White House Cabinet secretaries have spent recent months campaigning for Republican candidates with a frequency described as having no modern precedent. These powerful officials are being moved around the electoral map for partisan benefit, despite ethics laws intended to preserve some distance between federal authority and campaign politics.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been among the Trump administration’s most ambitious participants. He has appeared alongside vulnerable Republican incumbents and has even tried to organize partisan strategies designed to help GOP lawmakers.

That effort brought Kennedy to Michigan on Monday for a Republican campaign event. The appearance came as the state prepared for several important contests, including a highly competitive U.S. Senate race that could determine which party controls the chamber in the next Congress.

Kennedy used the event to criticize Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, which was one of the principal reasons for organizing the gathering. But the health secretary’s chosen line of attack quickly expanded far beyond a political opponent.

Kennedy briefly claimed some expertise involving the Muslim Brotherhood before turning his attention to what he called “Arab Muslims.” The conspiratorial secretary is an environmental lawyer by trade and has no meaningful background studying transnational religious organizations.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world,” Kennedy declared. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

The apparent goal was to criticize the Muslim Brotherhood, but even that argument had no meaningful connection to El-Sayed. The Democratic nominee has already denounced the organization and denied having any ties to it.

Instead of focusing on that group, Kennedy delivered a sweeping insult against the accomplishments of half a billion people. His attack dismissed Arab Muslims across science and literature while offering no factual basis for doing so.

The claims were plainly inaccurate. Arab Muslims have received the honors Kennedy listed, and Arab Muslim authors have produced published works of literature, contrary to the health secretary’s broad declaration.

Muslim authors Abdulrazak Gurnah and Naguib Mahfouz, for example, have won the Nobel Prize in literature. Their achievements alone expose the emptiness of Kennedy’s assertion that Arab Muslims simply “don’t produce literature.”

The comments also carry consequences beyond their obvious factual failures. The United States is currently at war in the Middle East, while U.S. troops are stationed in allied nations throughout the region.

A White House Cabinet secretary publicly suggesting that Arab Muslims are inferior in science and literature is therefore not merely offensive and wrong. It is wrong on a geopolitical scale, particularly given the position Kennedy holds within the administration.

The electoral setting made the spectacle even more glaring. President Donald Trump has leaned into Islamophobic rhetoric during the closing days of the midterm cycle, while his party’s closing message has relied heavily on overt and unapologetic bigotry.

Kennedy carried that message into the state with the largest percentage of Muslims and questioned the contributions of 500 million people. For Republicans hoping to maintain support among Muslim voters, it was quite a way to make the contempt impossible to miss.

Many Muslim voters took an enormous risk two years ago by moving toward the Republican Party. Many of those voters now feel used and betrayed, and Republican officials counting on them to remain within the party’s coalition are likely to be disappointed.