Muslim voters who backed Trump in Michigan feel betrayed

DETROIT (MNTV) – Arab and Muslim Americans who helped deliver Michigan for President Donald Trump in 2024 are voicing growing anger at the Republican Party, saying it has turned on the communities whose votes it courted — repaying their support, they say, with attacks on their faith and their candidates as anti-Muslim rhetoric intensifies before the midterms.

“There’s no thanking, there’s attacking,” Husham Al-Husainy, an Iraqi American imam in Dearborn, told MS NOW. 

Al-Husainy backed Trump in 2024, joining Arab and Muslim voters who opposed the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and is now backing Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. 

“They changed,” he said of Republicans. “We didn’t.” 

Research suggests Trump won nearly half the vote in Michigan precincts with majority-Arab populations.

Trump has repeatedly targeted El-Sayed, a physician and former health official who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator, calling him a “jihadist” and a “member of the Muslim Brotherhood” without evidence and mocking his name. 

Republican nominee Mike Rogers has falsely claimed El-Sayed “believes that America deserved 9/11.”

Bishara Bahbah, who led the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, called the attacks “astounding” and criticized Trump’s endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a betrayal. 

“A lot of people tell us that we’ve been fooled, that we’ve been used, that we got him to the presidency and we got nothing in return,” he said.

The discontent does not automatically benefit Democrats. 

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat, said his own party had made “no authentic outreach” to the community: “They love their vote from time to time, but that’s about it.” 

For many Arab and Muslim voters, he and others said, Gaza, civil rights, economic pressures and genuine representation remain decisive — and both parties risk treating the community as a temporary electoral prize. Republicans deny their criticism of El-Sayed is Islamophobic; asked about Trump’s rhetoric, Michigan GOP chair Jim Runestad said, “Everyone who knows the president knows he says what he says when the teleprompter’s shut off.”