For politicians, there’s no such thing as a bad endorsement—even if it’s a “f*** you” endorsement.
That’s probably not how Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, the country’s only Muslim-majority city, would characterize his endorsement of former President Donald Trump last week. But that’s how Democrats are taking it. After all, dismissing Ghalib’s endorsement as a deliberate slight is a lot easier than wrestling with the issues that led him to make it in the first place.
“This is kind of a ‘f*** you’ endorsement for the Democrats,” said James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute and an influential Democratic Party activist. “It’s not so much that people have forgotten how bad Trump is. For some people, it’s about punishment.”
Ghalib certainly did want Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats to feel some heat over the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel. The mayor, along with many Arab Americans in Michigan, have been outspoken critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, calling it a “genocide.” Earlier this year, Ghalib backed a resolution to divest all city resources from Israel, and he’s repeatedly called on the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire in the region.
Harris has called for a cease-fire, but it hasn’t won her any favor among those for whom the Israel conflict is a top priority. And that’s because no one really expects her to be able to handle the issue competently.
“We asked multiple times that they should change course, but nothing happened,” Ghalib said of his meeting with Harris’s campaign. “Kamala Harris is still going in the same path and nothing was addressed.”
Trump, on the other hand, may not be calling for a cease-fire, but he has a proven record of striking mutually beneficial negotiations in the region, such as the Abraham Accords. And, as Trump puts it, “there were no wars” when he was in the White House.
“Did I leave with promises that he will deliver on our requests? Of course not,” Ghalib wrote on Facebook after meeting with Trump. “Trump showed that he understood the issue, and [showed] respect for us.”
But Ghalib’s endorsement of Trump is about more than just Israel. In a statement, the Democrat admitted that while he and Trump “may not agree on everything,” the former president is “a man of principles” and “the right choice for this critical time.”
Indeed, there is likely little common ground between Ghalib and much of the conservative movement. His election to Hamtramck’s mayorship was itself a rebuke of the radical progressive agenda Democrats have been pushing in Michigan and across the rest of the country. Ghalib’s campaign in 2021, against then Mayor Karen Majewski, focused heavily on culture-war debates, including whether the city should fly the Pride flag when the vast majority of Hamtramck’s Muslim residents see it as an insult to their beliefs.
Majewski decided to cast the tie-breaking vote to fly the flag outside city hall, and Ghalib, who opposed the move, ended up winning 68% of the vote to serve as Hamtramck’s next mayor. He went on to support an effort by the all-Muslim Hamtramck City Council to ban Pride flags, along with all other political and religious flags, from being flown on city property.
Democrats should have seen this as a warning that all was not well in their coalition. Undeterred, they pressed forward with their cultural agenda, because what’s the point of respecting voters’ religious preferences anyway?
In 2022, controversy once again erupted in the Dearborn area, with hundreds of Muslim residents vowing to oust local school board members over explicit LGBT content found in their children’s public schools. As a result, Republican candidates made significant inroads in these areas for the first time in years.
Last year, Ghalib warned his peers in the Democratic Party at the time that this trend likely would continue: “Muslims are conservative,” he said. “They give high value to their faith and their families and their freedom—the three Fs. But I will say they put faith and family first, and some people will sacrifice some of their freedoms in order to protect their faith and family structure.”
The question now is how many Arab-Americans in Michigan agree with him—because they could literally alter the course of the presidential election. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by a little more than 100,000 votes, and Harris is polling worse than Biden was at this point in the 2020 race.
Trump, at least, recognizes the stakes. His campaign invited Ghalib to speak at the former president’s recent rally in Flint, and though Ghalib declined, he didn’t shoot down the idea of rallying for Trump at some point in the next several weeks.
That would be a middle finger Democrats can’t ignore.
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.
