After Donald J. Trump wrapped up a recent speech at the Detroit Economic Club, two local imams were waiting for him backstage.
One was Belal Alzuhiry, a Yemeni American cleric at the United Community Center, a Sunni mosque in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Mich. He was eager to question Mr. Trump about his description of Yemeni immigrants as “known terrorists” at a rally this month.
In the 15-minute meeting, Mr. Alzuhiry said, Mr. Trump gave the religious leader what is, for him, an extraordinarily rare thing: an apology.
“He said, ‘I made a mistake and I apologize for it,’” said Mr. Alzuhiry, who is still undecided about how he will vote, but who came away pleased with the answer.
The exchange was a small victory for a quiet, unlikely campaign to persuade a potentially decisive group of voters in the presidential race. Since early this year, a pair of unofficial Trump emissaries — Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and an in-law of Mr. Trump, and Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence chief — have been crisscrossing Michigan, trying to repackage and sell Mr. Trump to skeptical Arab American and Muslim voters there.
In 2020, these overlapping but different constituencies — many Arab Americans are Christian — largely rejected Mr. Trump, who as a 2016 candidate proposed a national registry of Muslims and vowed a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States. But the war in Gaza and Lebanon has strained their support for Democrats, and Mr. Boulos and Mr. Grenell have set out to exploit the weakness.
They have held what they estimate to be more than 100 private meetings, delivering a range of pitches, according to interviews with seven people who have met with one or both of the men. They have pointed to common ground with the former president on social and economic policies and have helped arrange access to the former president at events.
Mr. Grenell, who is lobbying to be secretary of state in a potential second Trump administration, has at least twice suggested Mr. Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could be useful in pressuring regional leaders. Both men often repeat Mr. Trump’s promises to be a peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And despite Mr. Trump’s record of solid support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his government, Mr. Boulos and Mr. Grenell have successfully pursued the endorsements of sharp critics of Israel, including one activist who has labeled Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide.
Democrats have dismissed these efforts as plain pandering. Formal endorsements from the most prominent figures in the Arab American and Muslim community have been relatively few so far.
But even local leaders and activists opposed to Mr. Trump say that the outreach is sending a meaningful signal, at a time when the Harris campaign, worried about alienating voters on either side of the war, has been cautious in campaigning in the same communities.
“All they’ve heard about Trump in the past is that he has something against Muslims,” said Mr. Alzuhiry, who posted a picture of himself with Mr. Trump on Facebook after the meeting. “But that was before.”
The charm offensive does not necessarily need to result in more Trump voters to be effective. In an interview, Mr. Boulos acknowledged that convincing Arab American voters not to vote for Ms. Harris could be enough.
“We don’t have to win over everybody,” Mr. Boulos said. “There are some that strongly believe that they wouldn’t vote for either of the major candidates. That’s fine with us.”
Asked about Mr. Boulus, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said the campaign was grateful for his “very effective outreach.” The campaign did not comment on Mr. Trump’s backstage meeting in Detroit.
Arab Americans have voted reliably Democratic for two decades. But that loyalty has been shaken by the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault in the Gaza Strip, a campaign that has killed some 43,000 people in response to Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The war’s recent expansion into southern Lebanon — where many in Michigan’s Arab American community have roots, relatives and homes — has further strained the relationship.
A poll this month by the Arab American Institute found that Ms. Harris’s support among registered Arab American voters was still far below Mr. Biden’s support in 2020 and effectively tied with Mr. Trump.
Although estimates of registered Arab American voters in Michigan are unreliable, the number of the state’s registered Muslim voters — 200,000 — exceeds Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in 2020, and Mr. Trump’s in 2016.
A Times/Siena poll last month found Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump in a dead heat among likely voters in Michigan.
Mr. Trump is still mistrusted by many in the Arab American and Muslim communities for a long history of Islamophobic statements and his ban on travel from half a dozen majority-Muslim countries in the first days of his presidency — a ban he has recently promised to reinstate, and expand, if re-elected.
But Dearborn, Mich., the country’s only Arab American-majority city, was an early hub of organizing against the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the current conflict. Mr. Boulos said he recognized that as an “opening” for Republicans.
Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman who is the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar automotive manufacturing and distribution company in Nigeria, first met Mr. Trump at a White House Christmas party in 2019, after his son, Michael, began dating Mr. Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany. (The couple married in 2021.)
The Trump surrogates’ first foothold was Yahya Basha, a Syria-born doctor and the founder of a medical diagnostics company in Royal Oak, Mich. Dr. Basha has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, he said, but he grew skeptical of Mr. Biden’s chances of winning — and, he said, “I never close a door.”
