Grandpa Pudding Brains has spent a week making up reasons he calls Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed "Mohammed," as if we don't already understand. Apparently, after reading the man's full legal name, Encyclopedia Trump made a huge discovery and announced today: "his middle name is Mohammed." — Read the rest
Having no remotely credible reason to encourage voters to consider Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed, America's angriest President resorted to racially motivated name-calling.
Diaper Don pulled out all the stops on his classic rhetoric of hate: calling Abdul "Mohammed," invoking "jihad," and attempting to declare El-Sayed "a terrorist sympathizer." — Read the rest
The conservative media behemoth is celebrating 30 years on the air this week. I have been a loyal, daily viewer for about half that run. I remember the inaugural episodes of “The Five” and “Outnumbered.” Before Marc Lamont Hill was helping elevate the conversation on one of the country’s biggest podcasts, I watched him school Bill O’Reilly as a Fox contributor and Temple University professor. And who can forget Alan Colmes, forever assigned the role of hapless Democrat?
For years, I believed there was no particularly good reason for a serious progressive to go on Fox News. The network touts its “fair and balanced” tagline, but it is not a neutral venue and it does not deserve to be treated like one. Its business model is grievance. A Democrat on Fox is a prop. The network invites them into the studio so its audience can watch them lose. Why submit to the bad faith interruptions and the inevitable social media clip engineered to make the left look elitist or insane?
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has made me reconsider that.
El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.
The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate has emerged as an anomalous fixture on the conservative network, dominating segments with a cool composure that leaves hosts alternating between hostility and reluctant infatuation. El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.
The president raged on social media about El-Sayed’s Monday appearance on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that Fox News spends more time covering “Democrat jihadists” than they do GOP candidates. Trump’s temper tantrums highlight a fundamental structural weakness in contemporary conservatism: Right-wing ideology is inherently hierarchical, predicated on the worship of strength and dominance. When El-Sayed goes onto Fox and refuses to shrink, when he looks a host in the eye and dismantles talking points with data and empathy, it scrambles the entire authoritarian matrix.
The psychological fallout among the network’s talking heads has been equally telling. Jesse Watters, a stalwart of the network’s macho posturing, has spent weeks gushing over El-Sayed with an almost comical bewilderment. After the Democratic candidate casually skewered his Republican opponent Mike Rogers as a “beta” on air — eliciting an involuntary chuckle from Watters — the Fox host found himself helplessly admitting that he liked the progressive Democrat despite himself.
This is a model for the left — and there is a lineage here.
Democrats on Fox News used to be cast in a narrow role: the tame liberal who could be invited on to lose politely. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was one of the first politicians on the left who seriously engaged with the network’s audience. He appeared on Fox during his 2016 presidential run and talked directly about wages, healthcare and corporate power. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign proved a Democrat can leave the network Roger Ailes built with their own viral moments. He routinely met a hostile premise with calm facts, a sharp answer and a smile that made the host’s irritation look frivolous.
El-Sayed is the next stage of that evolution. He adds something that many national Democrats still lack: an understanding that a media hit is not a policy seminar. It is about making the audience see who is in command. El-Sayed has figured out how to talk to the people who love Fox without pretending that the network is something it isn’t.
He refused to let Fox’s presenters dictate the terms of the conversation. In August, El-Sayed sat for a 25-minute one-on-one with Watters, who confronted him with the inventory of right-wing obsessions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump’s war with Iran, transgender athletes and his Muslim faith. Watters wanted to compress El-Sayed into a caricature, a radical leftist Muslim candidate who could be made alien and threatening to the people watching at home.
El-Sayed did not take the bait. When Watters pressed him about abolishing ICE, he did not surrender the moral argument or get stuck in a defensive loop. He pointed out that the U.S. enforced immigration law before ICE’s creation and that the agency’s existence has not solved the problem Watters claimed to care about.
“We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” El-Sayed said, while dodging several of the culture war questions and steering the interview back to healthcare and affordability. When Watters raised surgery for minors in the crudest possible terms, El-Sayed answered by asking whether the host was circumcised. Right-wing influencers howled that it was a nightmare. The clip went viral anyway.
