President Donald Trump went after Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Wednesday, the night before the first debate of Michigan’s Senate race and about a month before midterm election day.

“Mohammed El-Sayed is a terrible Candidate for the Dumocrats,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “While his opponent, Mike Rogers, is a good one, Mohammed goes back to the days of the Jihad. He is a RADICAL Extremist, Terrorist Sympathizer … How’s France doing? Mohammed’s Values are not exactly those of Michiganders, or those of our Great United States of America!”

El-Sayed responded to the post on X Thursday morning, and said, “He knows my name is Abdul. He says it everyday. But he’s not just attacking me. He’s attacking all of us. He thinks so low of us. He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting upon us … It’s time for change.”

El-Sayed’s campaign team did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment as of publication.

El-Sayed’s full legal name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. Though Mohammed is a common Muslim name, as Khaled Beydoun, an Arab American and Muslim associate professor of law at Arizona State University’s law school, told HuffPost, Trump is likely using it to “intimately connect Abdul and his campaign to this entrenched memory of Islamophobia and Muslim threat.”

“The strategy is to reconstruct and redeploy this portrait that Abdul is not an individual campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat, but very much a Trojan horse who is using his campaign as an attempt to impose Sharia law,” Beydoun added, referring to Islam’s fundamental religious law.

Using “Mohammed” to refer to El-Sayed is called a dog whistle, a political speech designed to trigger racial resentments while allowing plausible deniability, Ian Haney López, an Emeritus law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told HuffPost.

“[The Truth Social post] is indeed more explicit, at least on the level of being widely recognized as a strategic racist appeal, but it can still function as a dog whistle,” López said. “Dog whistling is measured by the ear of the persuaded, who can say to themselves this is not about race since no racial slur or skin color was invoked.”

Trump has been accused of dog whistling many times before. For example, he still refers to former President Barack Obama by his full name, emphasizing his middle name, Hussein.

“Trump is assuming that using Obama’s full name will trigger negative associations in the audience’s mind,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, previously told HuffPost. At the time, Anderson cited a 2017 study which found “that conservatives had a negative reaction to Obama’s middle name, but liberals and moderates did not.”

“This is a tried and true strategy for Trump … [to] misdirect voters’ attention to emotionally charged social resentments, first and foremost racism,” López said.

The context matters, especially when it comes to dog whistling.

According to Hajer Al-Faham, who has a doctorate and specializes in public policy and civil rights, the language in the rest of Trump’s Truth Social post — including “jihad,” “extremist” and “radical” — reflects a broader history of leveraging fear to shape attitudes and motivate political behavior.

“[Trump is] pairing that Muslim name with those terms encourages readers to think of the radicalized stereotypes that are associated with Arabs and Muslims,” Al-Faham told HuffPost. “The implication is that Mike Rogers is the safe and American candidate, while his opponent, Abdul, is dangerous and threatening.”

Trump’s mention of France seemingly references far-right politician Marine Le Pen. Le Pen’s party, National Rally, has historically taken very anti-Islam positions, including recent proposals to “penalize the wearing of the Islamic veil.” The White House referred HuffPost to Trump’s original Truth Social post when asked for clarification.

“The France bit is really key, because it’s part of the attempt [for Trump] to transnationalize Abdul and the terror threat as being something that is connected and supersedes domestic boundaries,” Beydoun said.

Does this type of messaging potentially signal another concern for Trump?

The Mitchell poll from Oct. 6 shows that El-Sayed leads the race at 45.6% over former congressman Rogers at 41.4%. Beydoun drew parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and tactics used against other Muslim politicians, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his 2025 campaign.

“In some respect, [it’s] a copycat strategy of, ironically enough, what the Dems did — Andrew Cuomo did to undermine Mamdani after he won the primary,” Beydoun said.

Former Gov. Cuomo sent mailers to voters in July 2025 that accused Mamdani of “rejecting Jewish rights,” and featured an altered image that “artificially lengthened and darkened” Mamdani’s beard. Cuomo also appeared on the radio show “Sid & Friends in the Morning,” where he said, “God forbid, another 9/11 — can you imagine Mamdani in that seat?”

Mamdani went on to win, becoming New York City’s first Muslim and first Asian American mayor.

“It’s a demonstration that Abdul’s campaign has been really effective in gaining traction and momentum,” Beydoun said. “I’m in Michigan, so I see it firsthand here. He wouldn’t, I think, be doing this unless Abdul was a viable contender, if not the favorite to win the seat.”