Abdul el Sayed resists efforts from Haley Steven’s to corner him on Israel Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has rejected a demand from his defeated primary rival, congresswoman Haley Stevens, that he apologize for criticism of US military aid to Israel two days before they were scheduled to campaign together in Detroit.
On Friday evening, El-Sayed rejected the demand from Stevens, whose fiancé campaigned this week for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, at a Republican Jewish Coalition event, where he called the Democratic nominee’s criticism of Israel “100% disqualifying to be a United States senator”.
File images of Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens during the US Senate primary campaign. Composite: Robin Buckson/The Detroit News via AP “Our campaign is and has always been focused on addressing the most critical challenges Michiganders are facing: Skyrocketing gas prices, unaffordable groceries, and the inability to see a doctor,” El-Sayed said in a statement in which he noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent heavily to defeat him in the primary.
“That focus is why our people-powered campaign defeated a historic $70M in outside spending from big corporations and AIPAC on behalf of Congresswoman Stevens. Now the stakes are even higher-defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidate, taking back the Senate, and defending our democracy,” El-Sayed continued.
“That should be the priority for all of us right now,” he added. “So while Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago, let’s all focus on the task at hand: that’s beating Mike Rogers, holding Trump accountable, and getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, and passing Medicare for All.”
The candidate was responding to a lengthy statement from Stevens, in which she repeated a demand she first made on CNN, that she expected El-Sayed to effectively denounce himself for antisemitism and racism.
To assuage the fears of Black and Jewish voters who supported her in the primary, Stevens said, El-Sayed had to take down a tongue-in-cheek ad produced by his campaign to air on rightwing cable news channels that includes a clip of Tucker Carlson saying he would not vote for Rogers, and condemn what she called an antisemitic ad made by an outside group founded by commentator Cenk Uygur, which blames US aid to Israel for high food prices.
El-Sayed’s campaign already said that the ad posted online by Uygur -who was identified in Stevens’s statement as the uncle of streamer Hasan Piker – was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.
The ad, which shows a fictional couple in a supermarket saying that they have to save money on groceries to pay “for killing Palestinians”, was not even made in support of El-Sayed, but repurposed from one originally produced in 2024 for Uygur’s own, short-lived presidential campaign.
Despite that history, Stevens argued that Uygur’s ad was inspired by El-Sayed’s rhetoric about Israel and insisted that he apologize for that too.
Uygur’s ad, Stevens wrote, “did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, health care, and child care.”
“The standard here is simple,” she continued. “If those words are wrong when a Political Action Committee supporting his campaign says them, then they are equally wrong when Abdul says them, and Abdul has said them from the start. I therefore expect him to apologize for those statements as well. Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”
The congresswoman’s statement did not go down well with many Democratic activists.
“If I was actually trying to harm Abdul’s campaign, Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer, and cohost of Pod Save America, posted in response to Stevens, “it would look a lot like the PR roll out we’ve seen from Haley that started with CNN, then her husband’s bizarre tirade, and now this crazy, hyper online, conspiratorial statement about a TV ad Abdul obviously hates!”
“I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing,” Michigan lawmaker Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Democratic primary, told CNN. “This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”
McMorrow’s husband, Ray Wert, posted a link to a detailed explanation of why “a vote for Mike Rogers is NOT a vote for Jewish safety”, including that the Republican refused to denounce far-right antisemites on his own campaign, and is financially supported by “one of the country’s leading financiers of Christian nationalism”.
Rogers has relentlessly repeated the lie that El-Sayed, the Michigan-born son of Egyptian immigrants, “publicly supported” the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In fact, El-Sayed signed an open letter in support of Egypt’s fledgling democracy in 2012, that made no mention of the Islamist group at all.
Leah Greenberg, a founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, was more blunt, accusing Stevens of taking part in a covert attempt to sabotage El-Sayed’s campaign. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here”, she wrote on social media, “but if you supported Stevens and you don’t want to be associated with one of the most disgraceful, bigoted ratfucking attempts in recent political history I encourage you to let her know that this must stop immediately”.
Key events
Closing summary This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for then day. Here are the latest developments:
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed rejected a demand from his defeated primary rival, congresswoman Haley Stevens, that he apologize for criticism of US military aid to Israel.
The top federal prosecutor in Alaska, Michael Heyman, confirmed the existence of both a criminal investigation and a civil investigation into an alleged scheme by Democrats to confuse voters by putting a candidate on the ballot for US Senate who has the same name as the Republican incumbent, senator Dan Sullivan.
