there’s a drag at the top of the ticket,” one South Carolina GOP official told MS NOW, referring to Graham.

The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the race, said Republicans aren’t as united behind Graham as they should be this late in the campaign.

“There are voters who are voting third party, there are the voters who are voting elsewhere, and there doesn’t seem to be as much cohesion amongst the Republican electorate around her,” the official said.

The polls suggest it’s not a South Carolina problem, but rather a Graham problem. An October survey from Trafalgar Group, a Republican polling firm, found Graham leading by just three percentage points, 49 percent to 46 percent. That same month, Trafalgar found Alan Wilson, the GOP nominee for governor, ahead of Democrat Jermaine Johnson by 16 points, 52.5 percent to 36.5 percent.

Republicans are spending accordingly. Earlier this month, the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., put a last-minute $5 million into the race as nerves hit overdrive. Since the Aug. 18 debate, Republicans have spent more than $22.5 million on the race, compared with $17.1 million from Democrats, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

To some Republicans, spending a single dollar in South Carolina is a waste in a year when control of both chambers of Congress is up for grabs.

“It’s political malpractice that we’re even having to spend money in the state,” the GOP official said.

That money, the official argued, belongs in battleground states, not a ruby-red one.

“South Carolina should not be a state where we have to spend money to shore up a Republican nominee,” the official said. “That money is better used in other states, but we are here, and this is the cards that we have to play right now.”

Trump is the party’s other big investment. Clemson sits in the state’s Upstate region, territory Republican Rep. Ralph Norman dominated in the August primary. Norman carried Pickens and Anderson, the two counties that include Clemson, by 16 and 15 percentage points, respectively.

There is some evidence the approach works. In this summer’s special primary, Graham finished second in Horry County, home to Myrtle Beach, with 35 percent to 42 percent for GOP Rep. Russell Fry, who represents the area. After Trump rallied there and Fry endorsed her, Graham won 73 percent of the vote in the runoff.

A source in South Carolina Republican politics said Trump’s visit to the northern part of the state this week is “wise,” pointing to the Horry County turnout.

“It’s gonna help fire up the most conservative part of the state right before the election,” the source said. “I think it’ll help a lot.”

But Trump’s backing only goes so far. Despite his endorsement, Graham couldn’t lock down the nomination early and was forced into a runoff.

There’s also an awkward subplot to Wednesday’s trip.

When she arrived in Washington, Graham became the face of a bill imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran, picking up where her brother left off. Congress passed it, and Trump signed it into law. It was a major achievement for the new senator, and one she frequently cited as proof she could get things done, especially as she fielded questions about her qualifications after the debate.

But earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order exempting Russia from the sanctions, gutting her signature achievement.

Asked about the move, Graham said the legislation is “one of the tools he can use to do that,” adding: “It’s up to him whether or not he chooses to use it.”

She also made clear she disagreed.

“Personally, I would choose to keep the pressure on Russia … because I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia,” Graham said.

Meanwhile, the campaign has reached a fever pitch. Earlier this month, Trump attacked Andrews on Truth Social, using an anti-transgender slur against her and writing that she does not represent the “values of the great people of South Carolina” and “is not for South Carolina.”

Andrews told WYFF, a Greenville TV station, that she saw the attacks from Trump “coming at some point.”

“I think they want it to be a distraction for me, but it’s not going to be a distraction,” she said. “I am a disciplined, hard-working candidate who is outhustling and out-fundraising my opponent. That’s why national figures like the President are getting involved.”

Trump is likely to keep up those attacks on Wednesday and to make clear how much he sees riding on the race.

At a tele-rally for Graham last week, he repeated his favorite refrain of the cycle: “Just pretend I’m on the ballot.”

In South Carolina, that’s closer to the truth than usual. After Lindsey Graham’s death, Trump lobbied Gov. Henry McMaster (R) to appoint Darline Graham to the seat, publicly encouraged her to run for the full six-year term and endorsed her once she entered the race.

Her bid is on the line. So is Trump’s credibility.

“Essentially,” Trump said at the tele-rally, “I am on the ballot.”

Hunter Woodall contributed to this report.

The post ‘There’s a lot of worry’: GOP sounds the alarm about Darline Graham as Trump swoops in — again appeared first on MS NOW.