Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, was given the chance to walk his words back — and instead he owned them, twice. On NPR's Newsmakers, the interviewer read his own statements back to him: "You recently called President Trump the dumbest f**king guy who ever was president." El-Sayed: "True." "You've also said Democrats should drop the decorum and treat the president as the unserious fool that he is." El-Sayed: "True." Asked why he takes that approach, he did not soften a word of it.
"Because he's a bully alongside being a narcissist. And the only way you deal with bullies is to stand up to them," El-Sayed said. "Because here's the thing about it: bullies don't bully you because they necessarily care for the thing you have. They bully you because they like to bully you, because it makes them feel strong. The way you take on a bully is to bully back, because then they learn that this does not make them feel strong. It makes them feel weak, and they don't like to feel weak. So they back off."
That is the pitch, stated as plainly as a candidate can state it: El-Sayed is asking Michigan Democrats to nominate him, and Michigan voters to send him to the Senate, on a promise to meet the President of the United States with insults rather than argument — profanity included, decorum deliberately dropped. It is a strategy aimed at a Democratic base that has spent years frustrated with its own party's politeness toward Trump, and El-Sayed is betting that performing the fight matters more to those voters than winning the argument. President Trump had not responded to the remarks as this article was published.
For Michigan voters, the choice is now on camera and in the candidate's own words — there is nothing to interpret and nothing he is hiding behind. Supporters of the president will see a Senate candidate swearing at the commander-in-chief and calling it strength; El-Sayed's supporters will see the plain-spoken fighter he is selling. Either way, the clip does what he wants it to do: it travels. What it cannot do is answer the question his theory skips — whether voters who dislike bullying actually reward the man who proudly does it back.
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