New York Post readers weigh in about Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed comparing circumcision to sex change surgery in a Fox News interview.
Page A13From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Trump, Fox News and the Post spend a week on one candidate's cable interview.
As it ran on the front
Here's how you know a story isn't about policy: watch who shows up to talk about it. This week the President of the United States found time to weigh in personally on a Michigan congressional primary, calling one candidate 'out of it' and predicting socialism is going to sink the Democrats on the strength of it. Fox News ran a piece on the candidate's 'strange' interview and the backlash around it. The New York Post ran a full letters page on the same interview. That's three separate national platforms devoting column inches to one guy's cable news appearance.
Nobody's arguing about a bill here. Nobody's arguing about a budget line, a vote, a subpoena. The entire controversy is a TV segment and the fallout from it. And that's the tell — when the President of the United States is personally narrating a local primary because a candidate gave an interview he didn't like, that's not commentary, that's deployment. You don't send the biggest microphone in the country after a city council candidate. You send it after the guy you're worried might actually win something.…
…(cont) The letters page is the giveaway too. A letters page isn't news, it's temperature. When a paper devotes a whole page to reader outrage over one interview, that's not organic, that's curated — somebody decided this was the week to make an example out of one candidate's fifteen minutes on Fox.
I'm not telling you the guy gave a great interview. I don't know, I didn't watch it. I'm telling you that when the amount of attention a story gets is wildly out of proportion to what actually happened in it — a candidate talked to a reporter, a paper ran a letters page about it — that imbalance is the story. Follow the imbalance, not the interview. Somebody's scared of a race in Michigan, and it isn't the candidate they're mocking.
That's the whole playbook, and it works because most people never step back far enough to count the outlets. Count them. Three, in one week, on one interview. That's not coverage. That's a coordinated flinch, and flinches tell you exactly where it hurts.
“The President personally weighing in on a Michigan primary to call one candidate 'out of it' isn't commentary, it's targeting — you don't send the biggest microphone in the country after somebody you're not worried about. When three national outlets spend a week on one guy's interview, the imbalance is the story.”
“The President is simply offering his honest read on a candidate's fitness for office, as any voter would appreciate. The letters page and the Fox piece are unrelated editorial decisions that happen to focus on the same interview the same week — coincidence, not coordination.”
The receipts
Hasan Piker claimed Abdul El-Sayed asked him to stump for his Michigan U.S. Senate campaign before the Twitch streamer faced intense political backlash.
President Donald Trump said on Sunday he thinks Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed is “out of it” and he and other socialist candidates will harm more centrist members of the Democratic Party in November’s midterm…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.