Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed had a tense exchange at a town hall over the weekend with a man who reportedly once served as an aide to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri.
At the Oct. 17 event, a man who identified himself as “Tommy” shouted from the crowd, asking the Democratic candidate if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to video from the event, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely.” The nominee alleged that the question implied, but did not explicitly cite, a "dual loyalty," comparing it to the allegations raised about John F. Kennedy's Catholicism in the 1960s.
This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his. pic.twitter.com/p09eMtsh0x
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) October 18, 2026
“You assume … that because
I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution,” El-Sayed said. “For me, that Constitution is the guiding light.”
A once-powerful force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist movement with global offshoots that renounced violence in the 1970s, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. In a 2025 executive order, President Donald Trump began the process of designating certain chapters of the group as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Town hall attendee identified
According to reporting by the Guardian, citing congressional staff records on LegiStorm, the man who called himself “Tommy” was identified as Thomas Teepell, who worked for Missouri Sen. Hawley between 2023 and February 2025. LegiStorm is a database that posts salaries and additional information on both politicians and their staffers.
The same records, cited by the outlet, show that he left Hawley’s office and became the political director for Philip Sarnecki’s Kansas gubernatorial campaign. The candidate lost the Republican primary to Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson in August.
USA TODAY reached out to Teepell for comment on Oct. 19 but did not immediately receive a response.
Repeated attacks
The moment follows a string of Republican attacks that have tried to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, and extremism more broadly, in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, in a Truth Social post the night before the first Senate debate between El-Sayed and Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Trump repeatedly called the Democrat "Mohammed" and a "terrorist sympathizer."
The president doubled down, adding that "Mohammed’s Values are not exactly those of Michiganders, or those of our Great United States of America!" The president reiterated his "TOTAL ENDORSEMENT" for Rogers.
In response to Trump's allegations, El-Sayed wrote on X that Trump knows his "name is Abdul," adding that the president says it daily.
"But he’s not just attacking me. He’s attacking all of us. He thinks so low of us," El-Sayed said about the president in a post on X. "He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office. He thinks we don’t know any better."
USA TODAY’s Terry Collins contributed to this report.
Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at fernando.cervantes@usatodayco.com and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Abdul El-Sayed argues with former GOP aide during tense town hall moment