El-Sayed’s appearance on Monday with MacCallum was masterful policy communication. The host pressed the candidate on terrorism, the Iran war, Medicare for All and campaign financing, and the two talked over each other at points because El-Sayed kept answering the question behind the question.
On terrorism, he was unequivocal that the victim is never at fault. Then, he pivoted: “Why are we fighting this war, to what end? Who benefits from it? Why did we do this? What are we paying for it?”
When MacCollum played a clip of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defining socialism as everyone having what they need to live a dignified life, and then asked if that disturbed El-Sayed as a capitalist, he dismantled the frame in seconds. “Well, Martha, I assume you went to good public schools.”
Yes.
“And you got to drive on good roads today.”
Pretty much.
“And when you put your garbage out, somebody comes and picks it up.”
Yes.
El-Sayed embodied the most devastating move in American politics: When someone tries to explain socialism to you, explain the socialist parts of the life they already love. MacCallum pressed him on campaign finance and high-profile donors, and El-Sayed did not stutter or retreat. He pivoted to the fundamental reality that ordinary people across the political spectrum despise: the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.
This connects directly to a deeper truth about the American electorate that corporate-backed consultants consistently fail to grasp. And there is evidence it is landing. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, El-Sayed outperformed other swing-state Democratic Senate candidates in capturing a vital sliver of 2024 Trump voters, securing 8% compared to paltry single digits elsewhere.
This is not because those voters have suddenly embraced intersectional environmentalism or Medicare for All in its entirety; it is because working-class Americans are profoundly alienated by corporate malfeasance, stagnant wages and the hollow promises of career politicians. When a candidate like El-Sayed — just like Sanders and Buttigieg before him — speaks directly to economic class struggles without patronizing rhetoric, a significant percentage of non-ideological working-class viewers listen. And they recognize the fundamental truth in the critique.
The left does not need to pretend that Fox News has suddenly become fair. It has not. One candidate’s successful appearance does not redeem a network that has fueled racism, conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant panic and the authoritarian politics that brought Trump to power.
But refusing to appear on Fox News is no longer a tenable position if it merely concedes millions of viewers to an information ecosystem with no meaningful counterargument that can reach them.
The big story coming out of the 2024 election was how Donald Trump orchestrated a realignment of American politics, bringing demographic groups that had long eschewed the Republican Party into the tent. Latinos, Black voters and young people, mostly males, had voted for him and the GOP in larger numbers than anyone could remember, and it was seen in some quarters as a sign that the party was embarking on a thousand-year reign. Conventional wisdom held that Trump was something of a magical figure who had defied the odds, defeated the majority of the legal and political efforts to hold him accountable, and triumphantly returned to power.
Many attributed the president’s success to a new political power on the block — the so-called manosphere, consisting of male podcasters with millions of followers who had enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Many pundits said that Kamala Harris lost the race because she didn’t try hard enough to appeal to these influencers, even though many are heavily misogynistic and wouldn’t have been open to her candidacy in any case. Their juvenile humor and oppositional defiance also happened, incidentally, to be perfectly matched to Trump’s sophomoric style.
However, like transgressive boys everywhere, they have a short attention span; Trump has not turned out to be as fun as they thought he would be. Although anecdotal evidence suggests they have been less fervent followers of the president for several months now, The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts to see if it was true. What they found was revealing: “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” Many are publicly unhappy with the economy and the war, both of which are seen as broken promises and could account for the decline in mentions, but the hosts are mostly spending their time trashing Democrats like James Talarico, the Texas state representative who is running for the Senate and may just win. (Significantly, the king of the manosphere, podcaster Joe Rogan, is actually a fan of Talarico.)
There are some other big names in the podcasting world, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are now openly antagonistic toward Trump, mostly for opportunistic reasons. The pair are among the early crowd jostling for power within the post-Trump right-wing ecosystem. Kelly has railed against the Trump family’s alleged corruption, while Carlson appears to be positioning himself as a presidential candidate, with his iconoclastic takes on a number of issues and increasing talk of a third-party bid. He recently told NPR that Trump should be removed from office.
But mainstream conservative media is still largely on board the Trump train, although Fox News’ firing of Maria Bartiromo for coordinating with the White House — hilarious as the network’s outrage is, considering the cozy relationships between the president and Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — and its decision to stand against Trump in support of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO has revealed a schism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has also been pulling no punches throughout the second term.
