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Updated 2 hours ago, October 16, 2026

President Donald Trump turned the name Mohammad into a punchline at a rally inside a hangar at Dalton Municipal Airport in Georgia on Friday, telling the crowd he uses it as a guessing game. “You have about a 65% chance. ‘Hello, Mohammad.’ I’ve done it for years now. I’ve never been wrong,” he said.

Mocking Iran’s presidency, he claimed “Iran is the only country where nobody wants to be president” and went on to pretend he was asking several men named Mohammad whether they’d take the job. Masoud Pezeshkian has been Iran’s president since 2024.

Muslims frequently name their sons after the Prophet Mohammad, the founder of Islam, which makes Mohammad one of the most common male names among them. The Georgia crowd gave the joke a muted response.

Trump was campaigning for Republican candidates ahead of the November 3 midterms, and the remark fits a pattern critics have flagged all season. He’s escalated rhetoric against Somali and Muslim Americans, including Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whom he’s taken to calling “Mohammed,” and Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a Somali refugee. Seven months after the US and Israel launched a war on Tehran that was partly aimed at crippling its nuclear program, he again vowed that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.

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