Two years after Arab and Muslim voters helped deliver Michigan to President Donald Trump, many say the Republican Party has repaid them with attacks.
“There’s no thanking, there’s attacking,” Husham Al-Husainy, an Iraqi American imam in Dearborn, told MS NOW.
Al-Husainy backed Trump in 2024, as did many Arab and Muslim voters protesting the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump won nearly half the vote in the state’s majority-Arab precincts, research suggests. This year, Al-Husainy is backing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed for Senate, and he said most local Muslim voters he knows who supported Trump will do the same.
“They changed,” he said of Republicans. “We didn’t.”
Trump has repeatedly targeted El-Sayed, who would be the nation’s first Muslim senator. At a rally in Georgia on Friday, Trump baselessly called him a “jihadist” and “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood” and mocked his name.
On Truth Social, Trump has repeatedly called him “Mohammed,” his middle name. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, has falsely claimed El-Sayed “believes that America deserved 9/11.”
Bishara Bahbah, who led the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, called the president’s attacks on El-Sayed “astounding” and “unacceptable.” He also blasted Trump’s endorsement this week of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a major betrayal of the Arab and Muslim Americans who voted for the president in 2024.”
“A lot of people tell us that we’ve been fooled, that we’ve been used, that we got him to the presidency and we got nothing in return,” Bahbah said.
Michigan strategists say Republicans squandered a real opening. “They blew it for sure,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, who works to mobilize Muslim voters.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat, said the party has made “no authentic outreach” to the community. “They love their vote from time to time, but that’s about it,” he said.
Republicans deny the attacks are Islamophobic. Rogers asked the state party not to attack El-Sayed’s faith or mock his name, according to Michigan GOP Chair Jim Runestad and Rogers’ campaign. Asked about Trump’s rhetoric, however, Runestad brushed it off.
“Everyone who knows the president knows he says what he says when the teleprompter’s shut off,” he said.
El-Sayed says the attacks are meant to “distract us from the fact that we can’t afford our gas and we can’t afford our groceries.”