Starting in May, he convened a series of meetings bringing members of the Arab American community together with Mr. Grenell and Mr. Boulos.
Their early outreach to voters demonstrated the difficulty of navigating the foreign policy priorities of Michigan’s many expatriate communities.
In his first call with Mr. Grenell, Dr. Basha asked whether Mr. Trump would be able to pressure Russia and Iran to withdraw support of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. Mr. Grenell called the idea “doable,” Dr. Basha said.
In June, when Mr. Grenell spoke with Osama A. Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News, an influential bilingual newspaper in Dearborn, he made a similar proposition. He suggested that Mr. Trump would push Mr. Putin to persuade Iran to withdraw support from Syria and from Hezbollah, Mr. Siblani said.
It was an odd enticement to offer Mr. Siblani, who has called the recently killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “the great leader of this time.” “He didn’t know who he was talking to,” Mr. Siblani said. This week, his paper declined to endorse either candidate for president.
Mr. Grenell declined to be interviewed. Oubai Shahbandar, an adviser to Mr. Grenell, did not respond to questions about the conversation with Mr. Siblani and instead noted that Mr. Trump’s sanctions on Iran had cut into Hezbollah’s revenues.
Mr. Boulos said he has largely avoided talking about the particulars of foreign policy. Mr. Trump has offered few specifics as to how he would resolve the expanding Middle East conflict.
The Trump administration was unwaveringly supportive of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, defending the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, recognizing Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights and moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
In wooing some Arab American communities, Mr. Trump’s emissaries have sought common ground that has little to do with foreign policy.
In a series of meetings with Amer Ghalib, the Yemeni American mayor of Hamtramck, Mr. Boulos, who is Christian, made the case for supporting Mr. Trump on the basis of a shared interest in social conservatism. Mr. Ghalib announced his endorsement last month.
Mr. Trump’s unofficial envoys have also promoted voting for Mr. Trump as a means of punishing Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris for the administration’s Middle East policy.
“The punishment part is the primary thing,” said Samraa Luqman, an environmental justice activist in Dearborn and a former Michigan co-chair of Abandon Biden, a national campaign — later renamed Abandon Harris — to defeat the Democratic ticket in the election.
Ms. Luqman, after speaking with Mr. Grenell and Mr. Boulos over several months, endorsed Mr. Trump, and posed for photos with him at a rally in September. “You have to punish a party for genocide,” she said. “If you don’t, they will be emboldened and they will continue their current policies.”
Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn and a former Democratic state representative, regards Mr. Trump’s outreach to his community as cynical.
“I think Trump is trying to capitalize on a weak moment between the Democratic Party and the Arab American and Muslim constituencies that have been very loyal to this party for two-plus decades,” he said.
But he said that Ms. Harris’s reluctance to distance herself from the Biden administration’s policy, and to call for an end to arms sales to Israel, had made it impossible for him to endorse her, either.
“We have residents who have lost 70 family members,” he said. “How do you come to them and say, ‘I need you to vote for a lesser of two evils’?”
Wary of losing voters on either side of the conflict, Ms. Harris’s campaign has done little public campaigning in Michigan’s Arab American communities, though it has received endorsements from some Muslim leaders. Although it has seven campaign offices in Wayne County, it has none in Dearborn, the county’s second-largest city.
Nasrina Bargzie, the Harris campaign’s director of Muslim and Arab American outreach, said Ms. Harris had been “steadfast in her support of our country’s diverse Muslim community.”
The most visible advertisements featuring Ms. Harris in Dearborn have been paid for by Future Coalition PAC, a secretive entity bankrolled by the conservative organization Building America’s Future. Its ad campaign plays up Ms. Harris’s support for Israel and the fact that her husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.
A digital billboard paid for by the organization on a major thoroughfare in Dearborn depicts Ms. Harris in front of an Israeli flag and declares that she “will always support Israel and our Jewish communities.”
An officer listed on Future Coalition PAC’s campaign filings did not respond to a request for comment. The committee’s website previously linked to the YouTube page of the Protecting America Initiative, an organization whose senior advisers include Mr. Grenell.
Mr. Shahbandar said in an email that Mr. Grenell had “absolutely nothing to do with” Future Coalition PAC.
“That billboard raised so many issues,” said Mohammad Mardini, a prominent Sunni imam in Dearborn, who attended the meeting after Mr. Trump’s speech in Detroit last week.
He said many in the community believed it was the work of the Harris campaign. “If she would have called for a meeting and explained the policy, maybe it would be different,” he said.
The post Trump’s In-Law Is Trying to Exploit Democrats’ Weakness With Arab American Voters appeared first on New York Times.
