Adbul El-Sayed wanted a big Upper Peninsula moment with AOC standing right beside him.
President Trump had hammered him from the Rose Garden just hours earlier.
So he answered with one punch line that blew up in a Republican’s face the last time somebody tried it.
Abdul El-Sayed Traded the Kitchen-Table Pitch for a Schoolyard Taunt
Abdul El-Sayed brought his “Shouldn’t Be This Hard” tour to Iron Mountain in mid-October, and he brought a famous guest along for the ride in US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The crowd got the usual Bernie-style sermon about rich guys running the country.
Then El-Sayed went after President Donald Trump’s hands.
“He’s a New York billionaire who has never cared about people in his life. And on top of that . . . he has very small hands,” El-Sayed said.
He also called the President a “punk,” according to Fox News, which posted the clip on its website.
So the man who wants one of the most hotly contested Senate seats in America stood on a stage in an old iron-mining town and reached for a joke most men retire somewhere around the seventh grade.
The timing explains a lot of the heat. Earlier that day, Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden at an event honoring first responders and tore into El-Sayed.
“He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%, 100%,” Trump said. “How about having him be on the Senate Intelligence Committee? How about that?”
El-Sayed denies it. He told NBC Nightly News, “I have no ties, we have no ties,” and he questioned why decades-old claims from a relative’s social media posts about his family’s past in Egypt should matter in a Senate race.
But Trump didn’t stop there. “I don’t think this guy likes our country at all,” the President said.
Back in Iron Mountain, El-Sayed told the crowd the attacks had nothing to do with their real lives.
“The reason they keep pointing out my name and my faith is because they think they can distract you from the issues in your life,” he said. He went on to argue that his name has nothing to do with what Michigan families pay for gas, groceries, or healthcare.
Hold that thought. It comes back around in a minute.
Vice President JD Vance piled on at his own rally in Monroe, clear at the other end of the state.
“He’s ten times more interested in what’s happening in Palestine than in Port Huron. He’s way more interested in what’s happening in Gaza than he is in what’s happening in Grand Rapids,” Vance said.
And Vance wasn’t finished. “You deserve better than a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything,” he told the crowd.
Marco Rubio Already Ran This Play and Fumbled It
But here’s the funny part. The small-hands bit isn’t even original.
Marco Rubio, then a Florida Senator chasing the Republican nomination, tested the same gag at a Virginia rally in February 2016. The crowd ate it up for about a week, and the cable networks played it on a loop.
Then Trump crushed Rubio in his own home state of Florida that March, and Rubio quit the race the same night. Rubio later admitted on national television that he regretted the hand cracks and that his own kids felt embarrassed by them.
So El-Sayed borrowed his best line from a failed Republican primary campaign. Somewhere in Lansing, a Democrat consultant is staring at the ceiling.
And remember the part about distractions? The candidate who scolded Republicans for ignoring gas and groceries spent the most-clipped moment of his Iron Mountain stop talking about the President’s fingers.
A Fox News poll released in mid-October found that six in 10 voters name the cost of living as their top economic worry. A joke about glove size doesn’t knock a nickel off a gallon of gas in Escanaba.
Maybe the line was a throwaway. Long town halls produce plenty of those, and every candidate says something goofy when a friendly crowd gets loud.
But the first half of that riff was no accident. “A New York billionaire who has never cared about people” is the whole Sanders-wing script crammed into a single breath, and El-Sayed has been reading from it since he launched.
The Medicare for All Problem Hiding Behind the Punch Lines
El-Sayed narrowly won the August Democrat primary over US Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI), according to the Associated Press race call. Groups backing Stevens outspent his side on the airwaves several times over, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, and he beat her anyway.
That tells anybody paying attention who runs the Michigan Democrat Party now. The Bernie Sanders wing does. El-Sayed even shared the bill with US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a Fighting Oligarchy tour rally at Mumford High School in Detroit in May 2026.
El-Sayed insists he isn’t a socialist. He calls himself a capitalist, according to NPR.
Funny kind of capitalist. His platform includes Medicare for All, the scheme to wipe out private health insurance and herd every American into one government-run program.
Michigan seniors who already depend on Medicare ought to ask a simple question. What happens to their care when Washington crams every man, woman, and child in the country into the same line?
But Canada and Britain already answered that one. Canada’s Fraser Institute has tracked long waits for specialists and surgery under that country’s single-payer system for years, and British patients have spent years stuck on National Health Service waiting lists.
And El-Sayed’s résumé makes the pitch even harder for a lot of folks to swallow. He’s an epidemiologist who ran the Detroit health department and later worked in public health for the surrounding county.
Plenty of Americans still remember what happened when public-health officials got their hands on real power during the COVID years. School closures. Mask orders. Rules that changed by the week.
Medicare for All would hand that same crowd the keys to every doctor’s appointment in America.
Ocasio-Cortez knows exactly what she’s road-testing out there, too. Pollster Nate Silver has called her the most likely 2028 Democrat Presidential nominee, and she’s spending the fall stumping for the Sanders wing deep in Trump country.
If the hand jokes land in the Upper Peninsula, expect the rest of the Squad crowd to start writing their own. And expect Medicare for All to march right behind the insults into the Democrat mainstream.
Rubio found out in 2016 how that kind of joke ages. Michigan voters get to deliver their own review on November 3.
Sources:
Fox News, “El-Sayed calls Trump a ‘punk,’ mocks his hand size at Michigan campaign event” (video)
Fox News, “2026 Midterm Elections: Trump, Democrats Campaign Live” (live coverage)
NPR via KPBS, “Progressive Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate”
Wikipedia, “Fighting Oligarchy tour”
Fox News, “AOC slams Trump administration during Friday night district town hall as 2028 White House talk swirls”
