Trump Calls El-Sayed a 'Jihadist,' Then Todd Beamer's Father Tells Michigan: 'We Can See the Attack Coming'

President Trump went to Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday with one job in mind. "I'm here today in Michigan for a very important reason," he told a packed arena nine days before the election. "I'm here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator. And that's the fact. We're not going to let that happen."

The man he meant is Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running against Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan's open Senate seat, one of a handful of races that will decide who controls the Senate. Then Trump did something no attack ad can: he told the story of Todd Beamer, the Flint-born hero of Flight 93, and handed the microphone to Beamer's father.

'Let's roll'

"Twenty-five years ago, our nation was attacked by radical Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001," Trump said. "And on that day, a father of three named Todd Beamer ... born in Flint, Michigan, became an immortal American hero." With "his famous final words, let's roll," Beamer and his fellow passengers charged the cockpit and died stopping the plane from reaching Washington.

"Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight, just like Todd did, to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol."

Then he brought up Todd's parents, David and Peggy Beamer. David Beamer, who told the crowd he is "four score and four," went straight to that morning. "Many of you weren't around on 9/11," he said. "Almost 100 million Americans weren't born yet." Todd left home that morning with two little boys, ages three and a half and one and a half, and a wife five months pregnant. "He never came home."

"Todd and 39 other heroes on Flight 93 had the opportunity to fight back," he said. Three of the hijacked planes hit their targets. "The fourth missile didn't." Everyone in and around the Capitol that day went home that night. Todd didn't. "But they won the counter-attack."

'We can see the attack coming'

Then the father of America's most famous 9/11 passenger made the case for Nov. 3. "9/11 was a surprise attack," he said. "What's going on right now in our country and here in Michigan, it's not a surprise. We can see the attack coming. It culminates in this battleground state on Tuesday, November the 3rd."

"What's different this time is the enemy has not come from abroad. The enemy is right here among us," he said. "They call themselves Democratic Socialists of America. You know what the D.S. really stands for? Demolition specialists." Their platform, he said, "reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids."

He drew the contrast in two lines. "Mike Rogers, the Michigan man. A life of service. Values and loves this country. Mike Rogers is an American." El-Sayed, he said, "has a birth certificate," but "a birth certificate doesn't make you an American." He asked lifelong Democrats to "do a little crossover" this once. "America depends on it."

Then he counted it off, the way his son did. "On three. One, two, three: let's roll." The crowd said it with him. "That's from the heart," Trump said when he came back to the podium. "Your boy is looking down very proud of you both right now."

The record behind the word

The national write-ups led with two words: "without evidence." What they mostly skipped is the list Trump actually read from the stage. "Have you ever seen his writings of the past?" he asked. "Take a look at the things that he wrote, his mother wrote, his sister wrote. You go take a look at the facts."

Here is what's in the original records. El-Sayed's mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked from 1999 to 2004 at the Islamic American Relief Agency, a charity the U.S. Treasury shut down in 2004 after finding its network "provided hundreds of thousands of dollars" to Osama bin Laden, as we reported Saturday. In 2012 El-Sayed signed a letter urging Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, to "purge the media and the police as quickly as possible." His half-sister posted that same year that "my family has long been MB."

Asked at the first debate whether Israel or Iran is the bigger threat to America, he called it "a ridiculous hypothetical." And a Fox News Digital review found he has taken more than $115,000 from at least 41 people who work for or have led the Council on American-Islamic Relations, including his father-in-law, a CAIR-Michigan board member, as we laid out after the final debate.

Trump also went after the company El-Sayed keeps, calling streamer Hasan Piker a "communist agitator" who "says that America deserved 9/11." El-Sayed, he said, "just won't disavow this guy," and the arena played a video of the two together. "Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane," Trump said. "They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate." If El-Sayed wins, he added, "he would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate."

Think of a job application for a top-secret clearance. Nobody asks how you pray. They ask who you've written letters for, who funds you and who you run with. A Senate seat comes with the same secrets, and Trump made the point himself: a senator gets "access to our nation's most closely guarded national security secrets."

Rogers: 'It's how you think'

Rogers made the same case that morning on NBC's "Meet the Press," when host Kristen Welker pressed him on Trump's words. "I don't understand the national press," said Rogers, a former FBI agent who chaired the House Intelligence Committee. "They have to work and twist themselves in knots not to understand Abdul's relationship with the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood." He pointed to the Morsi letter and to money from groups he said back Hamas and Hezbollah. "It's not how you pray, it's how you think. And that has a consequence."

El-Sayed's answer: a joke

El-Sayed answered from a rally in Grand Rapids with Sen. Bernie Sanders that evening. He didn't take on the Morsi letter, his mother's old employer or the donors. He went after Trump's pronunciation. "I don't even care that he remembers my whole name," he told the crowd, "because he can just go on and call me 'senator' after November." He added that he'd be "Senator Muhammad to you, bro."

It got cheers in Grand Rapids. It also left every question on that list where it was.

What happens next

Vice President JD Vance campaigns in Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday. Early voting is already underway, and the polls have this race inside the margin of error. Election Day is Nov. 3, nine days after Trump told Michigan to remember Todd Beamer, and Todd Beamer's father told them what to do about it.