Republicans’ social conservatism wins over some Arab Americans

For John Akouri, whose father immigrated from Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1955, there is only one choice for president in November’s election: Donald Trump , despite the Muslim travel ban during his presidency, the felony falsifying business records conviction and the unadulterated drama constantly surrounding him.

“After almost two decades of wars and watching [the Islamic State] cause devastation in Syria and in Iraq we needed someone to come in and clean things up,” he said of his initial draw to Trump for the 2016 election. “So, I thought on a foreign policy and national level he was saying the right things. He was a breath of fresh air,” he continued, referencing Trump’s withdrawal of thousands of US troops from Syria in 2019 .

The former president’s supporters are now looking for more voters like Akouri, increasingly reaching out to Arab Americans in a bid to secure their vote in November’s presidential election. What they are finding is a growing receptiveness, particularly with certain Arab Americans who find appeal in Republicans’ conservatism on social issues such as religion and LGBTQ+ rights – and despite the GOP’s widespread support for Israel in its war on the Gaza Strip.

In June, Akouri was among a group of Michigan Arab American leaders invited to a private gathering of national Republican figures including House speaker Mike Johnson, majority leader Steve Scalise, and the billionaire Lebanese US businessman Massad Boulos . Boulos, whose son, Michael, married Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, in 2022, is leading a new effort to win Trump votes among Arab Americans.

“We plan not only not to vote for [the Democratic candidate] again, as we did in 2020 – we are now bent on ‘punishing’ [Democrats for Joe Biden’s] unfettered support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza,” said Bishara Bahbah, the founder and national chairman of Arab Americans for Trump.

In May, a group of prominent Arab Americans that included Boulos and Bahbah established a political action committee called Arab Americans for a Better America .

Bahbah has said that he and other members of the community have been reassured by Boulos, who he describes as Trump’s special envoy to the Arab and Muslim American communities, that a second Trump presidency would “put an immediate end to the war in Gaza”, though he offered no evidence.

While Trump has referred to himself as “the best friend that Israel has ever had”, and in March told Fox News that Israel had to “finish the problem”, without specifying what that would mean, Bahbah says that he is confident having the former president back in the White House would result in a quick end to the hostilities in Gaza. Those hostilities became a defining issue for Biden before he halted his re-election campaign on 21 July.

Trump has also said that – as president – he’d ban refugees from Gaza from entering the US. That’s a move with which Bahbah agrees – but for very different reasons.

“Israel would love to empty historic Palestine from its native Palestinians,” he said. “We will not give Israel the satisfaction of driving out our people from Palestine.”

While Arab Americans are often lumped together and viewed as a single voting bloc, that characterization is often rejected by those to whom the term is often apportioned.

“Arab Americans have common things with the Democrats and common things with Republicans,” said Dr Yahya Basha, a respected physician and leading member of metro Detroit’s Arab American community.

“We have a lot of Middle Eastern Christians, and Muslims,” Basha said. “For family issues, they lean with Republicans. It’s a very diverse community.”

In the 2000 presidential election, which took place before the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaida in 2001, Republican George Bush won an estimated 45% of the Arab American vote – and he beat Democratic party candidate Al Gore by a 2 to 1 margin in Dearborn . But the US’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 changed up those dynamics.

In 2020, only about a third of Arab American voters backed Trump nationwide. And Biden reportedly won nearly 70% of the vote in Michigan’s heavily Arab American counties.

Michigan is home to about 95,000 registered Chaldean Christian voters, a community of Assyrian Catholics that immigrated from Iraq and which does not always readily identify as Arab .

It’s a community that Trump has long courted. Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who scored a coveted spot at the Republican party convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night and spoke of being a “proud first-generation Arab American,” is the daughter of Iraqi Chaldean immigrants.

At a campaign rally in 2020, Trump name-checked Michigan’s Chaldeans . And the same year, the former president nominated Hala Jarbou , an Iraq-born Chaldean, to serve as a judge for the western district of Michigan, making Jarbou the first Chaldean American to reach the federal judicial district bench.

Despite his overtures to some Arab American groups, in October, Trump suggested that, should he win November’s presidential election, he would introduce “ideological screening” for all immigrants. He also said he would expand the controversial Muslim travel ban introduced under his previous administration, which temporarily restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority states and other countries.

For Basha, who immigrated from Syria and today runs a major healthcare facility in Royal Oak, Michigan, the failure of Barack Obama’s White House – with Biden as vice-president – to support the Arab Awakenings that roiled the Arab world more than a decade earlier is one reason to now listen to the overtures of Trump’s supporters .

Another is that Basha believes the US would drive fear into the west’s enemies under Trump. Without offering evidence, he spoke of how, if Trump were president, he does not believe Russian president Vladimir Putin would have had his military invade Ukraine or become involved in the Syrian civil war as it did with Biden and Obama in the White House, respectively.

“If Putin feared the United States, he would not have done what he did in Syria or Ukraine,” Basha opined. He also said Trump demonstrated strength in Iran when he ordered the January 2020 US drone strike that killed general Qassem Suleimani , the former head of Iran’s Quds Force.

Akouri feels that in some ways, Arab Americans have been left out of politics under Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, whom Biden has endorsed to run for the White House in November. Akouri says that when Trump was president, two Arab Americans were chosen to serve in his cabinet – Mark Esper (former secretary of defense, whose paternal family immigrated from Lebanon) and Alex Azar (ex-secretary of health and human services, whose family also came from Lebanon).

Biden, in contrast, has none. Akouri also notes that Biden promised to reopen the Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem several years ago, but so far that hasn’t happened.

This year, Michigan Republicans have gone to extra effort to connect with the Arab American community in the state. For instance, during this past Ramadan, leading officials made a three-hour round trip from Grand Rapids to Detroit to be present at an iftar dinner. Arab American leaders say such an effort was unprecedented.

“Many of my friends who were solidly blue Democrats are approaching me asking, ‘How do we support Trump?’” Akouri said.

“People want change.”