Watch: Abdul El-Sayed Has His Hillary Clinton 'Hot Sauce in Purse' Moment in Cringey, Pandering Interview
It’s not easy getting lower than Hillary Clinton, but Abdul El-Sayed just pulled it off.
A decade after the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state managed to turn “hot sauce” into a national punchline of pandering, El-Sayed used a luncheon interview with a black publisher for even more obvious pandering to black voters.
What he ordered to eat was embarrassing enough — but not even close to the most embarrassing part of the interview.
HAHAHAHAHAHA it was fried chicken https://t.co/J6Wmn6lJlJ
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 20, 2026
El-Sayed was meeting with Ashley Allison, publisher of the black-oriented magazine The Root, at a Washington, D.C., restaurant trying to whip up enthusiasm for his campaign among Michigan blacks. (Even CNN admitted he has a problem with one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies.)
It was an exercise in pandering that would make even a Clinton blush.
From ordering fried chicken — El-Sayed’s interlocutor went with the blackened salmon — to belittling those of his own background, the man aiming to become the country’s first Muslim senator managed mainly to show just how low he was willing to go to pull the wool over the eyes of Wolverine State voters.
See, El-Sayed might have won a brutal nomination fight in the Democratic Party, thanks to his support among the party’s ascendant leftists — the Boris-and-Natasha duo of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, and the scheming Iago of a podcaster named Hasan Piker.
But he knows full well that in a general election, he’s going to need the support of the party’s more traditional base — and in Democratic politics, that means black voters.
And for El-Sayed, “black voters” evidently means those who are angry and resentful at small business owners in black communities who happen to be Middle Easterners trying to make the most of the American Dream.
Abdul El-Sayed to black voters: I am not like your “gas station Abdul” who hates blacks, catcalls women This reeks of desperation https://t.co/HfzrKViid9
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 20, 2026
“For too many black Detroiters in particular, their experience with somebody who looks like me is not a good one,” El-Sayed told Allison. “You go into a gas station, you go into a party store, you’re being talked at from behind bullet-proof glass.
“If you’re a woman, you’re being catcalled. If you’re a kid, you’re being sold a loosey [individual cigarette] out the back, being denied a bathroom.
“I’ve always tried to be on the right side of that. But I also understand that if that’s your experience with somebody whose name is like mine, that leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.”
And then there was this: “I also ask to be judged on the content of my character.”
Seriously? The “content of my character”?
Back in 2016, when Hillary was a Democratic nominee for president desperate for black support, she was a guest on “The Breakfast Club,” a black-oriented radio program/podcast. There, she made the literally incredible claim that she always carries hot sauce in her purse — presumably to spice up all those grits and fried catfish she scarfs down in Chappaqua.
When the host, who goes by the moniker Charlamagne tha God, said, “I want you to know, people are going to see this and say, ‘she’s pandering to black people …,'” Clinton had one of the few honest moments of her miserably dishonest public life.
“OK,” she said. “Is it workin’?”
Notice that she did not throw an entire class of Americans under the bus — much less the storekeepers and small-business entrepreneurs El-Sayed maligned.
Notice that she didn’t go out of her way to coddle criminals. (El-Sayed knows as well as anyone why bulletproof glass guards cash registers in poor neighborhoods.)
Notice that she didn’t invoke one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous quotes in a shallow defense of her own candidacy.
And El-Sayed did all of the above.
No Democrat can win Michigan without a sizable black vote. El-Sayed knows it, and he’s doing his worst to try to get it.
It’s not easy making Hillary Clinton look good by comparison, but damned if he didn’t do just that.
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