How the Media and the Messenger Are Sent to Bring American Blacks Back in Line
All week the news has carried the same headline: Barack Obama is coming to Michigan. He arrived in Detroit on October 24, the very day in-person voting opened, to stand beside Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the open Senate seat. And all week, right alongside that headline, came the reminders of what El-Sayed once said about the man he now calls his mentor. In 2012, after voting for Obama's reelection, he wrote that "the list of his failures goes on." He condemned the wars, the drone strikes, the erosion of civil liberties, the record deportations, and a health care law he dismissed as a gift to the lobbies. Years later he was still saying the country was no better off for those eight years. Now, with the election days away, he needs the very man he condemned.
He needs him because his campaign has a problem it cannot fix by itself, and the problem is us. American Black voters in Michigan did not choose him in the primary, and the polls since then show his support among us running well behind what the party counts on. The Democratic Party in Michigan is split in three directions: those who stand with Israel and those who do not, those who have aligned with the Democratic Socialists and those who refuse to, and those who have watched the immigration crisis land in our neighborhoods and concluded that Democratic policy has failed our communities. Every one of those fault lines runs straight through the American Black community. That leaves the party facing three outcomes it cannot afford. We vote for someone else, we stay home, or worse, we cross over and vote for Mike Rogers.
That cannot be allowed. So they called the former president of hope and change. They sent the great orator, the man whose cadence and delivery can still fill a room, to ask American Blacks to set aside their own convictions and get in line behind a candidate who did not come from our community and whose priorities point somewhere else: Gaza, Palestine, and an end to the war with Iran. This is the way it is done. It is the way it has always been done whenever American Blacks begin to move in a direction away from the status quo.
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But before Obama ever set foot in Detroit, the ground was prepared. Days ahead of the rally, El-Sayed sat down with Ashley Allison, the owner of The Root, for an interview that took place, of all places, in a soul food restaurant. The setting tells you everything you need to know about where the conversation was headed. She ordered salmon. He ordered fried chicken. We all remember the outrage in 2019 when Congressman Steve Cohen carried a bucket of fried chicken into a House hearing and was called racially insensitive for it. So what are we to make of a candidate courting American Black voters who sits down in a soul food restaurant and orders the one dish that has been used to mock us for generations? It was clear to me that he was not enjoying his meal, and I will say plainly that this is my personal opinion. But the meal was never the point. The plate was a prop, and the restaurant was a stage set built for an audience the campaign believes it can win back with familiar scenery.
What mattered was the conversation, or more accurately, the absence of one. Ashley Allison owns a publishing company. She bought The Root and returned it to Black ownership, and with that ownership comes a responsibility to the readers it claims to serve. Yet she sat across from a man asking for our votes and asked him nothing a serious journalist would ask. She never asked how his health care plan would be paid for. She never asked why his own book says Americans on employer plans would transition into a government system while his campaign tells Michigan families they can keep their insurance. She never asked how giving everyone coverage would shorten the months people already wait to see a cardiologist. The way Allison gazed at him, I half expected her to reach across the table and scoop him up like a piece of her salmon. What took place at that table was an audition, and she was the one clapping.
And it should surprise no one. Before she owned The Root, Ashley Allison served in the Obama White House and later ran national coalitions for the Biden-Harris campaign. So consider the sequence. First, an Obama alumna sits the candidate down at a soul food table and lets him speak without challenge to a Black audience. Then, days later, Obama himself arrives in Detroit to finish the job. This is the way it is done.
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Here is what neither of them wants the American Black voter to remember. El-Sayed's criticism of Obama was specific. He condemned him for perpetuating war, for the drone strikes, for the erosion of civil liberties, and for deporting more people than any president before him. Read that list again and ask yourself whose record it describes. It was Obama who sent American forces into Libya and helped topple Qaddafi, leaving chaos behind. One published study estimates that 21,490 people died in Libya's civil war between February 2011 and February 2012, counting both those killed in the fighting and those who died as the country's hospitals, water and power collapsed around them. Most of those deaths came from the war on the ground rather than from NATO bombs, but it was Obama who chose to put American power behind one side of that war, and Libya has never recovered from what followed. It was Obama who admitted his drone program killed civilians who should never have died. It was Obama's administration that held migrant families, children among them, in detention, and in 2015 it was Obama's administration that honored Tom Homan, the same man who now runs Donald Trump's border operation, with a Presidential Rank Award for his work at ICE. Obama's defenders will unfortunately point to DACA and his push for immigration reform. But the families in our neighborhoods did not live under his speeches. They lived under his enforcement, and his enforcement is the record El-Sayed himself condemned. On the very issues El-Sayed once named as Obama's failures, Obama's record sits far closer to Donald Trump's than to anything El-Sayed is promising Michigan today. And yet we are told that Trump is the enemy, Obama is the savior, and El-Sayed is the heir.
