Jesse Watters Grilled Abdul El-Sayed on Sharia Law, White Supremacy, and Taxing the Rich. His Own Old Words Did Most of the Talking.
Abdul El-Sayed (D), the physician and former Michigan health official who upset Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Aug. 4 Democratic Senate primary, sat down Aug. 24 for a combative 25-minute interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters on “Jesse Watters Primetime.” The two clashed over immigration, gas prices, Iran, gender-affirming care for minors, and a wealth-tax proposal — but the interview’s sharpest moments came when Watters pressed El-Sayed on his own past statements about Sharia law and a 2022 remark linking Sharia-ban opponents to a history of white-supremacist violence.
El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in November for the open seat Sen. Gary Peters (D) is vacating. The exchange arrives a day after Vice President JD Vance attacked El-Sayed by name at an Ohio rally, and the same week reporters surfaced El-Sayed’s own 2025 tax return — which shows a compensation structure tax experts say minimizes the very taxes he wants raised on others.
None of El-Sayed’s past statements are in dispute — he made them, on the record, years apart. What is disputed is what they mean, and PolitiFact has separately pushed back on the shorthand claim that he “supports imposing Sharia law in the U.S.” Both his exact words and that pushback are below.
- Aug. 24, 2026interview dateon Fox News' 'Jesse Watters Primetime,' roughly 25 minutes, frequent crosstalk
- $686,0002025 household incomeper El-Sayed's own financial disclosure — top 1% of Michigan earners
- 7%proposed wealth-tax rateon fortunes over $100 million, per El-Sayed's Aug. 2026 podcast remarks
- Nov. 3, 2026general electionEl-Sayed (D) vs. Mike Rogers (R) for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat
The interview covered more ground than its headline topics. El-Sayed argued ICE “isn’t working” and that voters he meets care more about gas and grocery prices than immigration enforcement; Watters repeatedly told him to “just answer the question” on both immigration and the Iran war. During a segment on gender-affirming care for minors, El-Sayed said “the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” then asked Watters directly, “Are you circumcised?” — arguing that circumcision is “surgery on a kid’s… body” performed on minors without controversy. Watters, visibly caught off guard, called the comparison “wacky” and told El-Sayed, “Michigan’s not going for that.”
At the interview’s close, Watters told El-Sayed he seemed “a little naive” and called several of his positions “straight-up wacky.” El-Sayed’s own campaign has separately circulated a different, more favorable Watters line — “You gotta respect Abdul because he beat the machine,” a reference to his primary upset over the establishment-backed Stevens — in campaign messaging; it is not clearly established that Watters said it during this specific broadcast. El-Sayed closed the interview by saying, “I’m not here to fight a culture war; I’m here to fight the affordability crisis that people are facing.”
Two separate past statements were at issue. In a 2009 New York Times interview about financing a Sharia-compliant mortgage for an Ann Arbor condo while in medical school, El-Sayed said: “Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way.” That quote describes a personal religious-finance choice, not a policy position.
The second, more politically charged statement came from a 2022 keynote at CAIR’s annual banquet in Oklahoma, where El-Sayed described opponents of a 2010 Oklahoma ballot measure banning courts from considering Sharia law as part of a historical lineage: the “same exact forces that drove native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, that those forces are alive and well today.” Watters characterized that remark as linking Sharia-ban supporters to white supremacy; El-Sayed did not walk it back on air, telling Watters instead: “Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else, just like I hope nobody is trying to push Canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.”
PolitiFact reviewed the CAIR remarks separately in August and found that a viral shorthand version — that El-Sayed “supports imposing Sharia law in the U.S.” — distorts the video: his actual argument tied opposition to Sharia bans to a broader pattern of movements targeting religious and ethnic minorities, not an endorsement of Sharia governing American courts. El-Sayed’s campaign says he believes in the separation of church and state. That fact-check does not resolve whether the “forces… alive and well today” framing was fair to Sharia-ban supporters — only that the narrower “he wants Sharia law here” claim overstates what he said.
On wealth taxation, El-Sayed told Watters: “I also think we got to start taxing wealth for people who have over $100 million. I mean at that point like what are gonna even do with more money?” Pressed on a specific rate during an earlier podcast appearance, he said: “If we tax you at 7%, you’re still going to make what? A cool $30 million off your billion dollars? I think that’s okay, they’re going to be okay, Jesse.” He has separately argued the alternative is that “a billionaire make[s] a second billion” instead of the public getting “good roads.”
Days before the interview, the Washington Free Beacon and Fox News reported on El-Sayed’s own 2025 tax return, which shows household income exceeding $686,000 — placing him in the top 1% of Michigan earners. His disclosure shows he paid himself a $64,000 “salary” through AME Higher LLC, a consulting and speaking-fee entity he founded, while separately claiming $103,000 as a “member draw” in company profits — a compensation structure tax accountants told the Free Beacon is commonly used to reduce Social Security and Medicare tax liability, and which past administrations, including Obama’s, have attempted to close as a loophole. El-Sayed and his wife also claimed a $26,171 “qualified business income” deduction on that return — a deduction created by the 2017 Trump tax law he has publicly criticized as benefiting “folks who don’t really need more money.”
Confirmed, on the record: both the 2009 and 2022 quotes, and the 2025 tax-return figures, are documented and not disputed by El-Sayed's campaign.
Disputed: whether the CAIR remarks amount to supporting Sharia law in the U.S. (PolitiFact says no); whether the LLC compensation structure is meaningfully different from ordinary tax planning (El-Sayed has not directly addressed the specific structure on the record as of publication).
The Watters interview didn’t happen in isolation. Three days earlier, at a Friday rally in Ohio, Vice President JD Vance (R) attacked El-Sayed by name: “I would love to go back in time and tell my papaw, that there is a man who claims to stand for working people, who says not only should we have sharia law, but if you criticize it, you are a white supremacist. That’s not my grandpa’s Democratic Party, my friend.”
Vance: I would love to go back in time and tell my papaw, that there is a man who claims to stand for working people, who says not only should we have sharia law, but if you criticize it, you are a white supremacist.
El-Sayed responded online over the following weekend with a post widely reported as referencing Second Lady Usha Vance’s Indian heritage — asking, in substance, whether Vance would take Usha Vance back in time to meet his grandfather too. Critics, including Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), called the post racially charged; Gill responded by asking why El-Sayed “just assume[s] that all White midwestern grandparents are racist.” Neither post could be independently verified to a live, specific X URL as of this story’s publication, so both are described here through outlet reporting rather than embedded directly — a distinction this site treats as important given how often screenshots of deleted or edited posts circulate inaccurately.
Abdul El-Sayed's Aug. 24 interview with Jesse Watters resurfaced two of his own past statements — a 2009 remark about personal religious finance and a 2022 speech tying Sharia-ban opponents to a lineage of white-supremacist violence — alongside his current push to tax fortunes over $100 million at 7%. Neither past statement is disputed as something he said; PolitiFact disputes only the shorthand claim that he supports Sharia governance in the U.S. What's newly documented is his own 2025 tax return, which shows a compensation structure tax experts say minimizes exactly the kind of taxes he's campaigning to raise on others. He faces Republican Mike Rogers on Nov. 3 for Michigan's open Senate seat.
