Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Michigan Senate candidate who has built his campaign around attacking Trump-era tax cuts as giveaways to the wealthy, claimed a $26,171 deduction on his own tax return that exists only because of the law he denounces.
El-Sayed and his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, took the qualified business income deduction on their 2025 federal return, saving roughly $6,000 in taxes, while El-Sayed spent the year barnstorming Michigan alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, calling the same tax provisions "deplorable and disgusting." The first two pages of the return, which El-Sayed released on July 15, show total household income of $686,069. That figure places the self-styled champion of working families above the $611,500 threshold for the top 1 percent of Michigan households, based on IRS data.
The qualified business income deduction lets owners of pass-through businesses, companies whose profits flow directly to the owner's personal tax return, write off 20 percent of that income. Congress created it in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and made it permanent through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year. El-Sayed has attacked both laws on the stump.
At a March 8, 2025, rally in Warren, Michigan, part of Sanders's "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, El-Sayed sat for an interview with broadcaster Laura Flanders and laid out his case against the Trump tax framework in blunt terms.
"I'm out here today in large part because we are watching as the government that our tax dollars paid for is being gutted by a set of billionaires who never actually had to use it. And they're gutting it for pennies on the dollar to make sure that they can continue to pass a tax cut for folks who don't really need more money. And so, you know, I find that deplorable and disgusting, and I think the 9,000 people who are here today feel the same way."
One month later, he launched his Senate campaign. By August 2025, he was back on the Sanders tour in Kalamazoo, calling the One Big Beautiful Bill Act "that big ugly bill" and accusing Congress of "gutting Medicaid" to "pass a tax cut for billionaires."
Sanders was even more pointed at the Kalamazoo stop:
"As part of his love of the oligarchy, Donald Trump and his Republican friends gave us the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. In my view, that bill is the most dangerous piece of legislation passed in the modern history of the United States.... At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that bill gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent."
El-Sayed stood beside Sanders on that stage. Months later, he filed a return that used the very provision they were denouncing, and saved thousands of dollars because of it.
The partial return tells a story that does not match El-Sayed's working-class branding. Of the couple's $686,069 in total income, only $130,749, about 19 percent, came from wages. Capital gains accounted for more than $262,000, roughly 40 percent of the total. Another $292,881 was listed as "additional income," a category that includes pass-through business profits.
For context, a 2024 Tax Foundation analysis found that wages make up more than 60 percent of income for the average American household. Capital gains account for nearly 18 percent. El-Sayed's income profile is almost the inverse, far more reliant on investment returns and business income than on a paycheck.
El-Sayed earns pass-through income through AME Higher LLC, the firm he uses for consulting and speaking fees. His Senate financial disclosure, covering all of 2025 and the first seven months of 2026, listed $167,000 in income from that entity alone. Jukaku owns Mind Work Psychiatry, also structured as an LLC. Senate candidates are not required to disclose a spouse's exact income, so her contribution to the household total remains unclear.
El-Sayed's record of public claims about his own background has drawn scrutiny before. His assertion that he removed lead from Detroit schools as city health director was contradicted by city records.
The contradiction runs deeper than the tax deduction. At a candidate forum in April, El-Sayed delivered an impassioned attack on doctors who turn away Medicaid patients.
He said:
"Medicaid reimburses at nearly half the rate, which means that when you walk in with your Medicaid card, the doctor in the hospital thinks of you as a half citizen. That means you can't get appointments. That means they push you to the back. That means they discriminate against you, because they know that the care that your body requires is going to reimburse at half the rate."
Jukaku's psychiatric practice does not accept Medicare, Medicaid, or any other insurance. Patients must pay entirely out of pocket. The candidate who accuses doctors of treating Medicaid patients as "half citizens" is married to a physician whose practice does not take Medicaid at all.
El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Free Beacon.
When his primary opponent, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, pressed El-Sayed to release his tax return, he dismissed the pressure. He said the return would be "pretty standard" and "pretty mundane." He then released only the first two pages, enough to show the headline numbers, not enough to show the full picture of deductions, investment holdings, or the breakdown between his income and his wife's.
What those two pages do show is a household earning nearly $700,000, drawing the bulk of its income from capital gains and pass-through business profits, and claiming a deduction that Donald Trump signed into law, all while the candidate built a Senate campaign around calling that law a giveaway to people who "don't really need more money."
El-Sayed has drawn progressive heavyweights to his corner. Sen. Elizabeth Warren broke with Senate leadership to endorse him in the primary. He has appeared alongside Sanders repeatedly. And his campaign conduct, including his refusal to apologize for an inflammatory remark during a debate, has drawn attention beyond Michigan.
His financial entanglements have also raised questions. Reporting has examined El-Sayed's luxury yacht fundraisers for an Islamic charity flagged by Congress, as well as the role his father-in-law played in bankrolling a super PAC supporting his candidacy.
El-Sayed is not the first politician to preach one thing and practice another on taxes. But the gap here is unusually clean. The deduction he claimed is not some obscure loophole buried in the tax code. It is the signature small-business provision of the Trump tax law, the one he has spent two years calling a handout to the rich.
When a candidate tells 9,000 people that a tax cut is "deplorable and disgusting," then goes home and claims that same tax cut on his own return, voters do not need a policy briefing to understand what they are looking at. They need a better candidate.
