ArabAmerican Trump voters have reservations but stand by their decision
To mark his one hundredth day in office - a milestone marked in every presidency - US President Donald Trump held a rally in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, on Tuesday.
He narrowly won the swing state in 2016, and again in 2024, thanks in large part to Arab Americans who were opposed to a continuation of the status quo: a Democratic candidate who, among other things, expressed a willingness to support war in the Middle East.
Trump campaigned as a "peacemaker and unifier".
But today, with backing from his administration, Israel has resumed bombing Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and threatening to do the same in Iran. In Yemen, the US has been carrying out nightly bombings since 15 March, killing scores of civilians, according to local health officials.
Immigrants from all of the aforementioned countries dominate the Arab demographic in Michigan, which boasts up to half a million Arabs in the state.
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While it can be easy to paint them with a broad brush and say foreign policy decides their vote, last year's election was a standout in that Israel had been carrying out what the United Nations called "acts of genocide" in Gaza for more than a year.
Palestinian and Lebanese Americans, in particular, had lost relatives to Israeli air strikes, so the issue was deeply personal.
But some who staunchly backed Trump in November did not indicate to Middle East Eye on Wednesday that they regretted their vote.
They expressed hesitation and frustration, and insisted that perhaps 100 days was not enough to judge a presidential performance. They also vowed to hold him accountable and believe his general unpredictability means he can still change course.
'Unconventional in his approach'
All those MEE spoke to live just under an hour's drive southwest of the rally site, either in Dearborn, known as America's Arab capital, or the suburbs next door.
The only presidential candidate known to have made a stop in this area on the campaign trail was Trump himself, just four days before the November election. That move helped secure his victory, given that no high-ranking official from the Biden administration paid this community mind.
"He's demonstrated that he's unconventional in his approach," Faye Nemer, who runs the MENA American Chamber of Commerce and helped orchestrate that visit, told MEE about the last three months of Trump's rule.
Still, she added, "There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of unknowns."
'We still need to continue to make America great again, and the beautiful people of the Islamic community are part of that'
- Pastor Mark Burns, spiritual adviser to Trump
That may be putting it mildly. The Trump administration has moved at breakneck speed since his inauguration on 20 January to reverse a plethora of Biden-era laws and introduce executive orders that have upended US political norms in their enforcement.
Chief among them is the crackdown on legal, documented immigrants and students with no criminal records, all because of their links to the pro-Palestine movement.
Thus far, the vast majority of those detained for this reason are Arab and/or Muslim.
"When it comes to protecting Jewish students, when you compare that to protecting Muslim and Arab students, you know the administration has been unevenhanded," Nemer said.
"That is something that is very worrisome and concerning to us. We have regular US citizens who are fearful of travelling abroad, because they're worried about prolonged delays at the border when they're coming back."
Mona Salama, a conservative political analyst who has backed Trump since his first term, expressed faith in the guardrails within the US government to do their job.
"You can attack a foreign government and that's not okay, but if you attack America, that's perfectly okay? I mean, right now, I think it's all going to go to the courts," she told MEE.
"I think this is just dangerous for not only us Arabs and Muslims. This is just dangerous for us Americans, because the majority of the people speaking against Israel are actually white Americans and Jews, like the non-Zionists."
Syrian-American Wasel Yousaf, a project control analyst at the automaker Stellantis, said freedom has always had its boundaries.
"For the immigrant, of course, [with] every law, there is some unfair situation," he told MEE. "You can say whatever you want, but don't do anything [that] bothers others or people's freedom or beliefs."
Nemer, Salama, and Yousaf were all members of the Arab Americans For Trump (AAFT) initiative, which gained momentum in the months leading up to the November election as community members turned their backs on the Biden administration for its unconditional support for Israel.
Soon after Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in early February and called for Gaza to become a beach resort without Palestinians, AAFT became Arab Americans For Peace, and issued a swift condemnation of the president's remarks.
