US elections 2024: The Arab-American swell of support for Trump is nuanced and uneasy

When Arab Americans for Trump sent out a notice on Friday about the location of the movement’s watch party on election night in Dearborn, Michigan, which is known as the Arab capital of America, it was slated for the popular Yemeni-American coffee house, Haraz – a place that is also steps away from the Arab-American National Museum. 

Less than 24 hours later, AAFT, as the group refers to itself, changed the location of the Tuesday night event. 

Hamzah Nasser, who owns Haraz, told Middle East Eye that he had been planning to install big screens on election night, in a bid to bring people in his community together. 

So when the Trump campaign reached out, Nasser agreed to host. 

But when the request came to put up Trump flags and banners outside his business, he decided to withdraw his participation, despite being a Trump voter himself. 

“I’m not a Republican or a Democrat,” Nasser told MEE. 

“And honestly, for Trump, I don’t think he’s a Republican or a Democrat himself,” he added. “The guy speaks his mind and he’s fighting with everybody as a president. He doesn’t like war. That’s one thing. He doesn’t like war. He’s all about business.”

Arab Americans in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn make up more than half of its 110,000-strong population, according to the last US census conducted in 2020.

Over the past 13 months, the community has come together in collective grief over Israel’s war on Gaza, and Lebanon, which has to date killed over 43,000 people in Gaza, and 3,000 in Lebanon, respectively.

It’s not uncommon to see fluttering Lebanese flags on almost every other house in some neighbourhoods in Dearborn. The Lebanese contingent is among the largest.

Their mounting rage at dismissive rhetoric coming from the Biden administration as the number of dead and wounded continues to rise, and their feelings of betrayal by the Democratic Party, which they turned out for in droves in the last election, are palpable. 

But as much as Arab Americans have come together, the impending presidential election has, in some ways, fractured the community here. 

Several people described to MEE their own experience of being “vote-shamed” and becoming the target of online smear campaigns, whether they have come out in support of Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Harris supporters have been called “sellouts”, one longtime activist told MEE. The individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, had been in meetings with top Democratic Party officials to share the community’s grievances but was not able to share the experience publicly on social media for fear of being ostracised. 

Real photographs and AI-enhanced pictures, shared privately with MEE, showed images of people perceived to be aligned with the Democratic Party and who were labelled as disloyal to the Arab community.

Conversely, those who are now publicly endorsing Trump, or simply giving Republicans consideration on the ballot, said they have been on the receiving end of online abuse for legitimising a man who has shown open disdain for marginalised communities and tried to institute a Muslim travel ban. 

“This is my cousin,” Nasser said, as he pointed to a young man walking into his coffee shop. 

“He came in during Trump’s Muslim ban and he couldn’t come in during Obama’s time… Trump says all kinds of crap, but it’s not really true,” he added. According to the National Immigration Law Center, the early iterations of the travel ban had left hundreds of Yemeni spouses and relatives of US citizens stranded after being denied US visas.

After being watered down, waivers were introduced and ultimately Joe Biden repealed the ban. But many families have yet to be reunited. “Democrats are not your friends,” Nasser said. “And you know, maybe Republicans are not your friends, too.”

AAFT’s party is now scheduled to take place at a hookah lounge in Dearborn.

“It’s out of our hands,” the note to invitees said. 

‘I don’t understand the point of this meeting’

Trump’s brief stop on Friday at a Dearborn eatery, The Great Commoner, was the first for a presidential candidate of one of the two major parties.  

Democrats had sent surrogates, but neither Hillary Clinton nor Biden or Harris had come to the Arab capital of America as part of their campaigns, despite the city being in a battleground state that could sway the outcome of the election. 

Albert Abbas, a Lebanese-American business consultant who hosted Trump at the restaurant, which is owned by his brother, said on Friday it was the Democratic Party which gave him no choice. 

Ahead of the visit, “We were able to meet with many different people on the team, from the people that make the introductions to the highest levels of [Trump’s] office and future cabinet. And that’s amazing,” Abbas told MEE. 

