On Saturday, former President Donald Trump received endorsements from numerous imams, mayors and Muslim community leaders in Michigan—a constituency that heavily supported President Biden in 2020, helping him narrowly win the state.
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 26, 2024
President Trump was just endorsed by Imam Belal Alzuhairi and other prominent leaders of Michigan's Muslim community — the most expansive, diverse coalition in political history.
"We, as Muslims, stand with President Trump because he promises PEACE — NOT WAR!" pic.twitter.com/HQ65R0b76T
BREAKING: The Muslim Mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, which is within the Detroit area, just endorsed Trump.
— George (@BehizyTweets) October 26, 2024
"I support and I endorse President Trump, because we are going to make, we're going to stop the wars. We're going to make the United States safe again. And also we're… pic.twitter.com/8Wchbk2c3F
Increasing numbers of Arab leaders in Southeast Michigan are turning their backs on Kamala Harris and are now encouraging their community to throw their support behind former President Trump.
“Just look where we’re at right now and look where we were before,” Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi told reporters during an online call Monday.
Bazzi’s comments represent a growing sentiment among some Arab leaders in Michigan, where there has been increasingly negative sentiment around the Biden administration’s handling of the conflicts in the Middle East. Dearborn, Michigan, is a suburb of Detroit with the largest per capita Muslim population in the United States.
“I can tell you, a lot of people are actually swaying to voting for Trump because they really don’t like what going on,” Bazzi said. “They think their future doesn’t look bright with the administration and the way they’re heading.”
Bazzi was joined on the call by Hamtramck, Michigan, Mayor Amer Ghalib, who leads the nation’s only Muslim-run city and made waves last month by announcing his endorsement of Trump.
“The current administration has done nothing, and the war is expanding to other countries, and it could be a regional war and maybe even World War Three,” Ghalib said. “President Trump keeps saying that he will end the chaos in the Middle East, and I talked to him personally, I told him ‘your strength is that no wars happened during your term, so we want it to stay that way.’”
While Ghalib acknowledged that some of Trump’s past rhetoric offended those in the community, his outreach since has made a difference. That outreach has worked, the mayor argued, noting that there is a “portion of the community that’s considering supporting Trump, and historically, those people used to vote Democrat.”
“Some people are trying to vote for a third party because they predict that President Trump may do the same thing or even worse,” he said. “What could be worse than what’s going on now? There’s nothing worse.”
One of those people is Dearborn’s Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center founder and Imam Husham Al-Hussainy, who told reporters on the call that he is now leaning towards support for Trump.
“I lean towards Mr. Trump because I found him closer to the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran. Because I support peace, no war,” he said, adding that the country “deserves to have a strong leader where he can bring peace in this world.”
On Wednesday, veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Vice President Harris is caught in a “terrible place” on the growing conflict in the Middle East
“This is a very fraught thing for Harris because in some ways she’s at the mercy of events there. She and Biden are—but she’s the candidate—cross-pressured between an Arab community that is significant enough to influence the race in Michigan” and Jewish voters, Axelrod said during an episode of the “Hacks on Tap” podcast.
“It’s a terrible place to be,” he said.
A poll from the Arab News Research and Studies Unit and YouGov shows Trump leading Harris among Arab Americans with 45 percent support to her 43 percent. The survey polled 500 Arab Americans nationwide in late September.
It found that Arab Americans have more confidence in Trump than Harris to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, 39% to 33%.
A majority of political handicappers believe Harris needs to win Michigan to defeat Trump.
Biden carried the state by 154,000 votes over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. However, The Hill reported that more than 100,000 Michigan Democrat primary voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” instead of Biden in February as part of a campaign to “Abandon Biden.”
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