Dearborn, United States - Incoming US president Donald Trump pulled off a surprising feat late in the 2024 campaign, winning over swathes of Muslim voters with a promise to end bloodshed in the Middle East. Now, his new supporters are celebrating his victory and confident he will deliver as Israel continues its 13-month siege of Gaza and bombardment of neighboring Lebanon. In Dearborn, America’s largest Arab-American enclave, preliminary results showed Trump narrowly eking out first place -- a dramatic swing from 2020, when outgoing president Joe Biden won handily.
This time around, the left-leaning vote fractured between Vice President Kamala Harris and the Green Party’s Jill Stein. “People got the message that Trump is trying to bring peace to the Middle East and to the whole world,” said Bill Bazzi, the Lebanese-American mayor of neighboring Dearborn Heights, speaking to AFP from a late-night hookah bar gathering that transformed into an early-morning party. Bazzi dismissed what he called the media’s distortion of Trump’s previous “Muslim ban,” insisting it was only a matter of closer vetting of select unstable countries to prevent Islamic State militants from getting into the United States. A Marine veteran who campaigned for Trump in his closing rallies, he added he had been in contact with high-level members of the incoming administration who assured him that “one of the things (Trump) is pushing is to stop the war -- he wants more diplomacy.”