Abdul El-Sayed's deleted 9/11 social media posts sparked a firestorm after CBS News reported on the Michigan Senate candidate's past comments.
Page A10From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Vance calls Senate candidate evil; candidate says corrupting yourself is the real evil.
As it ran on the front
Pay attention to the order these things happened in, because the order is the whole story. The Vice President of the United States stands up and calls a Michigan Senate candidate evil. Same week, a network runs a story on that candidate's old, deleted posts from around 9/11. Same week, that candidate's campaign has to publicly cut loose a podcast host because the optics got too hot. Three separate outlets, three separate news pegs, one target, one week. You want to tell me that's just how the news cycle broke? Fine. I've got a bridge in Michigan you can buy too, and it's got about as much structural integrity as that coincidence.
Here's what actually happened, in the plainest words I've got: a candidate for Senate said the corrupting thing is corrupting yourself for power, and the response from the people he was talking about wasn't to answer the point, it was to go digging through his old tweets and his old friendships instead. That's not a rebuttal. That's a distraction with a press release attached. Nobody had to prove El-Sayed wrong on the actual argument — corrupting yourself for power — because the argument's inconvenient. Easier to make the guy explain a decade-old post than make the Vice President explain why "evil" was the word he reached for.…
…(cont) And notice what doesn't come up in any of these stories: rent, insurance, wages, what the guy running for Senate in Michigan actually wants to do about any of it. That's the tell. When the fight's about tweets and podcast friends instead of the light bill, somebody upstream decided that's the fight they'd rather have. It works because it's cheap and it's fast, and by the time anybody fact-checks it, the news cycle's already moved to the next manufactured outrage.
The stakes here aren't hurt feelings. It's a Senate seat, decided by whichever story sticks longer — the old tweet, or the guy's actual platform. Guess which one costs more column inches.
“Watch the order these things happened in: the Vice President calls a Senate candidate evil, a network runs his old deleted posts the same week, and his campaign cuts loose a podcast host to make the story stop. Three outlets, one target, one week — that's not a coincidence, that's a script. The guy running for Senate is getting hit for who he talked to, not what he'd do about anybody's rent.”
“Vice President Vance was simply calling out dangerous rhetoric when he used the word evil, and CBS's report on old deleted posts is straightforward accountability journalism, not opposition research — I mean, the timing is coincidental, obviously, these things just — okay, the timing is notable, but that doesn't mean anyone coordinated it.”
The receipts
Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.”
Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed on Monday again defended Hasan Piker after publicly distancing himself from the Twitch streamer in the wake of concerns that he is antisemitic. El Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker multiple…
Republicans hold their trolls close. For Democrats, it’s more complicated.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Monday shot back at Vice President Vance’s comment about him being “very, very evil.” Earlier Monday, Vice President Vance went after El-Sayed at a rally in Detroit, calling him…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.