“I don’t want to say I’m a representative of the community, because, quite frankly, right now, I am basically being ‘cancel-cultured’ because I had extended an invitation to Mr Trump.”

That invitation followed outreach from Massad Boulos, the Lebanese father-in-law of Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany. Boulos has become the campaign’s point man for outreach to Arab Americans. 

His impact was perhaps most evident in a 26 October letter signed by Trump and dedicated to the Lebanese-American community. 

“Dear Friends,” Trump began. “I will fix the problems caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, and end the suffering in Lebanon,” he wrote. “I want to see the Middle East find real and lasting peace, and we will conclude it in a way that there is no more war every 5 or 10 years.”

“You have my word,” the former president pledged. “Vote Trump for peace!”

That message stands opposed to the one Abbas said he received from the Harris campaign just a few weeks prior, in a private face-to-face meeting. 

“The first thing that came out of these representatives’ mouths is that we would like to start off the conversation by letting you guys know that [in a Harris] presidency, she has no interest in changing the foreign policy in regards to Israel, Lebanon and Palestine,” Abbas told MEE. 

He described being stunned by the directness of the remark, given there were many in the room who were grieving family members killed in Lebanon or Gaza. 

“I don’t understand the point of this meeting, and I really feel that you guys should be ashamed of yourselves,” Abbas said he told them. 

But it was difficult for several others to speak up. 

“Our community was being primed with less funding, and our [Democrat] appointees were worried about not getting appointed, and so it created a rift within the community,” he explained. 

But Abbas insisted on an alternative to the Democrats who had let him down.

“We need to find a solution to the community’s alliance with the Democratic Party, and the absence of the Republican Party over the last 20 years,” Abbas told MEE. “We’re not willing to just go to Donald Trump for no reason. There has to be some substance. There has to be some promises.” 

Conservative values

Trump’s promises to end both wars in the Middle East haven’t been the only draw.

The slow but sure swell of support for Trump among Arab Americans here has also been something of a “coming out” for those who have long been social conservatives. 

“We’re faith-based people. That framework of family, and the nuclear family, is very important to us,” Omar Shajrah, the first Yemeni-American assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County, where Dearborn is located, told MEE. 

Before Israel’s war on Gaza dominated the discourse here, there was an outcry against liberals for introducing into schools LGBTQ+ books deemed too sexually explicit.  

Raucous protests called for the removal of the school board in Dearborn, which was stacked with Democrats. 

Heads began to turn towards the Republican Party.

In the Arab-heavy, Muslim-dominated Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, nearby, major figures within the national conservative movement began arriving to form alliances. The culmination of one such effort was the Yemeni-American mayor’s endorsement of Trump in September – a move that drew international attention.  

“I think it’s given us an opportunity and a platform because there’s a vacuum now to educate the Muslims as it pertains to conservative Republican values,” Shajrah said. 

“[Democrats] will give us the appointments on judgeships or they’ll promote and endorse state representatives, but do they actually tackle the issues that we have? I don’t believe so, and I think that’s why there’s become this huge momentum shift to [the Republican] Party,” he told MEE.

“The Republicans now are understanding: ‘We got to reach out to this demographic and we got to listen to them’.”

And to play the long game, strategy is key for both sides.  

“Political decisions are based on interests. And it is in our interest right now to vote with President Trump,” Bishara Bahbah, the Palestinian-American founder of Arab Americans for Trump, told MEE. 

Asked whether he’s concerned about Trump’s past rhetoric about Arabs and Muslims, Bahbah appeared unfazed. 

“I don’t agree with every single thing on [his] platform, but platforms are platforms,” he said. “Historically, they have not been policies that have been implemented…. which is, in my perspective, a good thing.” 

Bahbah says he thinks Trump is the only leader that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would fear because he’s “totally unpredictable”.

“If he says to Israel ‘stop the war,’ and Netanyahu ignores him, I would not want to be in Netanyahu’s shoes as to what President Trump might be willing to do.”