Tucker Carlson backs Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race

A wave of Republican attacks against two Muslim Democrats has ended with one of the most prominent right-wing commentators in the country endorsing Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.

Tucker Carlson wrote in his newsletter on Friday that El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, was unfit for office and defended him over his past criticism of the war on terror.

The Michigan Democrat emerged from this past week after a wave of attacks were hurled at him and Zohran Mamdani, the first elected Muslim mayor of New York, around the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both men were the subject of intense focus from media organizations on the right and even some mainstream outlets as the two faced differing but related accusations of anti-American sentiment impossible to separate from their Muslim faith.

For El-Sayed, it included accusations that he didn’t sufficiently care about American victims of the attacks given that he’d made statements criticizing the War on Terror launched in their wake, including one where he mentioned that he would spend September 11th mourning the attacks’ victims, and the next day mourning victims of the wars.

Carlson, who is now the most vocal critic of Donald Trump’s war with Iran on the right, leapt to El-Sayed’s defense on Friday, the anniversary of the attacks, after Mike Rogers’ campaign said El-Sayed’s attitude was “disgusting”.

“Hold on a second. Disgusting? Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?” asked Carlson.

“El-Sayed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda; he simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9/11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction. He is obviously right,” wrote Carlson.

Carlson is passionately opposed to the war in Iran and called the strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel to begin the war in February “disgusting” and “evil”. In June, he warned that the war would be the end of both the Trump presidency and the Maga movement, predicting that it would consume both, leaving the president’s legacy in tatters.

“What’s the Bush presidency about? It’s about the Iraq war and the financial collapse of 2008. Those are its defining facts. And that will be you,” Carlson said he told Trump during a Sky News interview. “It doesn’t matter what else ... you’re the Iran war guy if you do this. He knew that. Boy, did he know that. But he did it anyways.”

The latest remark from Carlson is bad news for Rogers, as it signals that the efforts of his campaign to paint his opponent as a radical extremist aren’t paying off.

Polling has trended in El-Sayed’s favor since the primary and support for Trump’s war in Iran continues to drop as well. The president’s own approval ratings hover in the 30s, dragged down by economic woes brought on by the war.

In Michigan, Democrats are hoping to hold on to a Senate seat held by retiring Sen. Gary Peters as they pursue a majority in the upper chamber in the upcoming midterms. The party needs to hold Michigan and net four other seats to take back control of the chamber.

But El-Sayed’s win of the primary in Michigan followed a bitterly divisive campaign against him by AIPAC and supporters of the Democratic Party’s relationship with Israel, which has frayed severely since the Israeli siege of Gaza began in 2023. The primary fight mirrored the New York mayoral race won by Mamdani, who faced a similar wave of anti-Muslim attacks labeling him a “jihadist” and supporter of radical Islamist terror groups, cheered on by a right-wing media sphere and even some conservative Democrats.

El-Sayed has sought to embrace Mamdani’s playbook and has been relentless in trying to refocus the conversation around his campaign whenever media outlets attempt to draw him into disputes about his Muslim faith, his past comments about 9/11 or other issues or the support his campaign has received from Hasan Piker, an avowed anti-Zionist Twitch streamer who also faced blowback over comments about 9/11 and criticism of the war on terror.