“I’m the president of the United States, I can call you whatever the hell I want.”
Donald Trump was addressing Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, at an October 16 rally in Dalton, Georgia, after days of calling him “Muhammad” instead of Abdul.
In the same remarks, Trump called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” said he hates the country, and claimed, without evidence, that he belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood. He then questioned whether El-Sayed could be trusted with a seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The sequence matters: mock the Muslim name, invoke terrorism, then cast doubt on the candidate’s fitness for public trust. Before any policy argument begins, religious identity has become a security threat.
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The rally came two months after Trump posted a photo of himself and Melania Trump beside one of El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist who wears a hijab. The caption read: “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” Readers were invited to decide which family belonged.
That is the burden Muslim candidates confront: before they can debate what government should do, they are asked to defend their place in the nation they seek to serve.
Punished for Participating: Islamophobia in U.S. Electoral Politics, a report from Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights due out October 27, examines more than 30 cases involving Muslim candidates and officials from 2001 to 2026. An advance copy I reviewed, along with the center’s published executive summary, identifies recurring patterns: claims of Islamic infiltration, gendered stereotypes, threats and violence, and presumptions of antisemitism.
The pattern predates Trump. After Keith Ellison’s election to Congress in 2006, his plan to use a Quran at his ceremonial swearing-in prompted Representative Virgil Goode to warn that stricter immigration policies were needed to prevent more Muslims from following him into office. Ellison was born in Detroit. Even a native-born American’s electoral victory became an argument for keeping outsiders out.
The report’s sharpest insight is the contradiction in its title. Muslims are urged to integrate, vote, and work within democratic institutions. When they do, their participation is recast as proof that those institutions are being infiltrated.
Meeting the terms of acceptance does not end the suspicion. It feeds it.
El-Sayed’s campaign makes that contradiction visible. He won Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination in August and now faces Republican Mike Rogers on November 3. His candidacy warrants the scrutiny any bid for national office deserves: his policies, his public statements and the company he keeps are all fair game.
Now consider Representative Nancy Mace’s response to his primary win. “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse,” she wrote, “and a threat to both national security and our republic.”
“Every single Muslim” leaves no room for an individual record. The religion becomes the evidence, and the election the means of entry.
The familiar defense, that critics are targeting extremism rather than Muslims, cannot explain language that indicts every Muslim in office. Nor does one candidate’s controversial association justify suspicion of an entire faith.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani shows another side of the same problem. Voters may oppose his economic agenda, question his judgment, or reject his stance on Israel. None of that puts his citizenship in question. Yet his campaign prompted calls to investigate whether he could be stripped of it.
The message reaches beyond its target. A naturalized citizen watching learns that entering public life can reopen a question that was supposed to be settled the day citizenship was granted: Are you really one of us?
Ilhan Omar’s case gives that question immediate stakes. Investigators—who searched her home days before an election—are examining her decades-old immigration paperwork with an eye toward denaturalization and deportation. Omar denies any wrongdoing.
The Washington Post reports that a 2019 review examined the same questions about Omar’s birth date and her father’s history, found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, and was dropped. New evidence may justify another inquiry. But what has changed—the evidence, or the political appetite for pursuing her?
Omar is subject to the law like anyone else. Political hostility does not prove an investigation is baseless, just as an investigation does not prove guilt. Both the allegations and the government’s conduct deserve scrutiny.
The common thread is how readily disagreement with Muslim politicians becomes doubt about their right to govern.
Article VI prohibits religious tests for federal office. That does not bar scrutiny of a candidate’s convictions or make offensive rhetoric unconstitutional. It rejects religious identity as a qualification for public trust—a principle worth defending in campaigns as well as courts.
The renewed campaign against “sharia law” shows why. A Washington Post analysis counted at least 39 state and federal bills and resolutions targeting sharia in 2025–2026, compared with 48 over the previous 15 years. Six measures passed in six states. As I have argued, courts already cannot enforce religious rules that violate constitutional rights. These measures offer redundant protection while casting Muslim identity as a threat.
Sharia encompasses guidance on prayer, charity, and ethical conduct, alongside diverse traditions of jurisprudence. Portraying it as a secret governing agenda turns ordinary religious practice into evidence of subversion.
No official’s faith licenses violations of constitutional rights. If a candidate proposes coercive religious rules, challenge the proposal. Muslim identity cannot substitute for evidence.
Otherwise, suspicion becomes impossible to rebut: religious practice proves extremism, denial proves concealment, and electoral victory proves infiltration.
This rhetoric finds a receptive audience. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s 2025 poll found that its Islamophobia Index, measuring endorsement of anti-Muslim stereotypes, rose from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025 among the general public.
The Rutgers report documents the consequences for public servants: harassment, threats, and risks to their families. Election results cannot count those deterred from running. Nor does one candidate’s victory erase the barriers others face.
Political parties should reject collective accusations from their own allies. Journalists should demand evidence for allegations of extremism. Authorities should take threats seriously regardless of the target’s politics.
None of this requires supporting El-Sayed, Mamdani or Omar. Equal citizenship means opposing them on the same terms as other Americans. Muslims owe the same constitutional obligations as everyone else and have the same freedom to dissent and seek change.
Running for office should invite scrutiny of a candidate’s fitness to govern—not a trial over whether they belong in America.
Faisal Kutty is a professor of law at Southwestern Law School, affiliate faculty at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, a regular contributor to the Toronto Star, and a contributing editor for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.