President Donald Trump is turning up the anti-Muslim rhetoric, accusing Democratic voters Monday of electing “jihadists” in the 2026 primary elections.
“We have jihadists being elected all over the place,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Whether it’s communism, jihadism — a friend of mine called up. He said, ‘You know, really, we should use the word jihadist because that’s what’s happening.’ If you take a look at what happens in other countries, I think that’s not going to be necessarily the way we want to live.”
The spiel went on. Without naming specific candidates, Trump claimed that “these are people that have been not successful. They’re people that have been, in many cases, failures. They come from other failed countries, and they come here and they tell us how to run our country.”
The remarks come as Muslim candidates gain ground within the Democratic Party, including Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American physician who won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan.
Trump’s comment didn’t surprise Khaled A. Beydoun, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a scholar on Islamophobia and civil liberties.
