Abdul El-Sayed Is a Paper Doctor With an Empty Résumé

A cop told me recently that he got a call from a rich white man complaining about a suspicious black man roaming his neighborhood.

Cops hate those kinds of calls. It puts them in a bad spot. But cops have to respond to calls. So he did. Turned out, the black man was an Amazon driver. And naturally, the white man had a sign in his yard that read “Black Lives Matter.”

Now, there’s a new sign on the white man’s lawn: “Abdul for U.S. Senate.”

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is running on a platform of good union jobs, money out of politics, and Medicare for All. I don’t understand the attraction. It’s doubtful the rich white man ever worked in a factory or has to worry about medical bills.

Let’s call it virtue signaling for virtue’s sake. It takes the sting out of white privilege.

For you workday humps who’d like to know something about the candidate beyond slick 30-second commercials, it’s worth noting that El-Sayed never worked in a factory, and aside from some part-time gigs at various colleges, his resume is thin. Very thin.

The first thing you need to know is that El-Sayed is a paper doctor. He’s never treated a patient, is not licensed in Michigan, and never passed the board examinations. He can’t so much as dispense aspirin from an ambulance.

The second thing you need to know is that El-Sayed, 41, has worked just two real jobs in his adult life, totaling less than four years, according to his resume. This from a guy who wants to be senator for life.

What’s troubling is where he worked and what he actually accomplished: He was appointed as the top public health official in Detroit and then Wayne County. Both departments are an historical quagmire of corruption and incompetence. Believe me, I know, I helped put one director behind bars for, among other things, embezzling public health dollars to pay for hair plugs.

For his part, El-Sayed was appointed as Detroit’s health director in 2015 by then-Mayor Mike Duggan. At that time, as the city was emerging from its historic bankruptcy, El-Sayed’s health department was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into a pet program run by Duggan’s mistress. The program was supposed to lower infant mortality rates in the city.

After just 17 months on the job, El-Sayed resigned to run for governor. Then Mistress-gate scandal exploded and infant mortality skyrocketed. Nothing changed.

To El-Sayed’s credit, before resigning as health director, he commissioned a report that showed Duggan’s demolition blitz was poisoning the city’s children. That program is now the subject of a sprawling FBI investigation. However, El-Sayed the candidate has said little about it.

A couple years and cups of coffee later, El-Sayed was appointed in 2023 as the medical chief of Wayne County. According to his own campaign commercial, El-Sayed’s biggest accomplishment was a partnership with a nonprofit that supplied 16,000 eye glasses to needy children. What the commercial does not tell you is that the nonprofit existed for a decade beforehand and the county’s portion was funded primarily by Biden’s Covid bucks. One-time inflationary federal dollars is no solution to a health crisis.

All the while, life expectancy in Detroit continues to crater from pre-pandemic levels, hovering around 70 years old. That’s hardly an effective record.

There are also serious questions about El-Sayed’s campaigns finance problems, including indications of straw donors, actual contributors blowing past legal limits, and a Super PAC committed to spending millions of dollars on his behalf.

Then there are the disturbing questions regarding the mental fitness of those he surrounds himself with, including a former staffer charged with terrorism, a current staffer who says all white women are racist (ironically, that staffer herself is a white woman), and a prominent podcaster who once said America deserved 9/11. And can we get a timeline of when he actually lived in Michigan?

But those are stories for another day.

Go ahead and plant your yard signs rich white guy. That's your right. Just remember, you reap what you sow.