Jesse Watters Tries To Pin Down Abdul El-Sayed on Immigration, but the Candidate Ends the Segment by Baiting the Host With a Specific Insult
Staying on message.
Jesse Watters just got a masterclass in how to end an interview on your own terms. On the Fox News segment, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed left Watters laughing while casually dropping the kind of insult that’s going to live rent-free in the host’s head for weeks. The exchange, which covered immigration, Iran, and culture-war flashpoints, ended with El-Sayed asking, “Can we all agree that Mike Rogers is a beta?”
According to The Hill, the interview kicked off with Watters pressing El-Sayed on immigration, specifically his call to abolish ICE. El-Sayed drew a direct comparison to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which handled federal immigration cases before ICE was created in 2003. “We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” he said.
The line that landed with enough force to make Watters dismiss it outright. The host pushed back, arguing that INS “did the same thing as ICE back then,” but El-Sayed wasn’t having it. He fired back with a statistic-driven counter: “If you want to do that correlation, we have ICE now and we have far, far more undocumented people. So ICE is clearly not working.”
Watters accused El-Sayed of dodging the question
El-Sayed then pivoted smoothly to what he’s been hammering on all week: affordability. “Michigan voters are asking me about how they’re going to afford their gas and groceries,” he said, a message he’s been relentlessly pushing as scrutiny from both the left and right ramps up. El-Sayed is running against the noise of a political media landscape that thrives on distraction. And so far, he’s doing a pretty good job of keeping the focus where he wants it.
Attempting to corner El-Sayed, Watters then brought up Iran, asking him if he was “glad the ayatollah is dead.” El-Sayed responded by denouncing the Iranian regime while also criticizing the ongoing war with Iran. “I understand selective memory about history, but we had a JCPOA that was well negotiated, that actually had nuclear nonproliferation far more securely than we have right now after having gone to war for the better part of six months,” he said.
He was referencing the Obama-era nuclear deal that the current administration walked away from in 2018. Watters, predictably, countered with a line that sounded like it was pulled straight from a hawkish talking points memo: “Yeah, I like the fact that the nuclear program is buried under a mountain of rubble.”
El-Sayed didn’t miss a beat. “You understand that, like, nuclear material doesn’t just go away because you buried it under a mountain of rubble?” he shot back. “You understand they can still go back and bury it out, right?” Watters fell back on a Space Force joke, saying the U.S. was “watching it from Space Force” and that if anyone digs up nuclear material, it’ll go “kaboom.”
But the real fireworks came when El-Sayed brought up Rogers
The Republican has been notably absent from Watters’ show, and El-Sayed didn’t hesitate to call him out for it. “Can we all agree that Mike Rogers is a beta?” he asked, using the internet slang term for someone weak or unsuccessful. Watters laughed, but the jab landed. El-Sayed doubled down, suggesting that Rogers was “ducking” debates and even Watters’ show because he was “afraid of getting grilled.”
He went further, claiming Rogers “thinks he’s running against Hasan Piker,” the left-wing Twitch streamer who has fundraised and campaigned for El-Sayed. It was a bold move, especially given the controversy swirling around Piker this week, but El-Sayed seemed to relish the opportunity to frame Rogers as the one avoiding tough conversations.
Piker, a polarizing figure known for his unfiltered takes on Israel and U.S. foreign policy, recently called out Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democratic candidate for Congress in Michigan, for not endorsing El-Sayed. According to The Guardian, Moss has cited their differing views on Israel as the reason for his hesitation, but Piker’s comments took a darker turn.
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” he said in a stream. The remarks drew immediate backlash, with House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries calling them “dangerous and antisemitic” without naming Piker directly.
El-Sayed made a statement too
El-Sayed, caught in the crossfire, put out a statement distancing himself from Piker’s comments while stopping short of calling the streamer antisemitic. “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own daughters,” he said, calling antisemitism a “scourge.” Some critics accused him of playing into efforts to conflate Israel with Jewish people, while others saw it as a necessary step to win over Jewish voters in Michigan.
“While politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer, we’re going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools, and healthcare,” he said. It’s a line he’s repeated like a mantra this week, and for good reason. Michigan is a state where economic concerns are front and center, and El-Sayed is betting that voters care more about their wallets than they do about online drama.
The contrast between El-Sayed and Rogers couldn’t be more stark. While Rogers has been content to lob attacks from the sidelines, El-Sayed has been out there engaging with voters, taking tough questions, and even turning interviews like the one with Watters into opportunities to land punches.
(Featured images: Gage Skidmore, Conlan Houston)
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