Abdul El-Sayed Manages to Sink Himself When Unable to Handle Fox’s Jesse Watters

Michigan’s glamour candidate for the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, has had a tough couple of weeks. The media darling has been running into challenges as he faces some realities, and he is falling into a trap all too familiar to other Democratic Socialist candidates. Answering tough questions is not their forte, and this was exposed during his appearance with Jesse Watters on Fox News.

El-Sayed is calling to mind a figure seen in Major League Baseball this season, a player who exploded on the scene but appears to be shrinking as the season develops. In St. Louis Joshua Baez was called up from the minors, and in his debut game he hit a homer on the first pitch he faced. That feat was followed as he hit homers in his next two at-bats; no player in the history of the sport had homered in his first three plate appearances.

But since that explosive premiere, Baez has disappeared. He immediately went 0-16, and so far has only managed five total hits in 36 attempts, with 14 strikeouts on the way to a woeful .136 batting average. El-Sayed, of late, has had similar performances.

After securing the Democratic Party nomination for the Senate race, El-Sayed has discovered the glowing and fawning media coverage does not hold up as the campaign hits the throttle. His appearance with Watters, while laudable at this stage, did not go well for the candidate. The fact that Watters is not a seasoned journalist, yet Abdul could not manage to come away looking better, does not portend well moving forward.

In one of the contentious portions of the interview, Watters played a clip of a speech El-Sayed gave in 2022 mentioning how it was wrong, as possibly a sign of white supremacy, to take legislative action to block Shari Law. When asked pointedly on this comment the candidate worked to conflate Sharia with the practice of their Islamic faith.

Watters tried to explain to him that no one was blocking the practice of religious expression, but the issue was the application of a different legal foundation in this country. El-Sayed attempted to invoke Christian Cannon law as a practice, in order to justify the inclusion of Sharia, which was a desperate deflection. The issue is having Sharia running counter to federal law in this country.

Then to get out from under this El-Sayed resorted to the hard pivot, something he employed throughout the interview, to avoid answering direct questions. On this issue he attempted to steer away and say the people of Michigan were more concerned with gas prices, and affordability.

He did the same with other topics. When asked about Second Amendment restrictions he tried to pivot to children’s healthcare. He did the same when offered to comment on the struggle with black voters, and on the matter of Chuck Schumer remaining as the Democratic Party leader. But one topic shows the not-ready-for-primetime characteristic with El-Sayed.

He was asked about illegal aliens and his call to abolish ICE, and his explanation of the issue was that when the INS was running things there were fewer illegals in the country. He actually tried to suggest the influx of illegals was the result of ICE. “We have ICE now, and we have far, far more undocumented people, so ICE is clearly not working.”

That is simply an inept explanation. ICE is the response to the influx of illegals, meant to deal with the open border policies of the preceding President Biden years. El-Sayed is essentially saying the cows are running loose in the field because we are closing the barn doors.

This interview went far in exposing the hollowness of this man’s campaign. Watters is not a journalist with decades of newsman experience, but at least he was willing to come out with challenging questions. What is made clear is that El-Sayed is practiced and poised with his delivery, but in actually listening to his answers we see he is not forthcoming.

Like many of the other DSA candidates we have seen, his platform withers under scrutiny. The difference is that El-Sayed does not get flustered and stammer when challenged. Instead, he resorts to practiced dodges, deflections, and hard pivots away from probing questions. Ultimately the vacuousness manages to become displayed.

Watters twice asked El-Sayed directly if he wanted to replace the Second Amendment (a direct quote of his). Both times the answer was a scripted response: “I think more people are more worried about whether they can see a doctor than whether or not they can have a gun.”

What came across in this interview is that El-Sayed has worked on his delivery and is a better performer than the majority of the DSA candidates. But his calm and cool veneer is not enough flash to override the vacancy of many of his policies. As a result, a defensive shift has come over his campaign the past few weeks directing others on how he is to be handled.

There has been an effort of late to shield El-Sayed from probing questions arising with his rising notoriety. His campaign has become notable for what we are not allowed to call him. He is NOT a communist (just ignore his platform), he is NOT a member of the DSA (just ignore their claims to the man), and he is NOT an ally of Hasan Piker (just ignore their history together). Also, he is NOT to be referred to as Abdulrahman, even though that is his proper name.

Those are a lot of guardrails to place around a candidate, which narrows his path to the election. The more you tell us what is not permitted to be mentioned, the more it shows about the man begging for our vote.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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