BS BULLETIN:
- Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign posted a doctored White House first lady page crossing out Melania Trump’s name and replacing it with Trump aide Natalie Harp.
- The stunt comes days after the Michigan Democrat dragged Usha Vance into his fight with her husband, prompting critics to notice a pattern.
- GOP strategist Matt Whitlock summed it up: “Weird how much time this campaign spends talking about other people’s wives.”
Abdul El-Sayed is running for the United States Senate against Mike Rogers.
Melania Trump is not.
Usha Vance is not.
Natalie Harp is not.
Somebody may want to tell his campaign.
El-Sayed’s campaign jumped into President Trump’s latest fight with Canada on Thursday by posting a doctored image of the official White House webpage for first lady Melania Trump. Melania’s name was crossed out and replaced with that of White House aide Natalie Harp.
“If we’re just renaming everything now… When are we making this official?” the campaign wrote on X.
The joke was an obvious reference to the torrent of left-wing speculation about Trump and Harp.
It also produced an immediate question: What is it with this guy and other politicians’ wives?
“This is just such a weak, phoned-in effort,” GOP communicator Matt Whitlock wrote on X. “My four year-old could come up with better burns than this.”
Whitlock later zeroed in on the increasingly difficult-to-ignore pattern.
“Weird how much time this campaign spends talking about other people’s wives,” he wrote. “When Abdul’s not talking about (and clearly thinking a lot about) the vice president and his wife, apparently he’s thinking about President Trump and his wife?”
That history is very recent.
As The Daily BS reported earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance challenged El-Sayed over his past Sharia-law comments by recalling the old-school Democratic politics of his grandfather, whom he called “Papaw.”
El-Sayed answered by bringing Vance’s Indian-American wife into it.
“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…” El-Sayed wrote on X.
That prompted accusations that El-Sayed was suggesting Vance’s white, working-class grandfather would have rejected Usha because of her ethnicity. Usha later brushed off the attack, saying Vance’s Ohio family had always been “incredibly loving” toward her.
And El-Sayed has taken shots at the Trump marriage before.
Earlier this month, after Trump posted side-by-side photographs contrasting himself and Melania with El-Sayed and his wife, El-Sayed responded during a CNN appearance by describing Trump and Melania as “two people who don’t like each other but joined in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you.”
He later added: “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.”
Now Melania is back in his campaign material, along with Harp.
Tudor Dixon, the former Republican candidate for Michigan governor, had already spotted the broader problem after El-Sayed’s earlier attacks.
“He goes after Usha. He goes after Natalie [Harp],” Dixon wrote on X. “This coward picks on women who are not in his fight. Imagine how he would treat female staffers in the halls of Congress.”
El-Sayed has plenty of actual political targets available.
Mike Rogers is standing right there.
DBS WIRE SOURCES
- Fox News — El-Sayed dragged over ‘weird’ fixation on ‘talking about other people’s wives’ after latest Trump attack
- Twitchy — From Usha Vance’s Marriage to Melania: El-Sayed Can’t Leave Other Men’s Wives Alone
- Washington Examiner — Usha Vance says husband’s family always embraced her after El-Sayed attack
