Trump's strange bedfellows: Arab Americans and right-leaning Jews

Grand Rapids, Michigan :In the final hours before Election Day dawned, some of Donald Trump's top surrogates in Michigan were onstage in a Grand Rapids arena, distilling the choice in the campaign into a stark and striking message.

"Choose peace over war," urged Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Michigan.

Democrats, suggested Mayor Bill Bazzi of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, were "a bunch of warmongers."

And former Rep Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate, welcomed "our Christian Arab friends, our Muslim Arab friends" and declared, "We all want a path to peace.

"Thank you," he said, "for being part of that coalition."

It is an extraordinary new coalition. Along the way to his decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump drew at least some Arab American and Muslim voters who are outraged by the Biden administration's support for Israel in the war in the Gaza Strip. He managed to do so without alienating the right-leaning American Jews who see Trump as Israel's strongest champion.

Even in an election marked by a reordering of the country's traditional political teams, these strange bedfellows stand out.

The two groups hold sharply divergent expectations for the president-elect. And both strongly pro-Israel voters and some of Trump's Arab American backers are skeptical that his ascent this week is the start of a durable cross-ideological, interfaith coalition.

For Trump, the question is whether he can keep both happy -- or if he will even try.

"This was not even a shotgun wedding -- it was a blind-date wedding," James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee, said of Trump's new support from Arab Americans and Muslims. Zogby said many of those voters backed the former president to protest the Biden administration's support for Israel in the war in Gaza, not to affirm his campaign. He anticipated that Trump would "pursue policies that will make them more furious."

"The more they see what's going to happen, the less enchanted they'll be," he said of Arab Americans. "I don't expect the right wing in the Jewish community to be disappointed at all, unfortunately."

Broadly speaking, American Jews tend to strongly favor Democrats. And it is not yet clear how many Arab American and Muslim voters overall backed Trump, who has a long history of Islamophobic statements and policies, and, of those who did, how many were simply casting protest votes.

But in Dearborn, Michigan, a majority-Arab city, Harris won just 36 per cent of the vote, according to unofficial results, a roughly 34-percentage-point drop from Joe Biden's share of the 2020 vote in similar results released after that election. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate to the left of Harris, picked up 18per cent of the vote. But Trump's support also jumped -- to 42per cent of the vote from less than 30per cent four years ago, though turnout was lower.

"Whatever he did on his campaign trail in last two months, I think he won the hearts and minds of many Muslims," said Rabiul Chowdhury, a founder of Muslims for Trump who is based in Pennsylvania. "This guy is a Muslim-friendly guy."

Trump is, of course, the same guy who blocked citizens of predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States during his last presidency, and who spent years demonizing and insulting Muslim Americans.

As president, he repeatedly made clear he supported the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, taking several steps that Muslim and Arab voters found inflammatory, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

And he is so beloved among right-wing Israelis that some named a settlement after him in the Golan Heights. He also has strong support among Orthodox Jews in the United States, who tend to be more conservative.

It is not clear how substantively different Trump's position on the war in Gaza will be from Biden's.

But in interviews throughout the campaign, Arab American and Muslim supporters said they were ready to take a chance on him anyway.

Some were already aligned with the socially conservative views of the Republican Party. Many were nostalgic for the relative quiet of 2019.

They also noted his efforts to campaign in Dearborn and the time spent in the area by his surrogates, especially Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessperson and an in-law of Trump's, and Richard Grenell, Trump's former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence chief.

By contrast, they said, they saw Harris as inaccessible to the community.

"I don't know what's going to happen with him and his policies with Israel," said Samraa Luqman, an environmental and social justice activist who helped organize support for Trump in Dearborn. "I can say that he offered hope, whereas the Democrats offered none."

Ultimately, she added, the devastation of Gaza -- which followed the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 -- happened on the Biden-Harris administration's watch.

"Nothing is worse than what is happening right now," she said.

Meanwhile, Trump's strongest supporters in the pro-Israel Jewish community insisted that he would continue to be a stalwart supporter of Israel despite his broadly isolationist rhetoric.

"We have a four-year track record of knowing how he governs and how he views the world," said Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition. "The idea that somehow he's a totally different, 180-degree person from who he was four years ago doesn't pass the smell test."

He also said there were areas of common ground, pointing to developments like the expansion of diplomatic ties between Israel and Arab states during the first Trump administration.

But Trump is also known to be highly susceptible to flattery and ideologically flexible. In a speech in Pittsburgh shortly before Election Day, Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, warned that if Trump thought it was in his interests, he "would turn his back on Israel and the Jewish people on a dime."

Some Trump supporters from both the Jewish and the Arab American and Muslim communities acknowledged the obvious tensions now at play.

"I do have concern that these American Arabs, Dearborn Arabs, will try to pressure Trump to have Israel stop the defensive war before they complete their mission," said Morton A. Klein, who heads the Zionist Organization of America.

But he expressed hope that the president-elect and his advisers would reach a different conclusion about Israel's approach to the war in Gaza.

"He would never agree with these positions, I don't believe," Klein said.

Luqman, in Dearborn, expressed similar wariness of some of her fellow Trump voters.

"There are going to be people that do not wish to have us have a seat at the table," she said. "That's unfortunate that there are so many of them that are in the Republican Party."

And in one sign that this unusual coalition may be fleeting, she said she still did not consider herself a Republican.

"They keep telling me, 'You should,'" she said. "I'm not there."