Last month, former President Donald J. Trump was still promising to reinstate what he called his “famous travel ban” on some Muslim countries. He falsely claimed over the summer that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to deposit thousands of jihadist sympathizers in Minnesota.” And he said Democrats have a plan to “turn the Midwest into the Middle East.”
The anti-Muslim scaremongering is a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s political identity, dating back at least to his 2016 campaign when he said he would create a registry of Muslims and embraced an apocryphal story about Gen. John J. Pershing executing Muslim rebels in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig fat.
But in the final stretch of the presidential race, Mr. Trump is trying to persuade a potentially decisive group of Arab and Muslim voters that they should vote for him, even though he has spent years insulting and demonizing them.
“I have many friends who are Arab,” the former president said last week in an interview on Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language TV channel. “They’re very warm people. It’s a shame what’s happening over there. They’re the warmest people.”
During a rally on Saturday in Michigan, a crucial swing state with a sizable Arab and Muslim population, he told the crowd that he had met a group of the community’s leaders earlier in the day. “You know what they want?” he asked. “They want peace. They’re great people.”
He has even gone on the offensive, arguing that Muslims should avoid voting for Ms. Harris because she has surrogates who — he claims — dislike Muslims. He singled out former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican who is backing Ms. Harris.
“Why would a Muslim or why would an Arab want to vote for somebody that has Liz Cheney as her hero,” Mr. Trump asked, apparently tying her to her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had a key role in the Iraq war.
“I think it is a great insult to Muslims all over the world,” he said.
The former president’s U-turn betrays a clear political calculation: With the race virtually tied, he could end up winning or losing based on a handful of votes from the Muslim Americans he has said in the past often failed to assimilate into American culture.
Mr. Trump acknowledged as much on Saturday: “They could turn the election one way or the other. I think we have it anyway. I’m telling you, we have so many votes, but we got to get more. Got to get more,” he said.
Mr. Trump is exploiting Democrats’ weakness among Arab and Muslim Americans because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault in Gaza. That campaign has killed more than 40,000 people in response to Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. (Most Arab Americans are not Muslim and most American Muslims are not Arabs, but large segments of both groups are sympathetic to the Palestinians’ cause.)
Bishara Bahbah, a former professor of public policy, voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. But Mr. Bahbah, a Palestinian Christian who was born in Jerusalem, was so incensed by the Biden administration’s support for the war in Gaza that this summer he founded Arab Americans for Trump.
Mr. Bahbah did not dispute Mr. Trump’s record on Muslims, but he insisted that “the president’s tone has changed.” And that is enough for him, given the Biden administration’s record in the Middle East, he said.
Madiha Tariq, a 42-year-old Pakistani American and Michigan resident, said she did not believe Mr. Trump had changed his views on Arabs and Muslims.
“I’m sorry — I’m not buying that,” she said. She said that Mr. Trump was taking advantage of a community that was on edge because of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
“I think he’s trying to make an opportunity out of this. And you know what? We are stronger than that as a community,” she said. She planned to vote for Ms. Harris.
And while most voters have no illusions about what Mr. Trump is trying to do, the opening is real among voters who say they may stay home, vote third party or even vote for the former president because they are so affronted by U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump called this year for Israel to finish its war in Gaza and has said that he will bring peace to the Middle East. He has also criticized Ms. Harris for her remark about “far too many innocent civilians” dying in Gaza after she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this summer.
Those voters could have a serious impact in the battleground state of Michigan, home to more than 300,000 residents with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry and which President Biden won by nearly 155,000 votes in 2020.
Keith Ellison, a Democrat who was the first Muslim to serve in Congress and is now Minnesota’s attorney general, said Mr. Trump believes he can “trick” Muslims. He chalked up Mr. Trump’s friendly new tone to calculated politics, not a more enlightened attitude.
“He just simply is using rhetoric that he thinks will help him win,” Mr. Ellison said.
Still, some Arab and Muslim voters say they are willing to take a chance on Mr. Trump — not just as a protest vote, but because they say no choice is perfect.
“We give the Republican a chance,” said Walid Fidama, a 60-year-old Yemeni American who lives in Dearborn, Mich., and runs a local Yemeni American political organization. He said he had long voted for Democrats, including Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020.
But this year he said he would vote Republican.
“Who knows?” Mr. Fidama said. “Maybe they are better for us.”
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