FREAKING OUT

Trump Aides’ Secret Dem Star Complaints to Fox News Exposed

White House aides fear the conservative network’s coverage is boosting a left-wing candidate.

Donald Trump’s team has been panic-dialing Fox News over coverage they believe is boosting a rising Democratic star loathed by the president.

White House aides put in calls to the network on Tuesday complaining about an interview with Abdul El-Sayed the day before. They said it had allowed the progressive Michigan Senate candidate to portray himself as less left-wing than he really is, Axios reports.

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The president then took those gripes public in a late-night Truth Social tirade. He trashed anchor Martha MacCallum’s questions as “softball” and the network for “promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way!”

It’s not the first time Fox’s treatment of El-Sayed, 41, has freaked out the president’s closest supporters. Several Republican operatives also contacted the network in August after host Jesse Watters said that “you gotta respect Abdul because he beat the machine,” according to Axios.

El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, beat the odds to win the Michigan Senate primary over Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate backed by the Democratic establishment. He later released a campaign ad that included Watters’ remarks as backing from an “unlikely validator.”

The GOP was relieved when the physician and public health expert faced a round of tough questions from Watters on immigration and healthcare in a subsequent interview. But it proved short-lived when the host told viewers only the next day, “I actually like Abdul. I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do.”

El-Sayed, who said in his Monday interview with MacCallum that “I am going to have conversations with all kinds of folks,” has leant hard on the network ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms. Axios found that in the first six days of this month, Fox aired his campaign ads 129 times, roughly twice as often as they appeared on ESPN.

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“They are doing him a favor,” Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan, said. “It’s only helping him reach center-right voters. But they are in business to make money, and he attracts eyeballs.”

Trump’s war on Iran and widespread unaffordability have pushed the president’s approval ratings to a historic low of 32 percent. Those numbers have helped Democrats gain a staggering 9-point lead in the November race for control of the House and Senate.

Republicans have tried to close the gap by framing El-Sayed and other progressive candidates as extreme left-wing ideologues taking over the Democratic Party. The president has helped push that narrative despite his warm relationship with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, and welcoming Chinese Communist despot Xi Jinping to the White House last month.

The president broadened his attacks against El-Sayed in his late-night Truth Social posts on Tuesday. He blasted the Democrat as a “RADICAL Extremist” and “terrorist,” and warned El-Sayed is “WRONG for Michigan, and WRONG for America.”

But Fox does not seem set on taking the Michigan Democrat off the air anytime soon. “Someone didn’t necessarily like that,” network president Jay Wallace told Axios of El-Sayed’s Monday interview. “But that’s what we do.”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, Fox, and El-Sayed’s campaign for comment on this story.

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