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November 17, 2024 - 5:00pm
“Trump’s pro-Israel cabinet picks upset Muslims who voted for him,” reads a Reuters headline from this week. In the piece, a range of Muslim Americans who voted for the President-elect lament that he has chosen several cabinet officials who favour a strong security relationship with Israel and who have downplayed the rights of the Palestinians.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network, is quoted as saying.
Many of Trump’s Muslim backers had hoped, for instance, that he would appoint as secretary of state Ric Grenell, an official from his first administration who helped lead Muslim outreach ahead of this election. The pick of Marco Rubio, a comparatively conventional hawk and strident supporter of the Israeli government, seems to have ruffled feathers in the community.
Does this mean that Muslim voters were betrayed by Trump? Was his outreach ahead of the election nothing more than a cynical ploy? And will Muslims go running back into the Democratic camp in 2028? For now, it’s too soon to make any assumptions.
In 2000, a majority of Muslim Americans backed Republican George W. Bush for president. The community had long been known as socially conservative and business-minded, so the GOP proved a natural home for them. But the Iraq War horrified Muslims in the US, leading many of them to flee to the Democrats. They continued to vote blue for another 20 years, but this year a large number either voted Republican or for a third-party candidate.
It’s possible that this was a one-off protest vote, yet there are signs that a greater realignment may be underway. Even before the war in Gaza, which served as a tipping point to drive votes away from the Democrats, many Muslims felt that the party had leaned too far into divisive social issues.
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SubscribeI think the author touched on this in a roundabout way, but not explicitly. You can’t view Muslims as some monolithic demographic that all think the same way. Different Muslims and different communities have different issues. Multi generational Muslims are not as connected to the war in Gaza, but are likely more socially conservative than democrats. There is also the Sunni and Shiite divide. They all have different perspectives.
I would also suggest the Muslim community in North America is much different than the Muslim community in Britain and Western Europe. It still costs a relatively large amount of money to immigrate from the Middle East to North America. The young radical Islamists, who grew up in poverty, are much more likely to immigrate to Europe because it’s cheaper and easier to get there.
I would also suggest the progressive Muslims you see marching in the streets of America are almost all students. They have very little in common with the small business owner in Dearborn.
How is this question even sensible ? Who writes these ridiculous article titles ? And why ?
How can you possibly have buyer’s remorse after only one week when Trump isn’t actually in power for another 6 weeks or so and hasn’t done anything yet ?
It’s such a shame UnHerd does this clickbait nonsense as it puts people off reading good articles like this one.
I agree: and there’s something else.
In using the term “Muslim Americans” rather than “American Muslims” there’s an implication that they put their religion above their nationality. Now that may be the case, or may not, but has anyone asked them to which loyalty they’d rather be ascribed?
Technically, loyalty to the Ummah above all else is precisely what Islam mandates.
Surveys of the past have revealed that significant percentages adhere to this tenet, a fact that doesn’t sit particularly well with me at all.
The author doesn’t bother to mention, for some unknown reason, that 53.2%s of Muslim-Americans voted for Jill Stein (source: The Council on American-Islamic Relations). Why is that? Good luck with that Green Party vote…though Jill Stein, a self-loathing Jew, is a proclaimed anti-Zionist. Better luck next time.
Trump and Harris only received 21.4% and 20.3% of the Muslim American vote, respectively. Not much of a mandate for Trump to support the Palestinian side of the Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon/Iran/Yemen war. Besides, Trump continues to vociferously support Israel and the Israelis…he’s a loyal friend.
Importantly, a Pew Research Center survey found that 36% of Muslim Americans DON’T sympathize with the Palestinian people or their desire to gain a sovereign nation. There are 57 Muslim countries, and1.9 billions Muslims worldwide, many not located in the Middle East, and most could care less about the creation of a Palestinian state, despite their pervasive antisemitic beliefs.
On the pertinent issues, how would Kamala Harris’s nominee for Secretary of State have differed from Marco Rubio? How would her nominee for National Security Adviser have differed from Michael Waltz? How would her nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security have differed from Kristi Noem? How would her nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations have differed from Elise Stefanik? How would her nominee for Ambassador to Israel have differed from Mike Huckabee? One of those would have been Lynne Cheney, and all of them might as well have been.
We now await Donald Trump’s nominations to economic policy portfolios. Again, expect disappointment for the young men and the black men, the self-organised working class and the Left, whose abstentions, third party votes, and votes for Trump, expanded him beyond his 2020 vote that, if repeated on its own, would have repeated the 2020 result. But again, whom would Harris have had? Stephanie Kelton? Hardly!
And everyone has always expected this. It has never been the point, which is that the marker has been put down. Young men and black men, Latinos and the Native Americans who voted for Trump by two to one, Muslims and Christian Arabs, the working class and the Left: you cannot win without those, it is probably now fair to assume that you could not lose with them, they are all now firmly in play, and whoever was the next President will be a first termer.