President Donald Trump said on Sunday he thinks Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed is “out of it” and he and other socialist candidates will harm more centrist members of the Democratic Party in November’s midterm…
Page A15From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Fox ties El-Sayed to GOP antisemitism-controversy donors as Trump calls him 'out of it.'
As it ran on the front
Watch the timing, because the timing is the whole trick. Same week — not same year, same week — one outlet runs a story tying a candidate for governor to donors he shares with a former Republican candidate embroiled in his own antisemitism controversy, and the President of the United States tells a crowd that same candidate is 'out of it.' Nobody had to coordinate a memo. You don't need a memo when everybody already knows which candidate gets the donor-list treatment and which ones don't.
Here's what a donor-overlap story actually is, stripped of the euphemism: a list of names that gave money to two different campaigns, because that's what donor lists are, they're public, and plenty of names show up twice because plenty of people give money to more than one candidate in a cycle. That's not a network. That's a spreadsheet. But run it as 'shares dozens of donors with' a man 'at the center of an antisemitism controversy,' and suddenly a spreadsheet is a conspiracy, and a candidate is standing at the center of somebody else's scandal by association he never asked for.…
…(cont) Then Trump shows up on schedule, like he always does, with the closer: 'out of it,' and while he's at it, a prediction that socialism sinks the whole Democratic Party. Two sentences, zero policy content, and they'll run on a loop through the midterms regardless of what the candidate has actually proposed to do about anybody's rent.
This is the oldest play in the book and it works because nobody has to say the quiet part. You don't write 'we are targeting this candidate.' You write 'shares dozens of donors' and let the reader's imagination, primed by fifty years of the same association, fill in the rest. The receipt doesn't need a motive attached to it. The receipt is the motive.
The stakes here aren't abstract. This is a candidate for governor of a major state, and the coverage of him is being shaped, in real time, by a donor spreadsheet and a four-word insult, both landing the same week, both doing exactly the job they were built to do.
“Same day, same target: one story ties him to donors he probably never met, the other has the President calling him 'out of it' — that's not coverage, that's a pincer move. When two separate outlets converge on one candidate in twenty-four hours, that's not journalism finding a pattern, that's a pattern finding journalists.”
“The donor overlap raises legitimate questions about vetting, full stop — that's just due diligence, not a smear. And when the President says a candidate is 'out of it,' that's a character assessment, not a — well, it is a little bit of a smear, but a factual one.”
The receipts
Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Dan Bilzerian share nearly two dozen donors who gave more than $61,000 combined to both campaigns.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.