Divider-in-chief: The demagogue Obama is to campaign for El-Sayed

Obama resumes his role as the US ‘divider-in-chief’, writes Zachary Faria in the Washington Examiner.

The nickname, which can be translated as ‘America’s foremost divider’, was often used by critics who believed that Obama helped to exacerbate political and racial divisions in the country.

The nation’s chief divider

In case you’ve forgotten over the past decade, Barack Obama used his position as president to be the country’s foremost divider, writes Faria. And now he is resuming this role in the run-up to the 2026 mid-term elections.

Obama is, in fact, heading to Michigan to campaign on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whom Faria describes as a terrorist-sympathising communist whom the Democrats are backing in their bid to take control of the Senate.

According to Faria, El-Sayed has used the election campaign to justify terrorism in various forms, including the attempted Islamist terrorist attack on Jewish nursery school children in Michigan. He has also campaigned alongside a livestreamer from California who believes that the US deserved the 11 September attacks.

El-Sayed at a campaign event at Michigan Technological University in 2025.

– Trayvon could have been me

Obama has spent his time since leaving office condemning the divisions in the US, and claimed as recently as this year that the Republicans are responsible for “the vicious, angry, exclusionary ‘us-versus-them’ politics that create division”. At the same time, he has emphasised that Democrats get on well together, not in a clichéd, insincere way, but in a genuine, profound way.

Faria believes this shows just how hypocritical the former president is, as he was in fact the nation’s foremost divisive figure long before Donald Trump entered the presidential arena. Obama vilified police officers by accusing them of racism in 2009, several years before he breathed life into the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012, following the death of Trayvon Martin.

Nor have we forgotten what Obama said after Trayvon Martin was shot in Florida in 2012: ‘If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.’ After George Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013, Obama said that Trayvon Martin could have been himself 35 years ago.

Obama constantly referred to the Republicans as his ‘enemies’ and claimed that ordinary Republican voters ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigration attitudes’.

Obama and his team were obsessed with using his ethnic background as a get-out-of-jail-free card against criticism, and sabotaged race relations in the US for their own political gain – a consequence we are still living with today, writes Faria.

Laying the foundations for the obsession with Israel

Faria also reminds us how Obama routinely associated with anti-Semites such as Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, whilst the Obama administration laid the foundations for the obsession with Israel that characterises the Democratic Party today. In a way, it makes sense that Obama supports El-Sayed in his campaign to represent Gaza on behalf of Michigan. After all, it was Obama who created him, writes Faria.

Faria concludes by claiming that Obama, because he was not content with having divided the country during his eight years as president, now wishes to ensure that hateful, anti-American Democrats such as El-Sayed gain influence both within the Democratic Party and in Congress. Obama thus continues, according to Faria, to stoke the division he set in motion during his presidency, whilst the country’s toxic decline in political civility continues at a rapid pace.

El-Sayed has been condemning Obama for years

Obama clearly sees no problem with El-Sayed’s politics now, despite having previously supported Haley Stevens, who lost to the Muslim candidate in the primary.

With control of the Senate at stake in the mid-term elections, it is clear that even a radical candidate is no obstacle to gaining power, even when that candidate has for years condemned Obama for his policies.

Following the news that Barack Obama is to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim candidate’s long history of disparaging the US’s first black president has resurfaced.

El-Sayed has repeatedly criticised Obama for not being progressive enough, both in articles and in public statements, reports the New York Post.

In 2012, following Obama’s re-election, he wrote in the Huffington Post that we all had to admit that Obama was not the right choice. El-Sayed did not hold back, writing:

This leader has perpetuated war, violated our civil rights, deported more people from our country than any other president before him, and the list of his missteps is long.

In the column, El-Sayed distanced himself from the enthusiasm he had felt when Obama won in 2008. He described himself as a ‘naive young man’ who did not realise that hope and change required more than ‘flowery prose and a winning smile’.

He claimed that the US had not fared better under Obama, and lambasted the 44th president’s flagship policy, the Affordable Care Act, which he called “a watered-down reform that bends to the lobbying interests of the healthcare industry”.

Selective memory or taqiyya?

At a campaign rally in August 2026, El-Sayed spoke of the excitement he felt when Obama won the presidential election in 2008, The Post continues:

In 2008, a man named Barack Hussein Obama stood for election and won the presidential election. I have to be honest with you all, it was the first time I had ever seen myself reflected in politics, said El-Sayed, 41.

Criticism of Obama continued even after the US’s first Black president had stepped down, according to a chronological review published by CNN.

During his unsuccessful bid to become governor of Michigan in 2017, El-Sayed criticised Obama for his centrist, moderate Democratic policies. The article in Vox was titled ‘Don’t call this man “the next Obama”’.

In January 2020, El-Sayed warned the Democrats against repeating the same mistakes of the past eight years under Barack Obama during a panel discussion at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

– “We are no better off as a country eight years after Obama was elected in 2008 than we were when he was elected. And I say this as someone who loves him deeply,” said El-Sayed.

He believed that Obama had not received enough credit for what he did for the economy in the short term, but argued at the same time that the economic structure had not changed under Obama. According to El-Sayed, the Democrats’ shortcomings helped lay the foundations for Donald Trump’s rise.

It’s always about them and about race

Now, El-Sayed speaks far more positively about the former president, The Post concludes. In a statement to CNN, he said:

– When I was 24, I saw President Obama win in 2008. He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine. Despite facing one of the toughest challenges any American president has ever faced, he handled it.

– And despite everything he did, there is still so much left to do. That is where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, takes over. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and I look forward to telling him that myself later this month.

Like his partner in crime, Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed is a master of taqiyya. When it comes to his view of former President Obama, however, that may be the only thing he’s right about. Not that Obama wasn’t progressive enough, but everything else.

Read also: