A Senate candidate stopped a Fox News anchor mid-question on a Detroit street, and the fight that followed has pulled in a Texas senator, a former president and the sitting one.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, campaigned for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, and told reporters in Grosse Pointe Woods that Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed should not sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “If I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result,” Cruz said.
Asked the same day about “dual loyalties,” Cruz said, “I don’t know about dual loyalties. The demonstrated loyalties he has are to the Muslim Brotherhood.” He added, “It doesn’t matter how he prays. I’m not talking about how he prays. I’m talking about ideology and advocating for and supporting a terrorist organization.”
Rogers, 63, hosted Cruz at the Oct. 28 campaign stops and drew his own line between the two candidates. “I want to represent Michigan,” Rogers said, while El-Sayed “wants to represent Palestine.” Responding to El-Sayed’s denials of Muslim Brotherhood membership, Rogers said, “When you can’t tell the truth about things that matter on life and death.”
El-Sayed campaign spokesman Cole Wozniak answered Cruz directly. “Ted Cruz is a deeply unpopular politician who has long supported policies that hurt Michigan families,” Wozniak said, adding, “His dangerous comments are just the latest example of Mike Rogers and his MAGA allies attempting to distract voters.” The campaign has called the claims “a bigoted anti-Muslim smear campaign.”
“Be a Journalist,” He Told Baier
The clash that set the week in motion aired Friday, Oct. 23, on “Special Report,” where Fox News anchor Bret Baier interviewed El-Sayed, 41, on the street in Detroit. Baier opened with the Rogers attack line — “Mike Rogers has been really hitting this Muslim Brotherhood thing,” he said — and got as far as El-Sayed’s family before the candidate stopped him.
El-Sayed cut Baier off repeatedly, and the anchor never reached the end of his Muslim Brotherhood question. El-Sayed said the question existed only to raise the issue of whether he holds dual loyalty. His loyalty, he said, would be to the U.S. Constitution — the same oath every senator has taken.
Baier meant to raise a 2012 open letter El-Sayed had signed concerning Egypt’s then-president Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader. “I’m not interested,” El-Sayed said, interrupting again. Baier kept pushing, asking whether he would walk the letter back. El-Sayed accused the anchor of yanking the letter out of context and acting like an arm of the Rogers campaign, telling Baier to “be a journalist.” He was one, Baier shot back.
El-Sayed insisted he had never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and never would be. Rogers wants his faith to be the issue, he said, and making it one is “sad and beneath” Rogers and beneath the president of the United States, because the Constitution guarantees the right to pray as one chooses.
An Estranged Half-Sister’s Posts
The allegations started with social media posts by Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s estranged half-sister. She wrote that the family was long part of the Muslim Brotherhood and that her mother took part in activism with the group in the 1970s. His parents separated when El-Sayed was three, and neither his mother nor his half-sister raised him. No evidence of his affiliation with the organization has turned up in recent reporting.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, and its offshoots range from non-violent political factions to extremist groups like Hamas. Certain branches have been designated as terrorist groups by the Trump administration. Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum asked El-Sayed on Oct. 5 about backing terrorist designations for Brotherhood organizations in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. He answered that he would support designating any group engaged in or committed to political violence, and asked to be shown that the Brotherhood is.
Viral footage captured a young man called “Tommy” demanding that El-Sayed disavow the Brotherhood. The man was later identified as Thomas Teepell, who once worked for Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and for a Kansas Republican who lost a run for governor.
The Same Answer Away From Cameras
President Donald Trump called El-Sayed a “vicious, violent jihadist” with “no place in our government.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations and other organizations condemned Rogers’ campaign tactics and Trump’s remark as Islamophobic and harmful.
Former President Barack Obama campaigned for El-Sayed in Detroit on Saturday, Oct. 24, a day after the interview aired. The Michigan seat is open, with Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., retiring, and El-Sayed reached the general election after a bruising Democratic primary. Polling puts him narrowly ahead in some surveys, several of them showing a gap of a point or two.
El-Sayed has given hecklers the same answer. At a rally in Caro, Mich., on Oct. 17, El-Sayed told that heckler, “I’m running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim.”
Questions about El-Sayed and the Brotherhood are not new. At a May 2018 forum in the Michigan governor’s race, Republican rival Patrick Colbeck raised Sharia law and El-Sayed’s involvement with the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan.
