Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed tangled with Fox News host Martha MacCallum over Iran and terrorism Monday, then drew a sharp rebuke from Donald Trump.
The progressive Democrat sat for the afternoon interview after a slim primary win and used the segment to push one of his core campaign themes: opposition to U.S. involvement in the Iran fight.
MacCallum did not give him a free pass. She pressed him on terror, the nuclear deal, and the cost of the conflict at the pump, in an exchange the Daily Mail detailed as the Michigan race heated up.
El-Sayed called recent terrorist attacks “awful and terrible.” MacCallum then put his own words back to him, language that treated the attackers as people in pain rather than enemies to be stopped.
She quoted him saying the country needs to be “curious” about the people who carry out such acts, what causes them, and “what happens when individuals who commit these acts are in pain.”
El-Sayed rejected any claim that he was blaming victims.
"No, it's not, the victim is never at fault, and terrorism is wrong no matter who perpetrates the terrorism, who it is perpetrated against,"
he said. MacCallum still framed his approach as suggesting America had been “on the wrong side of our own policies,” and that terrorism was somehow “our fault.”
The argument moved quickly from terror to the war itself. El-Sayed cast the conflict as a choice Washington should never have made.
"War is a system of violence, when you think about a war we shouldn't be fighting, like the war in Iran right now."
MacCallum answered with the record she said Iran had written in blood and broken deals.
"Probably because Iran created a huge threat to the neighborhood and killed thousands of American citizens."
El-Sayed pointed back to the Obama-era nuclear agreement, known as the JCPOA, and argued it had contained the nuclear threat. MacCallum was unconvinced.
“I don’t know about that, they had been breaking the JCPOA by many estimations,” she said.
He kept returning to a single question aimed at voters watching from home: “Ask yourself, does more war make us safer?”
When MacCallum accused him of filibustering, El-Sayed said he had not finished his point. He tied the war directly to energy costs and the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for oil leaving the region.
"I haven't finished my point, I just want to finish what I was saying. We're in a situation where we could have chosen peace and instead we chose war, and now you've got a situation at the Strait of Hormuz where we can't move oil and gas."
“So why are our gas prices so high?” he asked. MacCallum cited economists and said prices would start to fall. El-Sayed waved that off as out of touch with real life in his state.
“That’s not what Michiganders are experiencing at the pump,” he said.
MacCallum referenced Wall Street Journal reporting on oil movement through the strait and the wider region. El-Sayed treated the choke on energy as proof that choosing war had already hit American drivers.
Hours later, Donald Trump took the stage in Nebraska and unloaded on the booking itself. He called El-Sayed “a total communist” and questioned why Fox put him on air.
"El-Sayed was interviewed on a certain network. I won't tell you which one (FOX). They hardly fight him at all. Why are they putting these people on our television networks? Why they always have to put Jessica Tarlov, another loser? They should stop,"
Trump’s complaint was not subtle. He saw a left-wing Senate hopeful getting national cable time to argue against the Iran fight and to reframe terror as a puzzle about the attacker’s pain.
El-Sayed is not a fringe protest candidate in this cycle. He won the Democratic primary over Rep. Haley Stevens by a single-point margin, with Stevens holding more of the older Democratic and African-American vote.
He now holds a slight lead in public polling over Republican Mike Rogers, the former House member and the GOP’s presumptive nominee. The Cook Political Report rates the seat a toss-up. Democrats need to flip four seats to take the Senate, and Michigan is on that short list.
The same day as the Fox appearance, El-Sayed announced a Michigan rally with former President Barack Obama, a signal that national Democrats still see him as their vehicle in a race Rogers has been waiting to run.
That is the tension the MacCallum interview put on camera. A primary winner selling peace, curiosity about terrorists, and pump prices as the cost of war now stands between Republicans and a hold in a chamber decided by a handful of seats.
Voters can decide whether that message is moral clarity or a soft line on enemies who have already killed Americans. The clip left little doubt where El-Sayed stands, and where his critics do.
