PHOENIX (AP) — It was Donald Trump’s mispronunciation that first attracted attention.
“We also have a lot of Asur-Asians in our room,” Trump said at a weekend rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona. “We have some great people in our room.”
Asur-Asiatics?
It turns out that the former president was trying to shout out a small group of Assyrians who supported his campaign. They were given prominent seats right behind him, wearing red “Assyrians for Trump” shirts as he spoke to a packed arena 90 minutes north of Phoenix.
Assyrians, a Christian indigenous group that traces their ancestry to ancient Mesopotamia in the modern Middle East, are a small minority community in the United States, but they happen to have sizable communities in two of the seven swing states that will contest the Nov. 5 elections to decide. , Michigan and Arizona. That could give them outsized influence in elections where the polls show them to be essentially even.
“Thank you, President Trump, for making a mistake on our behalf,” said Sam Darmo, a Phoenix real estate agent and co-founder of Assyrians for Trump, who sat behind the president during the meeting. “Because you know what? Assyrians became very famous. Today, more Americans know who the Assyrians are than they did on Sunday.”
Assyrians come from parts of what is now Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They are descendants of a powerful Middle Eastern empire and early followers of Christianity, whose language is a form of the Aramaic language scholars believe Jesus Christ spoke.
Many Assyrians, some who identify as Chaldean or Syrian, have fled centuries of persecution and genocide in their homeland, most recently at the hands of the Islamic State group. Ancient relics have been destroyed or stolen and traded.
About 95,000 people in the United States identify their ancestry as Assyrian/Chaldean/Syrian, according to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data. By far the largest concentration is in Michigan, a battleground area home to 38,000 Assyrians. There are approximately 5,000 Assyrians living in Arizona. The other five theaters each have fewer than 500 Assyrians. California and the Chicago area also have large Assyrian communities, but are not politically competitive.
Across the global Assyrian diaspora, the community has campaigned for the construction of monuments to preserve the memory of the atrocities they faced, including the 1915 deportation and massacre of Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks by the Ottoman Turks. They have also pushed to convince local and national governments to formally recognize massacres as genocide, a term widely accepted by historians. Such statements are fiercely contested by Turkey, which denies that the deaths constitute genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and the dead are victims of civil war and unrest.
Trump correctly pronounced Assyrian in an interview released Thursday with podcaster Patrick Bet-David, who is Assyrian and Armenian.
“Do you know why they were there?” Trump said. “They were so nice. I met them, the Assyrians. They said, ‘Can you give us a shout?’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ I didn’t know. They said, ‘We are Assyrians.’ I said, ‘What does that mean?’ But they were very nice people. But I said, I think I pronounced it wrong.
Darmo confirmed Trump’s story, saying he asked Trump for a favor while four Assyrians posed with Trump before the rally. He said the former president instructed an aide to add a shoutout to the teleprompter and speculated that the aide may have misspelled Assyrians in the script.
“We want Americans to know who we are, how much we have suffered and how many massacres and genocides have been committed against our people in the Middle East,” Darmo said.
Trump sent his son, Eric Trump, to meet the Assyrians in Phoenix shortly before the 2020 election.
Mona Oshana, an Iraqi-born Assyrian American who co-founded Assyrians for Trump during his first campaign but is no longer formally involved, said the Republican Party is a good fit for a religious population fleeing persecution by authoritarian governments.
“We are an America First community because we came to America based on the echo of freedom and the Constitution,” Oshana said. “We often say that we were Americans before we came to America, because we believed in America’s freedoms, we believed in the Constitution, we believed in America’s struggles.”
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign also has a grassroots organization, Chaldeans and Assyrians for Harris Walz, which is mainly active in Michigan.
Some in the Assyrian community were outraged by Trump’s immigration policies, which significantly curtailed refugee resettlement in the United States. Some were affected by his travel ban that restricted entry to the country from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Iraq and Syria.
A low point was the death in Baghdad in 2019 of a 41-year-old Chaldean man who had lived in the US since childhood. Jimmy Al-Daoud, who had a history of diabetes and mental illness, was deported for committing multiple crimes in the US.
