EASTORA REPORT | Donald Trump told Black and Jewish voters that supporting Abdul El-Sayed would make them “crazy.” JD Vance, in remarks circulating the same day, said anyone who divides Americans by skin color is a “scumbag.”
The contrast was striking.
Speaking about Michigan’s Senate race, Trump said: “If you’re Black or if you’re Jewish, and if you vote for Abdul El-Sayed, you’re crazy.”
The president has made El-Sayed, a Muslim progressive running for Senate in Michigan, one of his most frequent campaign targets in the closing days before the midterms.
Vance, meanwhile, delivered a very different message about identity and citizenship.
“Anybody who would divide us by the color of our skin and say that you’re more or less American, that person is a scumbag,” the vice president said.
He went further, saying he would never speak about fellow Americans “as if there were something wrong with them because they have the wrong skin color.”
“It’s disgusting.”
Vance has repeatedly argued throughout the campaign that Americans should be treated as citizens rather than members of racial groups, and has attacked politicians who, in his view, divide voters by race. Trump’s remark about El-Sayed, however, did exactly what Vance says he rejects: it addressed Black and Jewish Americans as separate voting blocs and told them how their identity should shape their vote.
The two men were not debating each other. But placed side by side, their words exposed an uncomfortable contradiction inside the same campaign.
Vance says politics should stop sorting Americans by race.
Trump had just done exactly that.