Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Accidentally Helping Abdul El-Sayed

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Donald Trump’s attacks on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed may be doing the exact opposite of what he intends. Tim Miller gives his take on Trump repeating the same failed strategy Republicans used against him in 2015 and 2016, attacking an outsider in ways that ultimately give them more attention and support. Tim also weighs in on AOC’s comments about “Woke 1.0,” arguing that Democrats need to be more willing to acknowledge where the movement went too far and how that overreach hurt the party politically.Watch The Moment with Katy Tur on MS NOW: https://www.ms.now/katy-tur-reportsThis episode is sponsored by The New York Times.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwork here. I was just on with Katie Turr and our girl Alex Wagner. And we were discussing Donald Trump's latest racist broadside against Abdul El-Sayed as well as some interesting comments that AOC made on the Sunday shows over the weekend. Just one kind of additional comment to what I said over on Katie Turr's show regarding the kind of racist broadsides against El-Syad. just for a strategic matter, it doesn't feel like the Trump people have learned anything from the success of Trump. In 2015-16, a lot of the Republicans, my candidate Jeb, but also all of them, Marco, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, they thought the way to tear down Trump was the way to tear down past kind of politicians of being like, oh, he had this gaffe about John McCain or, oh. Oh, there's this thing that he's outrageous thing that he said that makes him totally unacceptable to be in office. But each time we did that, that gave Trump more attention.

And a significant percentage that Republican base liked what he had to say. And so that gave him more support. And it was this kind of never in its cycle where he was, we thought we were attacking him, but the attacks were helping him, actually. And you would think that having been the beneficiary of that, the Trump people would kind of see that. how that worked in his favor. And yet they're deploying like the failed Republican establishment playbook against El-Said, who is an outsider, who's obviously different from Trump in a lot of ways. But like going at him and being like, oh, he said too many nasty things about Israel,

that's not going to hurt him. Okay. That's already baked in. Okay, people know what El-Syad's position is on the Middle East wars and his skepticism of Zionism and etc. Like, there are some voters out there for whom that's going to be disqualifying, but they already know.

And so now what you're doing is like giving him attention. Elsaids everywhere this weekend. He's out on the shows. People are getting exposed to him. Another similarity he has to Trump is that they're good performers on TV. They're compelling to their audiences. I know that Donald Trump does never compel you guys.

But like, there's a certain type of person that was drawn to Trump. That's why it's a successful fucking reality show, right? And so I'll say it's out there just kind of ripping the cover off the ball in these interviews. And every time Trump does a racist attack on him, we cover it here. He gets asked to do interviews where he gets asked to respond to it. Like, the attacks are actually empowering him. Sometimes just in life, you know, it's hard to kind of honestly assess your own success or your own skill set or why you got to a place.

You know, like you tell yourself a story that's different from the real story. And maybe that's the case here right now at Donald Trump. And he doesn't recognize that a lot of his success was the failed way in which the establishment opposed him. And now he is mimicking that failed strategy going after Abdul Al-Sayat. So we'll keep an eye on it, much, much more on that with Katie Cher and Alex Wagner on the other side. Subscribe to the feed, please. Please. For God's sakes, is Benny Johnson still beating me?

This is insulting. Tell your friends. We'll see you soon. This ad's brought to you by The New York Times. The amount of money that the Trump family has made since Donald Trump's gone back to the White House has become a defining feature of Trump's second term. This week, The New York Times investigative reporter, Ross Boutner, published a piece on yet another example. So this summer, Gurin Bobby Zow, who was a foreign national, came out of nowhere and bought about $100 million worth of tokens from Trump's World Liberty Financial. Who exactly is this guy? Well, Ross followed the money.

He searched through confidential documents and court records and conducted dozens of interviews to help uncover who exactly Bobby Zau really is and what he was really doing investing in Trump's cryptocurrency. The reporting you depend on like that is what this show depends on. And it starts long before the headline.

It's not just the Times. It's the journal. It's ProPublica. It's your local newspaper. Anywhere reporters are still working a beat. They gather all the facts. Find the story. They talk to all their sources and they distill it all down so you can learn what matters most in just minutes. And that's what journalists do to keep us informed. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting. We're calling us, host of the Bullwork podcast, Tim Miller, Alex Wagner, still with us.

It doesn't stop there, folks. Donald Trump is in the Oval Office right now. He's talking about Abdul-Sayed. Let's play it. heading into midterms right now? And are Democrats, what the candidates they're putting forward, making life easier for? Well, the one thing is we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this, whether it's communism, jihadism. It's a lot of a friend of mine called up. He said, you know, really, you should use the word jihadist because that's what's happening. And I'm not sure that anybody, if you take a look at what happens in other countries, I think that's not going to be necessarily the way we want to live. But when you look at the

radicalism and the craziness of the candidates and the stupidity of what they're suggesting, let's get rid of the Supreme Court, let's get rid of the presidency, let's get rid of the Senate. They want to get, you know, sometimes I'd like to get rid of the Senate too, but I don't say it, and I wouldn't do it, but, you know, they want to get rid of the Senate. They want to get rid of, ideally, the House, but they're thinking about maybe keeping the house, you know, isn't that nice? These are people that have been not successful. They're people that have been, in many cases, failures. They come from other failed countries.

