The most powerful voice at President Trump's Port Huron rally on Sunday did not belong to a politician. David Beamer, whose son Todd led the passenger counterattack aboard Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, took the stage at McMorran Place to applause, thanked the president, and told Michigan that the danger this time is not hidden: 9/11 was a surprise, he said, but what is happening in Michigan is not — the attack can be seen coming, and Election Day on November 3 is when voters answer it.
Beamer built the warning on his son's story. Todd Beamer left home that morning for an ordinary work trip, leaving two little boys and a wife five months pregnant, and never came home — he and the other passengers chose to fight the hijackers rather than let Flight 93 reach its target in Washington. America took 250 years to build, the father told the crowd, and it can be demolished in far less than that.
His targets were the Democratic Socialists of America — he joked that the DS stands for "demolition specialists" — and Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Their platform, Beamer said, reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids, and socialism can only work by taking people's freedom away. Michigan, he urged, should elect Republican Mike Rogers.
Trump took up the same theme in his own speech, telling the crowd that Todd Beamer gave his life for the country and urging voters to cast their ballots in his memory. The Michigan race — Rogers against El-Sayed for an open Senate seat — is one of the contests that will decide control of the Senate on November 3, and the Rogers campaign has made Beamer's voice a centrepiece of its closing argument. El-Sayed has rejected Republican claims linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood and, in a recent advertisement, defended his religion and called the questioning of his loyalty shameful.
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