Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee to be Michigan’s next U.S. senator, floated plans involving leveraging Trump administration officials if his party wrests control of the Senate in the 2026 midterm elections.
El-Sayed told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday Democrats can hold the Trump administration “accountable” if elected by using the powers reserved for the majoroty party, such as subpoena power, to start “hauling up people like RFK Jr.” The 41-year-old politician and epidemiologist endorsed by Bernie Sanders beat Democratic Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens in a Tuesday primary election.
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“Democratic voters are frustrated, as I don’t need to tell you. They don’t think that your party’s doing enough to fight Donald Trump on these issues, especially like affordability,” the “State of the Union” host said. “If you’re elected as a Democratic senator with a Republican president in November, what can you actually do about that?”
“Well, look, let me just tell you the picture from my state. We have been up and down the state now. I have been at this for 15 months, been to 110 cities, over 500 public events,” El-Sayed told Tapper. “Everywhere I go, people say the same thing: ‘It just shouldn’t be this hard.’ It shouldn’t be this hard to afford your groceries or fill up your tank or worry about getting sick without having to worry about losing everything too.”
El-Sayed said that the “first thing we need to do” after being sworn in to the Senate as part of a Democratic majority is to “start holding the Trump administration accountable,” citing subpoena power as his weapon of choice to “investigate all of the ways that this administration has used their power for their gain and enrichment and against ours.”
“And I think that means hauling them up to really understand all the conversations that were had about who got to get refunds after this terrible tariff policy, who got to get excluded from those refunds,” El-Sayed said. “It means hauling up people like RFK Jr. and holding them accountable for the DOGE-ing [a reference to Department of Government Efficiency cuts] of our public health apparatus, for which we now need to be dodging lettuce across the state of Michigan for fear of getting explosive diarrhea, which nobody ever thought would be a consequence of electing Donald Trump, but here we are.”
El-Sayed told Tapper that it’s “those powers and then the ability to set up to build the runway for a president in 2028 who can come in and start doing the things to hold big corporations accountable, to start enforcing antitrust policy, to start rethinking our tax system, so it’s less burdensome on everyday people, and we’re taxing billionaires their wealth, and to stand up for unions, who have been critical to winning fair wages.”
El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
The Republican nominee El-Sayed faces is former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers.
(DCNF)