Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed made it crystal clear this week: don’t expect him sharing a stage with Tucker Carlson anytime soon — even after the former Fox News star all but gave the progressive Democrat his blessing.
The exchange happened on the Pod Save America podcast, in an episode released Sunday. Co-host Tommy Vietor pressed El-Sayed on comments Carlson made earlier this month about El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. Carlson had declared he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint” — a brutal line from a man who spent years as one of the most-watched hosts in cable news.
Vietor didn’t hold back with the follow-up, practically daring El-Sayed to embrace the moment: “Is that an endorsement of you? Are we going to do a Tucker event maybe in Detroit sometime soon?”
El-Sayed’s answer: a flat no.
“Unlikely,” he said, before doubling down. “But by unlikely I mean no.” He then laughed off the idea, joking that political operatives were probably already panicking at the thought of a Carlson-El-Sayed pairing: “I’m just imagining all the ops being like, ‘Wait, wait, so there’s a possibility.'”
Still, El-Sayed didn’t waste the opportunity to use Carlson’s blistering critique of Rogers to his own advantage. He argued that Carlson — who has spent years inside conservative media circles — has simply seen the “corruption” up close within MAGA world, and that Rogers is a prime example of it.
El-Sayed didn’t mince words describing his opponent, accusing Rogers of caring only about “power and the money he can make off of power.” He dug into Rogers’ record in Congress, tying him to past support for trade deals like TPP and NAFTA, even as Rogers now postures as a champion for American workers. El-Sayed also slammed Rogers over his hawkish history, claiming he backed the Iraq War, pushed to extend the war in Afghanistan, and “never saw a war he didn’t like” — now allegedly flip-flopping to oppose conflict only when it’s politically convenient under Trump.
El-Sayed made sure to note that he and Carlson don’t agree on much. But when it comes to sizing up Rogers, he suggested Carlson’s assessment cuts through the noise: “He can see the corruption and the cowardice in the man, and it’s just so off-putting when you actually have to look it in the eye.”
Carlson, for his part, hasn’t backed off his attacks on Rogers either. In a newsletter published Friday, he doubled down, urging his readers to keep the Trump-backed Senate candidate “far away from Washington.”
But make no mistake — Carlson stopped short of a full endorsement of El-Sayed himself, leaving this unlikely media-meets-politics moment stuck in limbo: a scathing rebuke of one candidate, but no full embrace of the other.
For now, it appears the closest thing to a Carlson-El-Sayed alliance is a shared disdain for Mike Rogers — and nothing more.
