Obama tries to gaslight America about Abdul El-Sayed

With just over a week to go until the midterm elections, former President Obama joined the campaign trail to remind us of just how smug and condescending he can be. It was Obama at his best: He made fun of the tastes of middle-class Americans, getting into hot water over a joke about how tacky the Cheesecake Factory is. He also bemoaned how divisive our politics has gotten — while of course slamming his political opposition as utterly indecent.

What’s more, he reverted to his trademark gaslighting. It’s almost as if we were all back in 2012.

The comments came over the weekend at campaign stops in Ohio and later in Michigan, where the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, is struggling with Black voters. El-Sayed’s efforts to court this traditionally stalwart Democratic bloc have fallen flat; a recent poll had former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, picking up an unprecedented 33 percent of the Black vote.

Hence Obama’s appearance — a Hail Mary attempt to revive El-Sayed’s support with Black voters.

At the rally, Obama compared questions about El-Sayed’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Birther movement — the kooky conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the U.S.

“They will use lies, and maybe your name or your faith to somehow suggest you are dangerous and less American than they are,” he said . “We have seen this movie before. I starred in it! I’ve got a long-form birth certificate to prove it. This stuff didn’t work on me in Michigan, it’s not going to work on Abdul.”

But here’s the difference between the racist Birther movement and the questions about El Sayed: The claim that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. was false, whereas the claim that Abdul El-Sayed has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is true.

Sayed’s mother is supposed to have worked for the Muslim Brotherhood. His sister bragged about it online , long before he was a candidate for anything.

El-Sayed himself signed a letter supporting the Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian leader Mohamed Morsi in 2012. The letter called on Morsi, then Egypt’s president, to purge his opposition from that nation’s police and media. At a time when American journalism and human rights non-profits were calling on Morsi to stop arresting and prosecuting journalists, El-Sayed signed a letter calling for an acceleration .

When confronted during this campaign, El-Sayed has refused to answer questions about it — instead berating the journalists who dare to ask them .

Obama wants to suggest that asking questions about any of this is racist, but it isn’t. Nor is it Islamophobic to ask a Muslim why he signed a letter supporting a group currently designated by multiple countries , in whole or in part, as a terrorist organization . To suggest that this somehow impugns all Muslims is to suggest that all Muslims support terrorism — which is, ironically, the actual racist position. Don’t forget: The people El-Sayed was calling to be purged by the Morsi regime were also Muslims.

No one has a problem with El-Sayed’s religion. A lot of people have a problem with the fact that he has a problem denouncing terrorists — something not true of most American Muslims.

The analogy with the racist Birther movement against Obama is equally fallacious. Saying someone’s not American because he is Black is racist. But calling someone racist for asking legitimate questions about someone running for office who cannot condemn Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not. It is not racist to question someone seeking office why he thinks Israel is an enemy equivalent to Iran, or why he would campaign with Hamas-lovers like Hasan Piker.

To say otherwise is just the purest form of woke gaslighting.

And Obama went further. He suggested that there is nothing at all radical about El-Sayed — as if the whole thing were just a psy-op designed to fool you.

“What they’re doing, which is par for the course, is running all kinds of scary ads to make you think Democrats are radicals or communists or jihadists or the woke police,” Obama said. “We are not going to fall for that. … Abdul is fighting for change, real change. … He’s taking on politics and corrupt politics that only benefits people with enough money and power to game a broken system in Washington at your expense. I hear people say this is somehow radical. What is radical about that? Wanting everybody to have health care? How’s that radical? Wanting everybody to have a place to live that they can afford? How is that radical?”

Again, this is the purest form of Obama gaslighting. El-Sayed spent the primary campaigning with Hasan Piker, a man who said he would vote for Hamas and that America deserved 9/11.

El-Sayed constantly accused his main opponent in that primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), of having dual loyalties to Israel. He justified a terror attack that nearly killed 140 Jewish preschoolers by saying that “hurt people hurt people” to explain the would-be mass murderer’s motivations. El-Sayed talks about Israel as an adversary on the scale of Iran. And that is radical.

Comparing El Sayed’s truly divisive politics to Medicare for All — or worse, pretending that Medicare for All is the sum total of problematic views held by El Sayed — is a deeply dishonest effort by Obama to evade legitimate questions.

By the way, El-Sayed, the great advocate of Medicare for All has a wife with a private medical practice that doesn’t take Medicare — or any other insurance for that matter. It seems pretty radical to force on the nation a health care system your own wife opts out of because it isn’t profitable.

Obama frequently bemoans how divisive our politics has gotten. Yet he himself seems perfectly willing to stand by the most divisive politicians of our time. He’ll even demean you for having a problem with it.

We all want a less divisive politics. President Trump’s language is frequently divisive — and so is Obama’s, albeit in a more genteel, condescending tone. No one wants to be the first to lay down their weapons.

Batya Ungar Sargon is the host of “ Batya !” which airs Saturday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on NewsNation, the nation’s fastest-growing cable news network and a sister company of The Hill.