WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s senator-elect and the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, says his priorities will be stopping Medicaid cuts, ending the war with Iran and ending Donald Trump’s tariff war with Canada.
“Number two, end this stupid war. It makes no sense,” El-Sayed said on Pod Save America, in an episode recorded before a live audience in Washington and released on Friday. “We’re paying for it in the lives of our service men and women. We’re paying for it at the gas station. We’re paying for it at the grocery store. We’re paying for it in our tax dollars.”
“We need to have a war powers resolution. We need to hold them accountable. They are not allowed to make war on their own,” he said. “This war needs to end. We go back to the diplomacy that had contained the nuclear threat in the first place.” The war has cost the US more than $47 billion, according to internal figures.
Who he blames: El-Sayed said one man had been “trying to get this war fought for nearly all of our lifetimes. It is the prime minister of a foreign government,” who “gets invited to the Situation Room where he gets to dupe the dumbest guy who ever was president.” He said AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, spent $42 million trying to defeat him “because I have the audacity to say” that “a Palestinian child and a Jewish Israeli child get to have equal rights of peace, dignity, self-determination”.
His approach, he said, was to “treat the government of Israel the way you would treat any other government that did the same thing”, and he applied the same test to Egypt, where his family comes from. “Egypt violates human rights law. Egypt shouldn’t be getting $3.3 billion of our tax dollars.”
First priority: his top goal is to protect Americans from what he called “the healthcare nuclear bomb” of Medicaid cuts, and he believes Democrats could win enough Republican votes to override a veto, because rural states would be hit hardest. “I’d love to sit down with my colleagues from South Dakota and Idaho and say, ‘What do you think is about to happen to your hospitals?’” On Canada, he said: “I’m from Michigan. It’s the only place in America where you can go south to get to Canada. Tariffs are taxes that we pay on Canadian goods.”
El-Sayed, a former Crooked Media podcast host, predicted early in the campaign that he would win by seven points, and did. He said Democrats had to stop treating Trump with decorum. “If you don’t stand up to the bully, the bully just gets stronger,” he said.
