A Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Michigan was caught on a leaked staff call explaining why he couldn’t celebrate the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader — because too many of his voters in Dearborn would be “sad” about it.
That’s not a parody. That’s a campaign strategy.
Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate, was recorded on a conference call with his staff shortly after American forces took out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His first move wasn’t to celebrate. It wasn’t to salute the troops. It was damage control.
“I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” El-Sayed told his team. “So like, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all.”
Sad. The Supreme Leader of Iran — the man who spent four decades funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and every proxy war against American interests in the Middle East — gets taken off the board, and El-Sayed’s voter base is “sad.” And his instinct isn’t to correct that. It’s to accommodate it.
But wait — it gets worse.
When El-Sayed’s team discussed how to handle the inevitable media questions about Khamenei’s death, he laid out his deflection plan on tape. “I’m just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly,” he said. The full quote: “I’ll just be like, ‘Pedophile president decides that he doesn’t like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'”
So the strategy is: don’t acknowledge that a terrorist-funding dictator is dead, and redirect to calling the President of the United States a pedophile. This is a man running for the United States Senate.
El-Sayed also coached his team on how to dodge the tougher follow-up questions. “They’re gonna try and bait us into saying, ‘Yeah, but isn’t it justified now that they took him out, right?'” he said. “And I just think, for us, we’ve got to be, like, ‘no.'”
Got to be like “no.” The killing of a man who bankrolled attacks that killed American soldiers — and the answer has to be “no, it’s not justified.” Because voters in Dearborn are sad.
Let’s talk about who this guy has been hanging around with.
El-Sayed recently appeared alongside Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer who famously declared that “America deserved 9/11.” When pressed on why he’d team up with someone who said that, El-Sayed’s defense was remarkably honest — he wanted access to “his millions of followers.” Principles for sale. Audience included.
Jordan Domingue, a veteran staffer who worked on El-Sayed’s campaigns since 2018, resigned in January and went public with a warning. Domingue said that his conversations and observations “give credibility to the claims of El-Sayed’s antisemitism and pro-Islamist regimes/factions.”
Domingue didn’t mince words in his final statement: “Antisemitism is now hidden behind calculated rhetoric, spoken by people who disguise themselves as partners of peace between Israel and Palestine. Personally, I regret and feel shame for excusing antisemitism and for not leaving sooner.”
That’s not a Republican attack ad. That’s El-Sayed’s own longtime staffer, refusing a campaign payout to stay silent, and going on record anyway.
El-Sayed also associates with Amer Zahr, a Dearborn school board member who has publicly defended both Hamas and Hezbollah. And when a temple in West Bloomfield was attacked on March 12, El-Sayed issued a generic statement that conspicuously failed to name the terrorist groups responsible.
This is a pattern, not a gaffe. The leaked audio, the Piker alliance, the Zahr association, the temple attack non-response, the whistleblower resignation — they all point in the same direction. El-Sayed isn’t confused about where his loyalties are. He’s strategic about how he hides them.
Michigan Democrats rejected El-Sayed once before, choosing Gretchen Whitmer over him in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. He’s back now, running for the Senate seat being vacated by Gary Peters, competing against state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens in the August 4 Democratic primary.
Here’s the question Michigan Democrats need to answer: When your Senate candidate’s first instinct after America eliminates a terrorist-state leader is to protect the feelings of people who are mourning that leader — and his second instinct is to call the president a pedophile on tape — what does that tell you about who he’d represent in Washington?
Thirteen American service members lost their lives in the operation that took out Khamenei. El-Sayed didn’t mention them on the call. He mentioned the sad people in Dearborn.
That’s his priority list. Believe it.