A federal appeals court blocked a request from the Department of Justice to require California to set aside the votes of 20,000 people it said could have been noncitizens who were illegally sent ballots by the state.
At a rally in Florida, Donald Trump said he loves the group Blacks for Trump, which was founded by a former member of a violent cult who posts antisemitic screeds and racist conspiracy theories online, and yet has been a featured member of the audience at Trump campaign events since 2016.
At a White House trick or treat event, Ukrainians were shocked to see that a little boy approached the president, and the first lady Melania Trump, dressed as a Russian soldier.
A Halloween mystery: who brought their child to trick or treat at the White House dressed as a Russian soldier? While most Americans enjoyed a respite from thinking much about Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon, as he handed out chocolate to a select group of children cleared to trick or treat at the White House, Ukrainians were shocked to see that one little boy approached the president, and the first lady Melania Trump, dressed as a Russian soldier.
Donald Trump and Melania Trump greeted children dressed in Russian costumes during a Halloween event on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Samuel Corum-Pool/CNP/Shutterstock Children dressed in Russian costumes trick or treated at the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Aaron Schwartz-Pool/CNP/Shutterstock Video from the White House livestream shows that the young boy, wearing a cap with a Soviet-era hammer and sickle emblem and a Russian army tank patch on his arm, approached the president and first lady about 10 minutes into the parade of trick or treaters.
As a Ukrainian news site pointed out, the boy was holding the hand of a smaller girl, “wearing a costume styled after a traditional Russian sarafan dress and a headband resembling a kokoshnik.”
Although there was a wave of anger over the Russian military costume from Ukrainians on social media, the identity of the children’s parents, and whether there was a message in the outfits, has not yet been uncovered.
A Polish Press Agency correspondent who was present at the event, Oskar Górzyński, who was dressed as a “scary poll/Pole” with Trump plunging approval taing pinned to his jacket, told the Guardian that he was not sure who the children were with.
“Unfortunately, not anybody I recognized and it wasn’t clear with the crowd being what it was,” Górzyński messaged. “Somebody suggested the Russian ambassador but I would have recognized him. I also saw someone saying it was Stephen Miller’s kids but that’s also not true, as they were in front of the line with the Hegseths.”
“This is a carefully crafted political message by someone in Trump’s inner circle. This isn’t a coincidence,” one Ukrainian veteran commented on social media. “Troops wearing this patch are currently pillaging and raping Ukrainian children, while their supporters and enablers sends their kids to celebrate Halloween with the USA president.”
David Smith
in Dumfries, Virginia
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rounded off her midterm election campaign tour in Virginia with a populist message attacking Donald Trump’s corruption, “reckless war” in Iran and unfettered support for data centres.
The 37-year-old from New York, tipped as a potential US presidential contender in 2028, earned a standing ovation and chants of “AOC!” at a middle school in Dumfries, Virginia, where she stumped for congressman Eugene Vindman on Friday night.
“The Trump administration is treating the highest offices in this country like the Trump family business,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Every single day we are seeing people holding sacred seats of public trust and trying to use that as an opportunity to cash in for themselves. While working families are told to tighten their belts, the people at the top are cashing in on the very power that we gave them.”
The democratic socialist congresswoman condemned the president’s military action in Iran for pushing up prices. “Donald Trump has ensnared us in a reckless war in Iran. It has created global chaos and it is showing up at the pump so that we’re paying for this war, too.
“Gas prices have skyrocketed directly because of this war and every extra dollar at the pump is a dollar less that can’t go towards rent, groceries or childcare. And once again, the people who had no say in this decision are being handed the bill.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been campaigning across California, Florida, Michigan, Maine, Nevada, New York and Ohio in the run-up to next week’s midterms, principally for progressive Democratic candidates. In Virginia she drew an enthusiastic crowd, though not a full house.
Tapping into local concerns, the congresswoman said: “Just up the road sits the largest concentration of data centers anywhere on earth,” – prompting the audience to boo – “owned by some of the richest companies that have ever existed. Some of them use as much electricity as an entire town.”
“When the power companies have to build all of that new infrastructure to accommodate a private data centre, who do you think they turn to to help pay for it? You! The people! Families that are already watching of their electric bills climb.”
Trump again plays selectively edited CNN segment on his polling to rally crowd, leaving out the part that shows he is losing support Near the end of his remarks in Florida, Donald Trump again asked his rally crowd to watch two short clips, plucked from CNN segments first broadcast in August and September on polling data that flatters him.
