Can Trump turn Michigan's Arab community red with help from his in-laws?

It's been nearly a decade since then-presidential candidate Donald Trump issued his now-infamous call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." Two years later Trump made good on his proposal, releasing various iterations of a travel ban focusing on Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East and North Africa. As such, his campaign rhetoric was a "preview for an unprecedentedly Islamophobic administration," said the Brennan Center for Justice at the start of his term.

Now, despite recent echos of his 2016 xenophobia — including promises that "any student that protests [Israel's war on Gaza], I throw them out of the country" — Trump is actively courting members of the country's largest concentration of Muslim and Arab Americans in the perennial swing state of Michigan. There, dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden's handling of the Gaza war has helped launch a national "uncommitted" movement, complicating the Democrats' reelection effort. It's a potential electoral weakness that Trump hopes to exploit with the help of his son-in-law Michael Boulos and Boulos' father, Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos.

Last month, the Bouloses and Trump administration diplomat Richard Grenell met with dozens of Arab American activists in suburban Detroit in a push to make inroads with their influential voting bloc. But can Trump and his allies truly sway a community that has skewed heavily Democratic for the past 20 years? 

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

Dissatisfaction with Biden notwithstanding, any "apparent political opportunity for Trump may be limited," The Associated Press said. Many of the people who have met with the elder Boulos, whose son married Tiffany Trump in 2022, "so far are skeptical about the impact of these efforts." At his core, Massad struggles to "convince people to come to Trump's side because he hasn't offered anything substantial to the community," said Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani to the AP. 

Many of the questions asked of the Trump surrogates "were not answered directly," Arab American activist Khaled Saffuri said to CBS News. "I didn't expect these issues to be answered in detail in such a meeting. That requires some thought. But at least engaging the community is one step forward."

"I told Massad, 'This isn't about you being Lebanese and me being Lebanese,'" said AAN's Siblani to Abu Dhabi's The National news outlet. "You can't just buy votes." Regarding his demand for something "substantial" for the Arab American and Muslim community, "Trump hasn't done that yet." What that substantial offering looks like remains to be seen. "Obviously the No. 1 point that is of high priority within the Arab American community is the current war in the Middle East," countered Boulos to The National. "And the question is, who can bring peace and who is bringing war? And they know the answer to that."

There's ample evidence that Trump would be "even more supportive of the Israeli government than Biden," The Washington Post said. Regardless, some Arab American and Muslim activists see the current administration's policies as so bad "they might as well roll the dice on a second Trump term." That Trump and Republicans are hoping to seize upon the dissatisfaction with the current administration "should be a wake-up call for the Biden team." The "fear of a second Trump term no longer resonates," said American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Executive Director Abed Ayoub to The New York Times.

What next? 

Trump's Michigan outreach is the "beginning of a series of larger gatherings between Trump allies and Arab American leaders," Arab Americans for Trump chairman Bishara Bahbah said to CBS News. It is also the "latest example of outreach by some Republicans to Arab Americans" over the past several years through which the GOP "made gains in Dearborn in the November 2022 election," The Detroit Free Press said.

Trump and his envoys "can try all they want" to make inroads with Michigan's Arab American community, said former Democratic strategist Abbas Alawieh, an organizer with the Listen to Michigan movement, to The New York Times. "We won't be taken as fools here in Michigan. Whether or not Trump makes gains here is really more dependent on whether President Biden comes out more forcefully against this war."