For John Akouri, whose father emigrated from Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1955, there is only one option for president in the November election: Donald Trump, despite the Muslim travel ban during his presidency, the conviction for falsifying corporate records and the outright drama that constantly surrounds him.
“After nearly two decades of wars and watching [the Islamic State] “To cause destruction in Syria and Iraq, we needed someone who could clean it up,” he said of his initial attraction to Trump before the 2016 election. “So I thought he said all the right things on the foreign and domestic levels. He was a breath of fresh air,” he continued, referring to Trump’s withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from Syria in 2019.
The former president’s supporters are now looking to recruit more voters like Akouri, increasingly reaching out to Arab Americans in an effort to secure their votes in November’s presidential election. What they’re seeing is a growing receptiveness, particularly among some Arab Americans who find appeal in Republican conservatism on social issues like religion and LGBTQ+ rights—and despite the GOP’s broad support for Israel in its war in Gaza.
In June, Akouri was among Arab American leaders from Michigan invited to a closed-door meeting of national Republican figures, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and billionaire Lebanese American 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 determined to ‘punish’ [Democrats for Joe Biden’s] “Unlimited support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza,” said Bishara Bahbah, founder and national chair of Arab Americans for Trump.
In May, a group of prominent Arab American politicians, including Boulos and Bahbah, formed a political action committee called Arab Americans for a Better America.
Bahbah has said he and other members of the community have been reassured by Boulos, whom he describes as Trump’s special envoy to the Arab and Muslim American communities, that a second Trump presidency would “immediately end the war in Gaza,” though he provided no evidence of this.
While Trump described himself as “the best friend Israel has ever had” and told Fox News in March that Israel needed to “solve the problem” without specifying what that would mean, Bahbah said he was confident that the former president’s return to the White House would result in a swift end to hostilities in Gaza, which became a defining issue for Biden before he suspended his re-election campaign on July 21.
Trump has also said that as president he would ban Gaza refugees from entering the US, a move Bahbah agrees with – but for very different reasons.
“Israel would like to empty historic Palestine of its native Palestinians,” he said. “We will not give Israel the satisfaction of expelling our people from Palestine.”
Although 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 applied.
“Arab Americans have similarities with the Democrats and similarities with the Republicans,” said Dr. Yahya Basha, a respected physician and prominent member of the Arab American community in metro Detroit.
“We have a lot of Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims,” Basha said. “On family matters, they lean Republican. It’s a very diverse community.”
In the 2000 presidential election, which took place before the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in 2001, Republican George Bush won an estimated 45 percent of the Arab American vote—beating Democratic Party candidate Al Gore by a 2-1 margin in Dearborn. But the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 changed that dynamic.
In 2020, only about a third of Arab American voters supported Trump nationwide. And Biden reportedly won nearly 70% of the vote in Michigan’s predominantly Arab American counties.
Michigan is home to about 95,000 registered Chaldean Christians, a community of Assyrian Catholics who emigrated from Iraq and who do not always identify as Arab.
It’s a community Trump has long courted. Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, who won a coveted spot at the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night and spoke of a “proud first-generation Arab-American,” is the daughter of Iraqi Chaldean immigrants.
At a 2020 campaign rally, Trump singled out Michigan’s Chaldeans. That same year, the former president nominated Hala Jarbou, an Iraqi-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 outreach to some Arab-American groups, Trump suggested in October that if he won the November presidential election, he would implement “ideological screening” for all immigrants. He also said he would expand the controversial Muslim travel ban imposed under his previous administration, which temporarily restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority states and other countries.
For Basha, who emigrated from Syria and now runs a large healthcare facility in Royal Oak, Michigan, the failure of Barack Obama’s White House — with Biden as vice president — to support the Arab awakening that convulsed the Arab world more than a decade earlier is a reason to listen to the overtures of Trump’s supporters now.
Another is that Basha believes the US would sow fear among the West’s enemies under Trump. Without providing evidence, he spoke about how, if Trump had been president, he doesn’t believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would have let his army invade Ukraine or become involved in the Syrian civil war as it did with Biden and Obama in the White House, respectively.
“If Putin was afraid of the United States, he would not have done what he did in Syria or Ukraine,” Basha said. He also said that Trump showed his strength in Iran when he ordered the US drone strike in January 2020 that killed General Qassem Suleimani, the former leader of Iran’s Quds Force.
Akouri argues that Arab Americans have been left out of politics in some ways under Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, who Biden 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 (former Secretary of Health and Human Services, whose family also came from Lebanon).
Biden, on the other hand, has none. Akouri also notes that Biden promised several years ago to reopen the Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem, but that has not happened yet.
This year, Michigan Republicans have made an extra effort to reach out to the state’s Arab American community. For example, during Ramadan, top officials made a three-hour round trip from Grand Rapids to Detroit to attend an iftar dinner. Arab American leaders say such an effort was unprecedented.
“A lot of my friends who were true blue Democrats come to me and say, ‘How can we support Trump?’” Akouri said.
“People want change.”