The first was a 43-second clip of CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, showing CNN viewers in September that Trump remains very popular with self-described “Maga Republicans,” which is to say people who describe themselves as loyal to his Make America Great Again movement.
“Maga GOP on Trump. In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, he got 99% of the Maga GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100%, but it was 99% percent,” Enten said in the first part of the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the Maga GOP. It’s 98%; that is, there’s been no real decline in Maga support.”
“Look, now in terms of the congressional vote, 98% of them say they’re going to be voting for House Republican candidates,” Enten said in the second part of the clip. “So, that support is actually really holding up strong. It’s really, really strong when it comes to Maga GOP and Republicans holding on to that vote.”
However, a look at the full 14-minute segment from late September shows that what the White House edited out was Enten carefully explaining that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans who do not describe themselves as Maga loyalists had suffered a sharp drop, plunging from +56 points in the 2024 election to just +7 points in September 2026.
“You know, when it comes to non-Maga, this is where we’ve absolutely seen Donald Trump’s numbers plummet into the ocean,” Enten said.
While more recent polling show that Trump is deeply unpopular, he has been screening these clips at each rally on his midterm blitz, inviting his supporters to shut out all the negative information and focus only on how much they love him.
A CNN report on Trump using out-of-context clips from the network at his rallies in recent weeks. Speaking in Florida, Trump pauses between boasts about his crowd sizes and the Apprentice ratings to dole out federal disaster funds At a rally in Florida ostensibly in support of other Republicans, Donald Trump has devoted most of his speech to bragging about what he says is the incredible success of his presidency, and the economy, suggesting that he is speaking only to people who live inside the same tightly sealed bubble as himself.
Before a friendly crowd in Daytona Beach, the president has also veered far off script to boast about the size of the crowds he attracts to rallies and, for several minutes, about the success of his reality TV game show, the Apprentice.
Despite the fact that Trump has been holding rallies in small venues in recent weeks, he claimed that reporters “don’t want to mention my crowd size. They never like mentioning crowd size because crowd size means success”.
As if recalling that he is supposed to be boosting the Republican candidates for Florida governor and the US Senate, Trump took a moment to also let voters know that they should support those candidates, Byron Donalds and Ashley Moody, because, he claimed, he takes their calls when they ask him to grant requests for federal disaster aid.
“Just yesterday, at Byron Donalds’s and Ashley Moody’s request, I approved – they call up, they bug me all the time, they’re always looking for money,” Trump said. “‘Could we get $184 million in additional FEMA hurricane relief funding for the Florida Panhandle?’ I said ‘The Panhandle? I don’t know what it is with the Panhandle’ … They want almost 200 million. I don’t even know what happened.”
“It was, there was a little drizzle,” Trump said, greatly minimizing the deadly impact of Hurricane Isaias, which killed at least six Floridians. “So I gave it to them, right? For the Panhandle.”
“Tonight, I’m pleased to announce that the United States Department of Labor will be providing Florida with $40 million in federal grants to support nearly 10,000 brand new apprenticeships,” Trump said, before immediately veering back to bragging about his own TV stardom.
“Did you ever hear of the show the Apprentice? ‘You’re fired!’ Get out of here!’ You ever hear the show the Apprentice?” Trump asked his supporters. “You know there’s a big thing going on. So I did this show. Everyone thought it would be a total failure. Went to the hottest show on television.”
“But it went to number one and then it had the season finale. They had 47 million people watching, which was the second after the Super Bowl,” Trump said. “It beat what used to be a great show, the Academy Awards. Now it sucks because people get up and use foul language about your favorite president.”
His own random mention of the Academy Awards triggered Trump’s anger at the actor Robert De Niro, apparently misremembering where De Niro was when he said “I want to say one thing: Fuck Trump!” Although video of that comment went viral on social media last year, when it was wrongly described as part of an Oscars speech, De Niro actually made the comment at the 2018 Tony Awards.
At Florida rally, Trump praises Blacks for Trump, founded by former member of violent cult Early in his remarks to supporters in Daytona Beach, Florida on Friday, Donald Trump recounted what he cast as very real and not at all imaginary conversations with one Black friend and one Jewish friend in Michigan who asked his advice on whether they should vote for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers in the Senate race there.
The president began by making the wildly false, bigoted claim that “Abdul’s a jihadist”.
He then said: “I have a friend, he’s Jewish. He said, ‘What do you think I should do in Michigan?’ I said, ‘Are you stupid?’ He’s not voting for Abdul. I have another friend, he’s black. He said, ‘What do you recommend?’ I said, ‘I recommend you go Republican’. He said, ‘Okay, that’s what I’m going to do’”.
