President Donald Trump has made no secret of his displeasure with Fox News, including host Martha MacCallum, right, for her interview Monday with Michigan Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images; Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images)
By Brooklynn Robinson October 8, 2026 at 8:48am
Fox News Media president Jay Wallace answered President Donald Trump’s complaint about the network’s interview of a controversial Democrat candidate with a short defense of the booking:
“Someone didn’t necessarily like that,” he said. “But that’s what we do.”
Wallace made the remark in a Tuesday report in the Beltway news outlet Axios. He was talking about Fox host Martha MacCallum’s Monday sit-down with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
Wallace called the interview an example of the network airing programming different from what its core audience expects, Axios reported.
Trump had already put the objection in public. On Truth Social on Tuesday, he called the MacCallum interview “softball” and wrote that she never interviewed him that way.
“Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way!” he wrote.
FoxNews spends more time covering the Jihadist and Dumocrat candidates than they do the good old fashioned Republicans, the people that have saved America, and are making it great again. All they talk about is Dumocrat Jihadists like El-Sayed, with his softball interview by Martha MacCallum, and the like. She never interviews me like that. They don’t show my record breaking Rallies the morning after, but others do, and that’s what MAGA is watching. Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way! President DJT
( TS: Oct 6 2026, 9:50 AM ET )
— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) October 8, 2026
White House officials had already called Fox that day to complain about the MacCallum segment, Axios reported.
These aren’t the first complaints about Fox. Senior Republican operatives contacted Fox producers and executives in early August, Axios reported, warning that favorable comments from Jesse Watters could help El-Sayed look moderate.
After El-Sayed beat an establishment-backed Democrat in the primary, according to liberal website The Daily Beast, Watters said, “You gotta respect Abdul because he beat the machine.”
Do you agree with Trump’s criticism of Fox News?
El-Sayed put that line in a television ad and called Watters an “unlikely validator.”
Republicans were less worried after an Aug. 24 Watters interview that pressed El-Sayed on ICE, Medicare for All, and Sharia law, Axios noted. But they might have been unsettled the next day when Watters said, “I actually like Abdul. I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do.”
Fox said that August interview drew nearly 3.4 million viewers, the highest-rated cable-news primetime telecast of the month.
A Fox representative told Axios that Michigan GOP Senate nominee Rep. Mike Rogers was invited on Watters’ show and did not respond.
Trump: “El-Sayed was interviewed just a little while ago on a certain network, I won’t tell you which one. They let this guy talk, talk, talk. They hardly fight him at all. Why are they putting these people on our television networks?…They should stop doing it.” https://t.co/yXsWdgLkS1
— Bulwark Clips (@BulwarkClips) October 5, 2026
From Oct. 1 to Oct. 6, El-Sayed’s ads ran 129 times on Fox News, about twice as often as on ESPN, ad-tracking data cited by Axios showed. Michigan GOP strategist Dennis Lennox told Axios that El-Sayed was “on Fox every commercial break.”
Polls have the race close, but El-Sayed ahead by 3.2 points, according to a RealClearPolling average. El-Sayed, a critic of Israel’s government, would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate if he wins.
On MacCallum’s show, he said, “I am going to have conversations with all kinds of folks.”
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