Donald Trump made an appeal to Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan on Friday, leveraging the ongoing war in the Middle East and his increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney in an attempt to garner support from the unlikely voting bloc.
“Many Muslim and Arab Americans have friends and family living in the Middle East, and Kamala is campaigning with warmongers like Liz Cheney,” Trump said at a rally in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “They want to get the Arab American vote, they want to get the Muslim votes. So she picks Liz Cheney, whose father virtually destroyed the Middle East. I don’t think that’s … working out too well.”
Earlier Friday, Trump had visited with members of the Lebanese community in Dearborn, Michigan, the country’s largest majority-Arab city.
Arab and Muslim voters are facing a difficult choice in this election. Although Arab Americans tend to vote Democratic, Harris is polling at 18 points below Joe Biden’s level of support in 2020, while Trump has made small inroads. That’s because many Arab and Muslim voters find it unconscionable to vote for Harris when Biden’s administration, they say, is complicit in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and southern Lebanon.
And in the knife-edge battleground of Michigan, which has an Arab American population of about 400,000, that could make a decisive electoral difference.
At the rally, Trump continued his attacks on Cheney, who on Thursday he called a “radical war hawk,” who should have “nine barrels shooting at her.” Cheney’s father, Dick Cheney, was the vice president under President George W. Bush and helped oversee the U.S. invasion of Iraq after previously serving as CEO of Halliburton, a weapons manufacturer that made billions off the war. Both Liz and Dick Cheney have endorsed Harris.
Trump has now bestowed the “war hawk” title on Liz Cheney while claiming she would be a coward on a battlefield.
“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said, adding: “That’s why I broke up with [her], all she wanted to do is go to war with everybody because she, like Kamala, is a stupid person.”
“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace,” Trump continued. “I am peace.”
And so the former president, who in his first month in office signed an executive order banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, made an improbable plea: “I need every Muslim American in Michigan to get the hell out and vote.”
