What did Donald Trump do today?

He gambled that Michigan voters would respond positively to gutter racism and Islamophobia.

At a campaign rally in Michigan tonight, Trump made openly racist and Islamophobic attacks against Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Trump called El-Sayed a "terrorist" and a "jihadist" and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a reference to the September 11th attacks, he also said that El-Sayed should be barred from boarding planes. Trump also invoked the name of Todd Beamer, one of the passengers on Flight 93 who rushed the cockpit and prevented hijackers from bringing the jet to its intended target. 

There's no evidence that Todd Beamer was a racist or an Islamophobe. 

Rogers has made some of the same claims about El-Sayed. But in the typical pattern for Republican candidates Trump is "helping" this election cycle, Rogers was squeamish about endorsing all of Trump's attacks. "I've never said he was a terrorist," Rogers told NBC News. 

A comparison of the two men through the lens of September 11th is instructive, though. El-Sayed was a high school junior living in suburban Detroit on the day of the attacks. Trump was living in Manhattan and spent the afternoon of September 11th bragging (falsely) about now owning the tallest building in Manhattan. He later lied about having seen "Arabs" in Jersey City celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center on television (no such footage exists) and making up increasingly baroque lies about his own supposed heroism during the relief effort. He also publicly promised to donate $10,000 to a relief fund (about 0.01% of his net worth at the time) and then reneged on the pledge. 

Among other things, Trump lied about having supervised "hundreds" of Trump Organization workers he sent in to do clean-up and rescue work. (In reality, untrained office workers were not being accepted as volunteers, and they likely would have died from exposure to inhaled toxins if they had.) A few months ago, he added a new wrinkle to his story, claiming for the first time in 25 years that he was inspecting the old U.S. Steel Building in the aftermath of the attacks and had to be dragged out by firefighters. 

In a now-viral video, El-Sayed was asked by a Republican operative posing as a constituent to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and did so immediately and without hesitation. There's another parallel with Trump here, too. Trump's father was arrested for taking part in a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. Decades later, during the 2016 campaign, Trump received the endorsement of David Duke, a notorious Klan leader and politician. Trump pointedly and repeatedly refused to denounce the white supremacist terror organization, then went further by openly accepting the support of other such racist terror groups like the Proud Boys.  

Why does this matter?

• Racial and religious bigotry is evil and so is everyone who indulges in it. 

• Anybody sick enough to tell lies about their supposed 9/11 heroism should keep the actual heroes' names out of their mouth.