CBS News reported Sunday that it verified two deleted social media posts by Abdul El-Sayed that compared the COVID-19 death toll with the nearly 3,000 Americans killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, adding a fresh wrinkle to his Michigan Senate race. The posts had not been previously reported.
The timing matters because the country is nearing the 25th anniversary of September 11, a date that still cuts through politics far more than most campaign disputes. El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, is trying to hold together a coalition that includes moderates while facing Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the fall.
In one deleted post from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID death toll. In another, he argued that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the attacks, he hoped the next ten years would be spent fighting a war for public health and against poverty. He wrote that “we could save lives rather than take them,” framing the pandemic in the language of national mobilization.
A separate deleted post first reported earlier by another outlet showed the same line of thinking in sharper form. On Sept. 11, 2021, El-Sayed mourned “the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC” and contrasted that with roughly 1 million lives and millions of injuries in three countries, saying both were perpetuated “ignorantly” in the name of faith and country. That post pushed the argument beyond public health and into a wider critique of war.
That is where the campaign’s problem lies. El-Sayed has now publicly said September 11 was “an awful thing” and “a terrible attack on our country,” while also saying Americans should think about how to build a country where servicemen and women are not asked to fight wars the U.S. has no business fighting. The two ideas are not identical, and voters who hear the deleted posts will decide whether the earlier language sounds like a policy argument or something more loaded.
His campaign said earlier this summer that all posts older than July 2023 were deleted so they would not be taken out of context. That explanation may blunt some criticism, but it also underscores how many old posts vanished at once: everything before that cutoff, not just the three messages now under scrutiny. What remains unresolved is when the deletions happened, and whether more posts could surface as the race tightens and September 11 returns to the center of the calendar.
For El-Sayed, the question is no longer only what he wrote years ago. It is whether the way he explained those writings Monday is enough to keep the race focused on the future instead of on what he chose to erase.