“Now if you’re Black or if you’re Jewish and you vote for Abdul, you’re not smart,” Trump said, pressing on the Republican attempt to peel Blacj and Jewish voters in Michigan away from El-Sayed. “I’m being nice. You’re not smart”
Moments later, the president spotted some supporters in the crowd he recognized.
“Oh, I have my friends over here, Blacks for Trump. I love these guys,” Trump said of the group founded by Maurice Symonette, also known as Michael the Black Man, a former member of a violent cult who posts anti-Semitic screeds and racist conspiracy theories online, and yet has been a featured member of the audience at Trump campaign events since 2016.
Members of Blacks for Trump shirts cheered Donald Trump’s speech to a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida on Friday. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Symonette was known as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the Black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites. Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted.
After the trial, he reinvented himself as Michael the Black Man, a pirate radio preacher who delivered broadsides against gays and Democrats. His online sermons and writings suggest that he still sees himself as a follower of the cult leader, who died in 2007.
Symonette was interviewed before the rally on Friday by the pro-Trump network Real America’s Voice.
Abdul el Sayed resists efforts from Haley Steven’s to corner him on Israel Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has rejected a demand from his defeated primary rival, congresswoman Haley Stevens, that he apologize for criticism of US military aid to Israel two days before they were scheduled to campaign together in Detroit.
On Friday evening, El-Sayed rejected the demand from Stevens, whose fiancé campaigned this week for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, at a Republican Jewish Coalition event, where he called the Democratic nominee’s criticism of Israel “100% disqualifying to be a United States senator”.
File images of Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens during the US Senate primary campaign. Composite: Robin Buckson/The Detroit News via AP “Our campaign is and has always been focused on addressing the most critical challenges Michiganders are facing: Skyrocketing gas prices, unaffordable groceries, and the inability to see a doctor,” El-Sayed said in a statement in which he noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent heavily to defeat him in the primary.
“That focus is why our people-powered campaign defeated a historic $70M in outside spending from big corporations and AIPAC on behalf of Congresswoman Stevens. Now the stakes are even higher-defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidate, taking back the Senate, and defending our democracy,” El-Sayed continued.
“That should be the priority for all of us right now,” he added. “So while Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago, let’s all focus on the task at hand: that’s beating Mike Rogers, holding Trump accountable, and getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, and passing Medicare for All.”
The candidate was responding to a lengthy statement from Stevens, in which she repeated a demand she first made on CNN, that she expected El-Sayed to effectively denounce himself for antisemitism and racism.
To assuage the fears of Black and Jewish voters who supported her in the primary, Stevens said, El-Sayed had to take down a tongue-in-cheek ad produced by his campaign to air on rightwing cable news channels that includes a clip of Tucker Carlson saying he would not vote for Rogers, and condemn what she called an antisemitic ad made by an outside group founded by commentator Cenk Uygur, which blames US aid to Israel for high food prices.
El-Sayed’s campaign already said that the ad posted online by Uygur -who was identified in Stevens’s statement as the uncle of streamer Hasan Piker – was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.
The ad, which shows a fictional couple in a supermarket saying that they have to save money on groceries to pay “for killing Palestinians”, was not even made in support of El-Sayed, but repurposed from one originally produced in 2024 for Uygur’s own, short-lived presidential campaign.
Despite that history, Stevens argued that Uygur’s ad was inspired by El-Sayed’s rhetoric about Israel and insisted that he apologize for that too.
Uygur’s ad, Stevens wrote, “did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, health care, and child care.”
“The standard here is simple,” she continued. “If those words are wrong when a Political Action Committee supporting his campaign says them, then they are equally wrong when Abdul says them, and Abdul has said them from the start. I therefore expect him to apologize for those statements as well. Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”
The congresswoman’s statement did not go down well with many Democratic activists.
“If I was actually trying to harm Abdul’s campaign, Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer, and cohost of Pod Save America, posted in response to Stevens, “it would look a lot like the PR roll out we’ve seen from Haley that started with CNN, then her husband’s bizarre tirade, and now this crazy, hyper online, conspiratorial statement about a TV ad Abdul obviously hates!”
“I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing,” Michigan lawmaker Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Democratic primary, told CNN. “This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”
McMorrow’s husband, Ray Wert, posted a link to a detailed explanation of why “a vote for Mike Rogers is NOT a vote for Jewish safety”, including that the Republican refused to denounce far-right antisemites on his own campaign, and is financially supported by “one of the country’s leading financiers of Christian nationalism”.
