Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed took a swing at President Donald Trump’s marriage after the president launched a crazed online attack at his wife.
The 80-year-old president posted an image of himself and his wife, Melania Trump, 56, alongside El-Sayed, 41, and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, with the caption: “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” The president’s post also singled out El-Sayed’s full name, identifying him as “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” a choice that echoes his repeated emphasis on Barack Obama’s middle name, “Hussein.”
While appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, El-Sayed, in a lengthy response to the president’s post, took a dig at Trump’s own relationship.
“Actually, Sarah and I like each other. I don’t know about the First Lady and the president, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a bit of a rocky road,” El-Sayed said.
The dig came at the end of a scathing assessment of Trump’s presidency.
“You’ve got two different visions of America. Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe when you look your kids in the eye, that they’re going to have a better future than you did?” he said.
“When we look our daughters in the eye, Emmalee and Serene, we want them to believe that they are every bit as able to have a better future than the one that they could have had under the Trump Administration,” he added.
El-Sayed and his wife got engaged while they were in college at the University of Michigan in 2006. The pair has two daughters.
The president and first lady got married a year earlier in 2005, as Trump said “I do” for the third time.
He was previously married to Ivana Trump, who died in 2022. He shared three children with her, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka. His second marriage was to Marla Maples, with whom he shares a daughter, Tiffany.
While Melania did live at the White House with their son, Barron, during Trump’s first term, she is not believed to live there full-time during his second. Trump and Melania do not share the traditional White House master bedroom, as Melania occupies that and Trump has taken over space next door, which is typically labeled the second-floor “living room” on White House maps, according to the bombshell book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
After moving back into the White House last year, Trump launched a bizarre decor standoff with his wife, the new book reveals.
“In the early weeks of the new administration, items were spirited from the second-floor corridor into the president’s bedroom,” the authors wrote. “Sometimes Trump carried the objects in himself, rearranging things across the private quarters on a whim.”
At the time, however, Melania wasn’t around to comment as objects “vanished” into Trump’s bedroom.
“Once, when staff gently reminded the president that he was taking things from the Center Hall his wife had personally selected, he made clear he didn’t care,” the authors wrote. “He seemed almost to be competing with her—determined to have the better room.”
