What did Colin Jost say about Abdul El-Sayed? SNL weekend update joke explored 

Colin Jost had jokes ready the moment Abdul El-Sayed made history. The forty-two-year-old Michigan senator-elect has become the first Muslim voted into the United States Senate, winning his race against Republican Mike Rogers by seven points, and Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update wasn’t letting that go without comment.

Jost, who is forty-four years old, kicked things off on the October 31st episode by telling the audience El-Sayed made history as “the first Muslim elected to the Senate,” then paused and added, “Well, first openly Muslim,” while flashing a photo of Barack Obama on screen. Colin Jost followed that up with a second comment, noting Abdul El-Sayed had hinted he wanted Chuck Schumer out as Senate Majority Leader. Jost basically went ahead and joked that:

“But if I had just gone through the campaign he did, I don’t think my first move would be, ‘Get rid of the Jewish guy!’”

Forty-three-year-old Michael Che also raised eyebrows that same episode. During Weekend Update, Che cracked a joke about Israel’s recent elections, saying

“This week, a record number of people voted in Israel’s election, which is great to see, regardless of if you’re on the right side, or the left side, or the genocide.”

(The jokes above belong solely to the performers. This publication neither endorses nor takes a position on the material delivered during the broadcast.)

Social media users weren’t thrilled with either man. Many felt Jost’s jokes fed directly into the Islamophobic trope that Muslims are inherently antisemitic, pointing out that Abdul El-Sayed had already weathered obscene levels of Islamophobia across his entire campaign. Che’s genocide quip caught people off guard too, with many viewers expressing surprise at how casually it landed.

Abdul El-Sayed says sorry to Michigan’s Jewish Democrats over comments tied to synagogue attack:

As per a report shared by The Guardian, El-Sayed stood before Michigan’s Jewish Democratic caucus on August 29, 2026 and apologized. The controversy went back to March, when a man named Ayman Mohammad Ghazali drove his car into Temple Israel synagogue in a Detroit suburb, opened fire on a security guard, and died by suicide. Ghazali had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon the week before.

El-Sayed put out a video response condemning the attack at the time, though he added that “hurt people hurt people,” nodding to what Ghazali’s family had been through. Critics took that as him justifying the attack. He addressed that reading directly later, telling reporters

“What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context. And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”

The synagogue comments were one piece of a bigger problem. El-Sayed had come through a bruising primary against Haley Stevens, and questions about antisemitism had followed him out of it, including scrutiny over his ties to commentator Hasan Piker. His appearance at the Lansing party convention was his shot at putting it behind him.

“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” he shared.

“To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention,” he added.

(The antisemitism allegations against El-Sayed were disputed by him throughout his campaign. This publication reports the controversy as public record.)

Abdul El-Sayed lays out his terms for working with the Trump administration:

El-Sayed made his position on the Trump administration pretty clear during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. The Michigan senator-elect said Democrats were open to working alongside the president, but only on the condition that he chooses to “act serious.” That being said, El-Sayed wasn’t short on examples of what he considered the opposite.

“Let’s talk about how he is an unserious fool. Think about this war in Iran that every single president had resisted fighting because, of course, it was a dumb idea,” he said.

“Let’s talk about the foolishness of a tariff war with Canada. Let’s talk about the foolishness of gutting Medicaid to pass tax cuts for the richest people in America,” he added.

He didn’t stop there. El-Sayed also took a direct shot at Stephen Miller, whom President Trump announced on Friday would replace Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff effective Monday.

“So look, if he wants to act serious, we are happy to work alongside him to actually address these issues,” El-Sayed continued.

“He is the president of the United States. But if he wants to continue to fool, he will hire people like Stephen Miller to run the White House, and he gets to choose where he goes next,” he added.

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Abdul El-Sayed had spent his campaign focused on three core issues, sharing that his message centered on efforts “to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket and pass Medicare for all.”

(The political opinions expressed here are solely those of Abdul El-Sayed and do not reflect the views of this publication. References to the Trump administration and its personnel are reported as matters of public record.)

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