The mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, made headlines last month for endorsing former President Donald Trump.
Mayor Amer Ghalib doesn’t check stereotypical Trump supporter boxes. He’s a 45-year-old Muslim, an Arab American immigrant from Yemen, and the leader of the country’s only city governed entirely by Muslim Americans. He’s also a proud pro-Palestinian activist who backs the progressive Uncommitted movement.
Ghalib was one of the roughly 100,000 Michigan “uncommitted” voters who cast a protest ballot against President Joe Biden during the state’s Democratic primary this year in a bid to bend his arm on the war in Gaza. The Uncommitted coalition is heavily concentrated in Ghalib’s city, Hamtramck, as well as in Dearborn (and the nearby Dearborn Heights), where the majority of Michigan’s approximately 150,000 Arab and Muslim voters reside. Should they echo Ghalib’s support for Trump on Election Day, the former president could very well win a state he lost by just over 154,000 votes four years ago.
Leaders of the Uncommitted movement, allied with prominent Michigan Democrat, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), have withheld a crucial endorsement from Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the election.
They warned supporters not to vote for Trump as the group’s Marxist ideological underpinnings and anti-Zionist rhetoric are generally in opposition to Republicans’ values and pro-Israel platform.
But Ghalib’s pragmatic take on backing Trump is rooted in his belief that the former president will end the suffering in Gaza and usher in a world of “peace.”
“He was a very big fan of the Trump administration because he saw no wars,” Trump told Breitbart News. “There was no Oct. 7.”
Ghalib is worried Harris “is still going in the same path” as Biden, as she has not offered any concrete policy differences from the White House’s approach to the war in Gaza. But Trump has emphasized that while he supports Israel’s right to defend itself, he would bring a swift end to the war and voiced support for making “a deal” with Iran, which is funding Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
“If we win [the presidential election], it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out and very quickly,” the former president told reporters in July.
“Only President Trump will restore peace and stability in the Middle East for all people,” Senior Advisor to the Trump campaign Brian Hughes told the Washington Examiner in a statement that bemoaned the “Harris-Biden Administration’s failed foreign policy [that] has brought death, chaos, and war to the Middle East.”
But does Ghalib’s decision to break with leaders of the Uncommitted movement and support Trump represent an anomaly or trend within Michigan’s Arab and Muslim community?
Michigan’s “uncommitted” voters hailed predominantly from the majority Muslim cities of Dearborn and Hamtramck. Fifty-six percent of Dearborn voters and 61% of Hamtramck residents cast uncommitted ballots against Biden in February when he was still the presumed Democratic nominee.
The six members of the all-Muslim Hamtramck City Council are split between Trump and Harris. Council member Muhtasin Sadman of the Bangali-American community recently endorsed Trump, and two others have also refused to back the vice president thus far.
Three others have proclaimed their support for Harris in defiance of Ghaleb and say the mayor’s support for Trump isn’t indicative of their community.
However, the majority of the 519 comments made in response to Ghaleb’s initial Facebook post backing Trump are positive. The supportive trend followed in later social media posts from the mayor with Trump.
When asked how the community reacted to the mayor’s endorsement, Garrett Soldano, who ran as a Republican for Michigan governor in 2021, said, “I think it’s been very positive, but it depends on who you talk to, right?”
“If you talk to the Democrats, it’s not good, but if you talk to Republicans, it’s obviously very, very good,” Soldano commented. During his run for governor, Soldano visited Dearborn’s Muslim community, a place he noted few Republicans had ventured into, and said he found people that were “more conservative than conservatives.”
The GOP activist noted that many of the people he encountered were immigrants who had fled from totalitarian regimes and favored Republican values of “less government.”
“When you go and have a conversation with these folks, you start to realize that they have a whole heck of a lot more in common with the Republican side of the aisle than the Democrats,” he said.
“Most people that I know are either third-party or Trump,” an Arab American nurse from the Dearborn community told the New York Times in October.
Imam Hassan Qazwini, a prominent Arab leader who founded the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights, added that he didn’t “know anyone who would vote for Harris.”
Recent polls indicate that Arab support for Trump is on the rise. A new survey by the Council on American Islamic Relations showed Michigan’s Muslim voters prefer Trump to Harris by a six-point margin. Another survey by the Arab American Institute showed the voting bloc’s support for Trump has grown by eleven percentage points since 2020.
The polls come after Trump has made concerted efforts to engage with the Muslim community, requesting without prompts multiple meetings with Arab leaders like Ghalib. Meanwhile, groups like Uncommitted have often felt sidelined by Harris and her allies.
Now, there’s a strong sense, even within prominent pro-Palestinian groups and Arab leaders who haven’t backed Trump, that keeping Harris out of the White House is more important than “choosing the lesser of two evils.”
In October, the “Abandon Harris” movement pushed aside worries its endorsement of Green Party candidate Jill Stein might put Trump in office.
“There might someday be a moment where we do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but now we’ve reached a point where the evil is so pronounced that we must denounce it at every moment, regardless of the cost, to send an undeniable signal that a reckoning will come upon…[the Democratic Party] and it will have to ask why it lost,” Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam, who is the group’s leader, told the Black Agenda Report.
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Even Dearborn’s Arab-American mayor, a leader in the Uncommitted movement who criticized Ghalib’s decision to back Trump, broke with the coalition’s leadership after they urged people to “vote against” the former president. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud is done with supporting Democratic candidates based on “the continuous argument that they are the lesser of two evils or the fear factor of this other president will threaten democracy.”
“People want to be inspired to come out to the ballot,” he told Mother Jones. “Don’t blame the constituency if it doesn’t come out. If they don’t come out, you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself: What did you do wrong? Where did you fall short? What policy positions did you take that are not popular?”