But what of the Republican establishment? Since Trump’s exultant victory in 2024, they have behaved as if he were ordained by God to be America’s reigning monarch, omnipotent and infallible. Republican governors have largely abdicated their own roles as one of the Constitution’s checks and balances, agreeing to give up their own sovereignty to serve his agenda, while the GOP majorities in Congress have proven to be nothing more than trained seals happily signing on to the president’s usurpation of their own power.
Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite.
But you can’t really blame them. Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite. He actually inherited a recovering economy — dubbed “the envy of the world” in 2024 by The Economist — and newfound global respect. If Trump had done nothing and simply continued the policies that were already in place — and then taken credit for them, as he is wont to do — he would be in a different position today. But he surrounded himself with radicals and sycophants, and he believed his own hype. The results have been a disaster.
As Republicans prepare to face the voters in the November midterms, they are finding out that the “magical” Trump mystique was actually luck and hot air. Reality still exists, and it bites. Hard.
As we head into the final month before the election, the polls appear very bad for Republicans. The House majority is almost certainly gone, and the Senate is increasingly in play, something that wasn’t seriously contemplated six months ago. The president’s approval ratings are in the low to mid-30s, and his ratings on the most important issues of the economy and the Iran war are even worse. Gasoline and diesel prices have turned the two big promises Trump made — to lower prices and keep the nation out of wars — into epic failures, and voters are livid.
Suddenly, GOP candidates are running for the hills. Candidates in tight races in battleground and red states — including Mike Rogers, who is running for the Senate in Michigan against Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who faces Josh Turek, a Democrat, in Iowa — are saying the Iran war must end. (As the New York Times pointed out, Hinson was among seven House Republicans who recently supported a resolution calling on the president to stop or seek congressional approval for military action in Iran.) Others are scrubbing or downplaying endorsements by or mentions of the presidents on their campaign websites. According to The Washington Post, Mike Beltran, the Republican nominee running against Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., touted on his website earlier this year how he had “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That language has now vanished, along with photos of Trump and references to “America First.” At least seven other GOP congressional candidates, reported the Post, are doing the same. One Florida Republican. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, has even publicly condemned the president for elements of his radical deportation policy.
Historically, this is common. Midterms are notoriously hard on the party in power, and presidents usually take the blame. Often, the approved strategy is for candidates to go ahead and distance themselves from the president, and try to win their races by portraying themselves as independent thinkers who will not rubber-stamp the unpopular majority’s agenda. Whether it’s Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2014, close midterm races almost always feature some version of that same sales pitch. The only exception in recent years I can think of is 1998, when the GOP’s threats to impeach President Bill Clinton over the findings of the Starr Report with regard to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky blew back on them, costing them seats and resulting in the resignation of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich in disgrace.
But this time it is especially jarring considering the fealty Republicans have been required to show their leader — and have willingly given him — until now. That loyalty ended up not helping Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary just a few months ago when Trump endorsed his opponent in retribution after Cornyn waited too long to endorse him in 2024. As the midterm campaign has unfolded, it’s belatedly become clear to many Republicans that standing with Trump may be riskier, even among the party’s base, than standing against him.
But they have a problem. The president won’t shut up. To the chagrin of most of his own party, he is insisting on making the midterms all about him. A narcissist to the core, Trump believes that the only way Republicans win in November is if he is out there bragging and blaming and lying as he always does, because that has been the secret sauce that brings out MAGA voters. He has even released a taxpayer-funded propaganda ad — which is illegal — touting his alleged accomplishments.
No one should mistake the Republican retreat from Trump as a full-scale rebellion. Instead, it’s a tepid, last-minute attempt on the part of some desperate candidates to show independence, knowing they may lose anyway — and that the president will say it’s because they didn’t support him enough anyway. The Republican Senate had a chance to take a stand on one of the biggest issues in the campaign, and the one that’s causing the most pain for average voters: Iran. On Thursday they voted down a resolution to end the war. The tally was 50-49. When it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, it’s clear they will default to Trump as always. Voters, though, are finally seeing through them.
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