And they come here and they tell us how to run our country. They come from places like I will mention, because I don't want to get myself into a controversy. But they come from countries that are. He doesn't want to get himself into a controversy, but he will call them jihadist him. Well, Abdul Zayat is from Michigan. So there's that.

He does not from another country. that's invading our country just in the first place. And he's not a jihadist, obviously. I think that should go without saying. I think that they're resorting to this kind of rhetoric because, substantially, like, Donald Trump's in really bad place right now. And he has a humiliating defeat he's facing in the war. And Iran, the economy's not going well.

And, yeah, you know, trying to paint El Ceyet as a... an extremist or as a communist jihadist is like the only play he's gotten his playbook right now and i do think it's a sign of weakness and i think that the democrats really should uh be forcibly pushing back against us and there's some um instinct i think sometimes to like want to play the victim here and be like oh this is racist poor us and it is racist and you can say that But I think in addition to that, it's just, again, totally a reflection of Trump's failure. And Trump wants to act like he's running this kind of all-American capitalist administration, and he's not. His administration is all about, is more socialist than any administration that we've had recently.

He's tried to purchase huge stakes in companies. He wants to be rate CEOs and make him come there and beg the leader in order for them to get, a break, whether it be on the tariffs or regulations. You know, think about what they're doing in the streets. You know, like this idea that they're calling Himigiatas. Well, we, this administration was the one that had a gulag in El Salvador. This is the administration that has internment camps all across the country. They're the ones acting like the Eastern European socialists and communists of the 1980s.

So I just think that that's like the right way for Democrats to push back against them. Abdul Elside was doing that all weekend. he's been pretty talented at that. And if they do that, I don't know that this is going to have a lot of bite. Do you agree that it unites the party, Tim, potentially? You know, look, I think that particularly in this Michigan Senate races and a couple other races, there is a faction of Democrats who are very passionate about our relationship with Israel and are really turned off by some of the rhetoric that they've heard by certain quarters of the left of the Democratic Party. And I think that that is a real big fractious debate right now. And I think that Zora, if you look at Zoran

in New York, has he won everybody over who had that criticism of him? No, I don't think so. Did he put a ton of effort into reaching out to Jewish leaders in the city, to others had concerns about that? He really did after he got in. And I do think that's going to be incumbent on El Cey's to do that and to make sure he's winning over the Lissa Slokin voters. You do remember Lassa Slokin did win in 2024. And so he's got to win those voters over in addition to continue to excite the younger base of the Democratic Party that he excited and that drove him to a primary victory. So I think you can do

both of those things. I think he's got to do it. Donald Trump's Islamophobia does help for sure, I think. But I don't know that it quite finishes the full job that he's got in front of him. All right. Don't go anywhere. I want to talk on the other side about what AOC just said about Woke 1.0. That's how she described it. I mean, I think that a lot of these races, even right now, they'll have a tendency to be nationalized.

Yeah. But these races ultimately are local, and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate. Yeah, she's moved away from a lot of that. Right, she's moved away from it. I have a local city councilman that has this saying woke one was crazy.

Oak one was crazy. And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying. Did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you know, I think that during this time and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the overtime window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.

And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. She's interesting right now, Tim. Do you think she's going to put herself on the ballot for for 2028? I think probably, whether that be running against Chuck Schumer or maybe Chuck Schumer sucks aside running for Senate or whether that's running for president. I think so. Not very many people are winning the New Hampshire primary polls and then decide not to run for president.

Usually people do when they see it. So I suspect that she will. I think she's been very savvy lately, extremely savvy in picking battles, not choosing battles, like the main Senate race. I think that she's been very pragmatic without kind of sacrificing her more left policy views. That answer on woke 1.0 being crazy is cute and makes me smile, but it is, it leaves me a little, I need a little bit more from the left on that because I think that they turned off a lot of voters with some of the stuff that happened during woke 1.0

and really did damage, I think, to the Democratic brand and the pro-democracy brand and their ability to win in red parts of the country, places that used to be swinging states like Iowa, Ohio, Florida, etc. And a lot of those voters got turned off by some of the rhetoric during woke 1.0. And so I would like to go a little bit further from just, oh, that was crazy. We were all at a crazy time to like, that was crazy. And we heard your pushback. And, you know, you were right about a couple of things, right? Like I still am a, I still have left progressive views, but I think that some of our critics

were correct about some of our overreach, whether that be on defund the police or other related issues.