MARQUETTE, Mich. — Abdul El-Sayed likes to say that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance “can’t seem to keep my name out of their mouth.”

And the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan is more than happy to return the favor.

Rolling through the Upper Peninsula last week on his “It shouldn’t be this hard” bus tour alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., El-Sayed carried his progressive message into traditionally conservative territory.

At all three stops, he leaned into taunting the president and vice president. Hard.

In Escanaba, El-Sayed called Trump “the worst symptom of the disease of our politics.” In Iron Mountain, he called the president “a punk” and “a good old billionaire who has never cared about people in his life.” When he asked the crowd what else Trump is, they yelled back: “A pedophile.”

“I was just gonna say he has very small hands,” El-Sayed responded.

El-Sayed saved some of his sharpest jabs for Vance, an Ohio native, who had campaigned earlier that day in Monroe with former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee. At that rally, Vance called El-Sayed “a little weasel.”

Within hours, El-Sayed fired back from his own stage in Marquette.

“You know it’s funny, he called me a — JD Vance called me a ‘little weasel’ today,” he remarked on stage. “I’m like ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a fucking wolverine.’”

He mocked Vance for holding a “cute little rally” with the “five people who like him” — and reached for the storied rivalry between Ohio State and the University of Michigan.

“Imagine being the candidate from Michigan and having to invite somebody from Ohio to campaign for you,” El-Sayed said. “I was like, Ohio? Bottom of the barrel, bro.”

The trolling, to be sure, is not unprompted. Trump has taken a particular interest in El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. The president has referred to him by his middle name, Mohamed, labeled him “a Jihadist lunatic” and, earlier this month, released a video from the Oval Office calling him “bad news.”

“We cannot take a chance of having this guy be in the United States Senate,” Trump said.

But it is set to come to a head Wednesday night, when El-Sayed and Rogers meet for the second, and final, debate in Michigan’s marquee Senate race. In their first meeting on stage, sparks flew. Their second go-around is certain to showcase more.

The escalating rhetoric reflects the stakes. Michigan’s Senate race is rated a toss-up, and the winner could help determine which party controls the chamber for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. El-Sayed and Rogers are set to meet for their final debate. And the name-calling is only intensifying ahead of Trump’s planned Oct. 25 rally in Michigan — a visit Rogers himself has been noticeably reluctant to embrace.

Asked by MS NOW after the candidates’ first debate on Oct. 8 in Grand Rapids whether he wanted Trump to come to Michigan, Rogers was noncommittal.

“Yes, he’d be welcome — I’d love to have him talk to those people and get them fired up,” Rogers said, after commending Trump’s no-tax-on-tips policy and touting the positive effects the tariffs have had on cherry farmers and automakers in the state.

Pressed on whether he would appear alongside Trump, Rogers moved on without answering. He shared a stage with the president at a rally in July.

Rogers’ caution reflects how closely divided Michigan is. Trump carried the state by 1.4 percentage points in 2024. That same year, Rogers lost his Senate bid to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by about a third of a percentage point.

And the president’s standing there has slipped. A Marist poll in September found that 41% of Michigan voters approve of the job Trump is doing, while 57% disapprove.

El-Sayed is trying to capitalize on both Trump’s poor numbers and Rogers’ ambivalence. In Escanaba, he dared the president to come to Michigan and cast the election as a referendum on Trump’s agenda — turning one of the president’s own lines against him.

Expletives flew. Again.

“Donald is thinking about coming to Michigan,” he said, drawing boos from the crowd. “But it’s OK, actually, you know what? Donald is going to come and remind everybody that Donald is on the ballot.”

“Donald, come,” he continued. “Tell everybody in Michigan that you are on the ballot. Your shit tariff war is on the ballot. Your dumbass war with Iran is on the ballot. Your Medicaid cuts are on the ballot. Your ballroom’s on the ballot. So come tell everybody about it. And if you won’t, I will.”

The back-and-forth is also a window into what politics has become in the Trump era. Since Trump burst onto the national political scene in 2015, his brash, insult-first style has seeped into politics more broadly. El-Sayed — a former college athlete who is fluent in social media, takes questions from reporters at nearly every turn, relishes the back-and-forth of a Fox News interview and rarely backs off a position under criticism — is in many ways a product of that shift.

Trump likes to spar with his opponents. El-Sayed is meeting him in the ring.

Asked about his jabs at Trump in an interview with MS NOW, El-Sayed smiled slightly as he addressed the crowd’s answer in Iron Mountain.

“When it comes to Trump, like, I didn’t say anything about his proclivities, that was the crowd,” he said.

“They know,” he added. “They understand.”

El-Sayed has also shown a knack for turning Trump’s insults around — and, in some cases, back on the president.

At the Iron Mountain town hall, he said Trump used to mispronounce his first name, Abdul. After El-Sayed called him out for it, the president switched to his middle name.

“Now that I called it out, he likes to call me by my middle name, which is Mohamed. And the funny thing about it is, Abdul means servant. Abdul El-Sayed means servant leader,” El-Sayed said. “Mohamed means the praised one. So he took me from servant to praised one.”

The crowd erupted in laughter and cheers.

“Whatever you want to call me,” he continued, “I’m going to make sure you’re going to have to use the word senator in front of it in November.”

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From MS Now.