Not all those MEE spoke to remain part of the group.
"It was just disheartening, because [if] you want to put American troops into another land, we Arabs know what that means," Salama said. "You're breaking international law."
While a ceasefire was underway in Gaza for Trump's first six weeks in office, by 18 March, it had fallen apart entirely as Israel resumed its bombing of the enclave. Now, Trump's designated envoy, Steve Witkoff, appears largely focused on talks between Russia and Ukraine as well as with Iran.
Yousaf believes the administration will not leave the war on Gaza on the back burner.
"It depends on the situation," Yousaf told MEE. "If people don't want to let [him] stop the war, this is not a school to stop the kids [from a] fight. There's something [that] happened that they need to work on. And he started working to stop it. The work is still going on."
Nemer, who lost family members to Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon, said that there is now a "continuation" of what happened under Biden.
"When there's loss of life, when it comes to foreign policy, that's not something that we're willing to be patient with or wait for an adequate resolution," she told MEE. "Trump received widespread support based on his commitment to put an end to endless wars."
Representation
To that end, Nemer and other concerned Arab Americans in Dearborn have been reaching out to Republican representatives at the state and federal levels, asking for meetings with administration officials. They've had little luck.
"The promise to our community members was constant [and] open communication with our community. And that has not been happening," Nemer said.
Trump has, however, appointed the largest number of Arab Americans to major public roles of any administration, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) noted earlier this month.
The list includes Massad Boulos, picked to be senior adviser on Arab, Middle East Affairs, and Africa. Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman who is also the father-in-law of Trump's daughter, was critical to the bridge-building that ultimately led to Trump's visit to Dearborn.
Jordanian-American Janette Nesheiwat, picked to be US Surgeon General, has a sister who is married to Trump's national security adviser, Mike Waltz.
And four other Arab Americans - two of whom are from the Detroit suburbs and whose endorsements of Trump were key to his election sweep among Arabs - are being awarded ambassadorships in the Middle East.
Among other names, the ADC said that "while policy disagreements exist, these appointments marked a significant step forward for representation and set a noteworthy benchmark for future administrations to consider".
Nemer said it wasn't enough.
"There's really no cabinet positions. There's no department heads," she said.
"If they want the community support moving forward, they need to really, truly understand the intricacies of the different ethnic makeups of the community."
Part of the outreach Nemer is leading has come to involve pastor Mark Burns, a self-described "deep MAGA" supporter of the president - referring to the Make America Great Again movement - and often referred to as Trump's spiritual adviser.
Burns was in Dearborn earlier this month, where he met members of the Muslim community, and where Nemer said they are working towards an interfaith project to elevate anti-war voices.
"I consider Dearborn, Michigan, as one of the ground zeroes or major hubs for the Islamic community," he told MEE. "For me, my desire is to cut through the noise of fake news."
Burns recently made headlines for his U-turn on pausing aid to Ukraine, a position Trump had adopted. After visiting the country, Burns returned to the US and said he "was wrong" and condemned Russia for its atrocities there.
Now, he said he looks forward to visiting Lebanon after his experience in Dearborn.
"My goal is to stand on what is right and not what is popular," Burns said. "I listen to those from Lebanon. I listen to those sharing... from Palestine, they are sharing their hearts, sharing their tears."
Trump's movement, he added, has room for all Americans.
"We still need to continue to make America great again, and the beautiful people of the Islamic community are part of that," he told MEE. "The more that we spend time together and not apart from each other, [we] realise where we can stand together."
And Trump is open-minded enough to come around, Yousaf suggested to MEE.
"He's flexible with what he's doing. Does he [do] the best always? Maybe he has a mistake... But he's working on it."
Responding to the vitriol from liberal voters being directed at Arab Americans who backed Trump, Salama said that it was inevitable some of that would come out.
"To those people... [you] fucked around and found out about Biden," she said.
"Biden did the damage that he's done in the Middle East. Trump, I don't think he can ever match that."
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