And if we are going to compare Obama to Trump, then let us compare them honestly, because Obama stood before a Black audience in Detroit and tore into Trump's war with Iran as though he had never sat in the Oval Office himself. It was Obama who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 and bragged about it as the crowning achievement of his foreign policy. What he never says is what the deal left untouched. It placed no limits on Iran's ballistic missiles. It did nothing to stop the money Tehran poured into Hamas, Hezbollah and the militias that target Americans. It released frozen assets and eased sanctions while leaving the regime's machinery of terror fully intact, and its limits on enrichment came with expiration dates. Iran took the relief and kept building.
Look at what that machinery did. In the months after October 7, Iran-backed militias attacked American troops more than 160 times across Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and in January 2024 a drone strike on Tower 22 in Jordan killed three American soldiers. In June 2025, while Israel was still fighting in Gaza, Iran fired roughly 550 ballistic missiles at Israel in twelve days. Enough was enough. Trump struck Iran's nuclear sites that same month, and when this war began in February 2026, he took it straight to Tehran. American forces have destroyed most of Iran's navy, the blockade and sanctions have choked its economy, and the Navy has cleared the mines Iran laid in the Strait of Hormuz. None of it has been clean. Iran still attacks ships in the strait, the fighting keeps flaring, and twenty-one American service members have given their lives, with more than 860 wounded. I grieve every one of them. But place those numbers beside Obama's own record. During his eight years in office, about 2,035 American service members died in Afghanistan and Iraq, 1,751 of them in Afghanistan, many during the surge he ordered, and nearly 19,000 more were wounded in action. Add the thirteen service members killed at Abbey Gate during Biden's withdrawal. Across all four years of Trump's first term, about 130 Americans died in military operations. Measured in American lives, Trump has done more to break the regime's reach at a far lower cost to our sons and daughters than either of the men the Democratic Party asks us to revere. And yet Obama stood before an American Black audience in Detroit, seemingly forgetting everything he did as president, and tore Trump down.
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And where Obama and Trump did differ, both of them still stand closer to each other than either stands to Abdul El-Sayed. Take immigration. Obama built the deportation machine, Trump expanded it, and El-Sayed is campaigning to abolish ICE altogether. Take the police. Neither president ever called to defund the police. El-Sayed did. In 2020 he said plainly, "we do need to defund the police," and he described police departments as standing armies deployed against our own people. By “our own people,” who is he referring to: Muslims? Suddenly Muslims are the oppressed. Then, before launching this Senate campaign, he deleted thousands of old posts, insisted he never called for defunding anyone, and started running ads featuring his endorsement from a deputy sheriffs' association. A man who scrubs his own record before asking for your vote is telling you something about how much of that record he still believes.
His record on Egypt goes further. In November 2012, days after Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's president, seized sweeping new powers for himself, a group calling itself Morsi supporters in America published a statement backing those decisions and urging him to "purge the media and the police." Abdul El-Sayed's name was on it. Within months, Egyptian journalists were being arrested for insulting Islam. A year earlier, he had written in the Huffington Post that Americans had nothing to fear from a Brotherhood takeover. Today the same man stands on stage condemning Donald Trump for attacking the press. When asked at a town hall this fall whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, he answered with a single word: "Sure."
Then there is the money. El-Sayed's yard signs promise to get money out of politics. Yet his own father-in-law, who holds leadership roles in Islamic organizations named in a federal terror-financing case, has poured at least $200,000 into the super PAC backing his campaign. His donors include the former foreign affairs spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood's political party in Egypt and an activist sentenced in Egypt for supporting the Brotherhood. More than $115,000 has come from officials and board members of CAIR. Money out of politics, it seems, means somebody else's money. These are the people funding the candidate Barack Obama came to Detroit to tell us to trust.
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So I come back to the table where this began. A soul food restaurant, a plate of fried chicken, a publisher who never got around to asking a hard question, and a few days later a politician who had been beloved in our community because of the lie that he was like us. Like me. That man stood on a Detroit stage asking us to fall in line, as if we were not aware that he is not an American Black. None of it was accidental. The setting was chosen, the questions were softened, and the messenger was selected because they know whose voice we have been taught to trust. Barack Obama is not a descendant of American slavery, but he has always known how to speak our language, and every time the party needs our votes, that language is what they send. This is the way it is done. It is the way it has always been done whenever American Blacks begin to move in a direction away from the status quo: send someone who sounds like home, remind us of our history, and count on us not to check the record. And we love the performance. Obama performs it better than anyone, but he is hardly the only one. El-Sayed uses the same trick, and so do lesser performers like AOC, who has toured Michigan on his behalf.
Scripture warns that the simple believeth every word, but the prudent man looketh well to his going. So look well. Ask the question nobody at that table would ask. When a politician's record becomes inconvenient, does the standard change, or does the alliance change? Abdul El-Sayed called Obama a failure when it cost him nothing. Obama condemns Trump for wars and deportations that fill his own record. Their records did not change. Only their alliance did. And the only people expected to forget are us.