Rogers has relentlessly repeated the lie that El-Sayed, the Michigan-born son of Egyptian immigrants, “publicly supported” the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In fact, El-Sayed signed an open letter in support of Egypt’s fledgling democracy in 2012, that made no mention of the Islamist group at all.
Leah Greenberg, a founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, was more blunt, accusing Stevens of taking part in a covert attempt to sabotage El-Sayed’s campaign. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here”, she wrote on social media, “but if you supported Stevens and you don’t want to be associated with one of the most disgraceful, bigoted ratfucking attempts in recent political history I encourage you to let her know that this must stop immediately”.
Top federal prosecutor in Alaska confirms civil and criminal investigations into Senate race featuring two Dan Sullivans Speaking at a news conference in Anchorage on Friday, the top federal prosecutor in Alaska, Michael Heyman, confirmed the existence of both a criminal investigation and a civil investigation into an alleged scheme by Democrats to confuse voters by putting a candidate on the ballot for US Senate who has the same name as the Republican incumbent, senator Dan Sullivan.
“The civil lawsuit is publicly faced, and is focused on preserving the ballots,” Heyman said, referring to a Department of Justice suit filed last week, and amended on Friday, asking a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would block Alaska from certifying its Senate election result if Sullivan loses to his Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola and votes cast for another candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan could theoretically change the outcome.
Since Alaska uses a system of ranked-choice voting, any voters who want to keep the incumbent senator Sullivan in office, have the option of ranking him and Daniel J. Sullivan first and second on their ballots, in either order, to be sure that their votes do not help elect Peltola.
Heyman would not say what potential crimes authorities are looking into, but cited reporting by the New York Times that Peltola’s campaign, and national Democrats, allegedly “orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy to recruit and prop up Daniel J. Sullivan as a sham candidate, and we are taking that extremely seriously.”
A sample ballot shows that voters in Alaska who want to support the incumbent senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, have to be careful not to select independent candidate Daniel Sullivan by mistake. Photograph: Al Grillo/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock “When credible information comes out, we are committed to pursuing that information to deceive voters and we will act on it. We are acting on it intensely and swiftly,” Heyman said.
“This new information has resulted in a significant surge of law enforcement assets to Alaska,” he added. “As we speak, law enforcement around the country are taking investigative steps with respect to a criminal investigation on these matters.”
The FBI special-agent-in-charge of the bureau’s Anchorage office, Matthew Schlegel, also asked the public to aid the investigation by submitting information to a tips line.
At a campaign event in Juneau on Thursday night, Peltola denied that she knew anything about the effort to put him on the ballot. “I just want to clear the air. I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters. I know I can beat Dan Sullivan,” she said, according to Alaska Public Media.
In response to a question from a reporter, who noted that “legal experts have really dismissed the basis for this case,” and described the civil lawsuit as “frivolous”, Heyman said he would not “litigate that case before the media”.
When another reporter asked “what types of crimes might be alleged,” Heyman said he would not go into specifics, but noted “conspiracy theories and election integrity” have been “been widely spoken about”.
While even some Democrats have described the effort to stack the ballot with Dan Sullivans as unethical, it is not clearly illegal. Alaska’s state’s supreme court has already ruled that it was legal for Daniel J. Sullivan to appear on the ballot.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, welcomed the federal appeals court ruling rejecting a Department of Justice demand that ballots sent to about 20,000 people the federal government suggests might not be citizens be set aside.
“Trump and his administration just lost for the third time this week in their desperate and dangerous attempts to meddle in the California election process with voting already underway and just days before Election Day,” Newsom said in a statement.
“These attacks on our democracy are serious, and the full force of our state is defending our democracy right now. We will continue to fight them on their illegal power grabs every step of the way, and deliver a free and fair election just as we’ve always done.”
California has criticized the Trump administration for suggesting, without evidence, that thousands of registered voters are not US citizens, four months after a similar claim, that nearly 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada, turned out to be untrue.
In the Nevada case, the Department of Homeland Security vastly reduced the number of noncitizens it claimed were registered to vote, sending state election officials a list of 185 people it believed were not citizens. Nevada officials investigated the list and found that all 185 voters were in fact citizens.
Appeals court shoots down Department of Justice request to sequester ballots in California A federal appeals court blocked a request from the Department of Justice to require California to set aside the votes of 20,000 people it said could have been noncitizens who were illegally sent ballots by the state.
The appeals court upheld an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found that such an action could throw California’s election system into chaos with days before the midterm, as well as disenfranchise lawful voters, the Associated Press reported.