‘A f— you endorsement’: How Trump won over a key Muslim mayor in Michigan

The successful effort to charm Ghalib grew out of long-running Republican outreach to Muslims, which grew more complicated after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Gaza.

Before the attack, conservatives saw an opportunity with Muslim-Americans who agreed with them on something significant: Democrats’ embrace of LGBTQ and abortion rights. Trump, who had put limits on travel and immigration for people from several majority-Muslim countries, had little pull in the community personally. But during the Biden presidency, social conservative groups that opposed displays of the pride flag, or lessons about gender identity in public schools, made inroads with majority-Muslim communities, in southeast Michigan and beyond.

Ghalib, an immigrant from Yemen, was in the thick of it. In the summer of 2021, under Mayor Karen Majewski, Hamtramck’s council voted to display a pride flag outside city hall.

“This is just going to create constant conflict among people,” Ghalib told the Yemeni-American newspaper.

That November, he beat Majewski in a landslide, becoming the first Muslim mayor of a small city that had reversed its decades-long population collapse by welcoming thousands of immigrants. In the summer of 2023, Ghalib and the majority-Muslim council pulled down the pride flag. Weeks later, Ghalib met with former Trump National Security Adviser Michel Flynn at a community event, in part, about the dangers of social liberalism.

“We certainly knew that he was, for lack of a better term, a social conservative,” Majewski told Semafor. “But I have not spoken to or heard from one person who is not shocked and appalled that he endorsed Trump.”

It was shocking, according to Democrats, because ceasefire activists were making specific demands — and Trump wasn’t meeting them. Trump has said little about Israel’s conduct of the war, except that it should end quickly, and that it wouldn’t have happened on his watch. He’d never endorsed the calls for a ceasefire or an arms embargo that break out at Democratic rallies. He’d deployed the word “Palestinian” as a slur, and in speeches to Jewish and pro-Israel audiences, he’d talked about how no president did more for the Jewish state.

But when Republicans reached out to Ghalib, the idea that Trump might end the war, and Harris never could, was compelling. After Michigan Republicans saw that Ghalib might take a meeting, Trump’s allies put it together. Massad Boulos, whose son married Tiffany Trump in 2022, had become a bridge between the former president and skeptical Arab and Muslim Americans. He was present at the meeting, and said that Trump’s pitch of a pro-peace administration was compelling for the mayor.

“He has made that clear: He is against the war,” Boulos said of Trump. “He’s against wars, in general, including this one. It must end and we must bring peace back. There was nothing new at that meeting. He reiterated his own position, saying that he will work from day one to make sure we end all of these wars.”

Ghalib, who did not respond to interview requests from Semafor last week or this week, had given his own view of the meeting to local media, and in Arabic language Facebook posts. Trump gave him far more time than Democrats had, an echo of how the GOP nominee brought Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. onboard — Democrats kept their distance, while Trump offered to be an ally. He showed up, said Ghalib, fully aware of who the mayor was, another flattering surprise.

“It was a positive meeting with Trump, but I can’t give you false promises,” Ghalib explained in a post over the weekend. “Our position is weak, and we are dealing with a party that we have severed ties with from a long time ago.”

The mayor passed on Trump’s offer to speak at his rally in Flint that week, but suggested that he might speak for Trump in the future. Bishara Bahbah, the founder of Arab Americans for Trump, said that the mayor “must have heard what he wanted to hear” — and if more skeptics heard it, they, too, could support him.

“I see four years of a Harris administration as a continuation of the Biden administration, and I see four more years of fighting in Gaza,” said Bahbah. “Donald Trump would stop the war in Gaza. If there is one person that Netanyahu fears, it is President Trump. He says what he’s going to do, and he is totally unpredictable.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $10 million on ads that link Harris to progressive critics of Israel in Congress. Trump’s endorsement from an Israel critic didn’t change that strategy, or the choice it saw in November.

“We vehemently disagree with many of Mayor Ghalib’s positions, but we do agree that Donald J. Trump is the only candidate who will put our country back on the right track,” said RJC spokesman Sam Markstein. “It’s clear Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are hemorrhaging support in key battleground states, and this is just the latest example.”

How can Trump promise to support Israel and punish its American critics, while convincing a Muslim mayor that he’ll quickly end Israel’s war? One reason was spelled out by the RJC: It’s a binary choice, and Trump loses no support from the right, or from pro-Israel voters, by bringing Ghalib on board.

The other reason is simple, compelling, and frustrating to Democrats: Trump consistently says that any problem that unfolded after he left office would have been prevented if he was there. He wasn’t around to prevent deaths during the retreat from Afghanistan; he wasn’t around to jawbone Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine; he frequently claims that he was on the verge of a new peace deal with a weakened Iran, after blowing up the Obama-era nuclear deal, early in his administration.

“He’s a very good negotiator,” Makki, the Michigan GOP outreach coordinator, told me. “He met with the dictator of North Korea. He’s not afraid to put himself in those situations and work toward peace.”

When Harris is asked how she’d end the war, she has to answer for what her administration is doing right now. Trump doesn’t get into detail, doesn’t have to answer for anything, and points back to the normalization agreements his administration brokered with Arab nations in 2020 — the Abraham Accords, which did nothing to resolve the Palestinian crisis, but bolstered his image as a negotiator who Netanyahu actually listened to. How can Trump promise to deport pro-Gaza protesters from college campuses while promising to end the war? Just watch him.