Vice President Vance lashed out at Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign style rally in Detroit on Monday, labeling him as “evil.” "There's something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in…
Page A7From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Vance calls Senate hopeful evil, then upgrades him to very, very evil the same week.
As it ran on the front
The Vice President's remarks about Abdul El-Sayed have been characterized, unfairly, as an escalation. They are not an escalation. They are a clarification. When you say a man is 'evil,' the American voter deserves precision, and 'very, very evil' is precision. This is not rhetoric, this is quality control — did I say quality control? That's a product term, forget I said that.
Look, every campaign season produces a word. In 2016 it was 'crooked.' In 2020, 'radical.' This year the word arrived early and it stuck, and the fact that the Vice President repeated it twice in the same week, once for NBC and once for The Hill, only proves it was worth repeating. A message discipline that other Republicans could learn from —…
…(cont) — and here I should say, no, we do not have a list of policy disagreements with Mr. El-Sayed that would take less than three syllables to explain. That's not — I didn't mean to imply we don't have policy disagreements. We have plenty of policy disagreements. I just can't name one in under nine words, which is, again, not evasion, that's brevity.
Is 'very, very evil' more evil than plain 'evil'? Grammatically, yes. Substantively, that is a question for the Vice President's staff, who I am told confirmed the quote to two outlets independently, which either means it was said twice or said once and reported twice, and I am not in a position to say which of those is worse for us.
The point stands: calling your opponent evil, then calling him more evil, is not a strategy in retreat, it's a strategy in refinement. If the Vice President wanted a policy conversation he would have had one. He had an adjective instead, and he doubled it, and somewhere in that doubling is a campaign plan, though I'll admit I could not draw you a diagram of it. Ask communications. Ask legal, actually — no, don't ask legal.
We stand by the comment. Both times. And if a third outlet calls tomorrow asking whether 'very, very evil' can become 'very, very, very evil,' that is a decision above my pay grade, and I will say so, on the record, calmly, the way a person says something they have already decided to say regardless of the question.
“Calling a guy evil twice in one week isn't a slip, it's a strategy — you say the ugly word until it's the only word left in the room. Vance didn't upgrade the insult by accident; he's teeing up the next ad. Watch the wallet: this is how you get people to stop asking about healthcare and start asking about horns.”
“Calling an opponent evil is not incitement, it's clarity, and repeating it twice just shows message discipline — did I say discipline? That's a product term, forget I said that. We stand by the comment, both times, though I couldn't tell you the policy disagreement underneath it in fewer than nine words.”
The receipts
Vice President JD Vance described Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, as “evil” during a campaign rally.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.