El-Sayed Wins Mandate on Palestine, Says Trump 'Can Read the Tea Leaves' Next Day

…(cont) A day short of four weeks before anybody in Michigan cast a ballot, the Washington Examiner was writing that October 7th and Israel were going to loom over the next Democratic presidential race. That's the couch going in. Then on the 20th of October, the Guardian reported that the man who tried to ambush Abdul El-Sayed with a question about the Muslim Brotherhood was the son of a Republican operative whose firm had been paid $250,000 by a group called America Next for "canvassing and influencer marketing." El-Sayed turned the heckle into a viral clip. On the 26th, the Hill's morning memo had El-Sayed's own allies arguing that Trump's attacks on him — the Hill's word is anti-Muslim, not mine — would backfire on Trump. Two days after that, Common Dreams reported that Ted Cruz had claimed, separately, two things in the same breath: that Americans could die if El-Sayed won, and that there was nothing — his word, "absolutely nothing" — to stop Chuck Schumer from putting El-Sayed on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Common Dreams called that Islamophobic bigotry. That's not my word either. I'm just reading what's in front of me.

Tuesday, El-Sayed won. Truthout and Jacobin both have the same shape of story — Dearborn precincts that went for Trump in 2024 flipped for El-Sayed, with the UAW's machine doing the mobilizing, and the union telling Jacobin its next fight is with the Big Three. That's still the couch. All of it's still in the truck.

The Washington Examiner has him saying Trump "can read the tea leaves." The Intercept runs a piece the same day asking whether a senator with, in its words, a mandate on Palestine can actually deliver on it. And the Guardian — this is the part I keep coming back to, not because it's the biggest piece of the load but because it's the one sitting right at the door — runs a column saying the whole Israel fight in Michigan was mostly theater.

So here's my truck, four weeks of loading, one door. The couch — the genocide line, the Cruz attack, the heckler's father, the allies insisting the attacks would backfire, the UAW's machine in Dearborn — that's all still back there. Nobody unloaded it. It's just not what you see first.

Excuse me — before you go — when the Washington Examiner says a senator-elect can "read the tea leaves," is that a compliment about Trump, or is it a description of what El-Sayed just did to his own mandate the morning after he was handed it?