By Jessie Seigel / March 3, 2024

President Biden won last week’s Democratic primary in Michigan with 81 percent of the vote. He received a majority everywhere except the heavily Arab American Detroit suburbs of Dearborn and Hamtramck. In those areas, led by the grass-roots organization Listen to Michigan, the Arab American community heavily voted “uncommitted” to express their anger at deaths in Gaza and Biden’s failure to back a full cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
According to The Hill, “uncommitted” took about 13.3 percent of the Michigan vote, winning at least one delegate, perhaps two, to the Democratic convention.
Samih Zreik, 80, who cast his protest vote for “uncommitted” in Dearborn, told the New York Times that without a cease-fire in Gaza, “he would not vote for the president, even if that meant a victory for Mr. Trump, whom he abhors.” Other Dearborn voters told the Times that Biden had lost their votes for good.
Asma Mohammed, one of the leaders of Uncommitted Minnesota said, “We are against a Trump presidency, and we also want Biden to be better. If that means pushing him to his limit, that is what it will take.”
According to the Times, “uncommitted” also received large percentages in two of Michigan’s major college towns—19 percent in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and 15 percent in East Lansing, where Michigan State University is located.
Though other states do not have as large an Arab American community as Michigan does, commentators have suggested that this nascent uncommitted movement could expand to other states having large numbers of progressive student voters unhappy with President Biden’s Middle East approach. They suggest that loss of that student vote could mean trouble for Democratic chances in the November general election.
Furthermore, in a Times op-ed last week, Dearborn’s Democratic Mayor Abdullah Hammoud warned that if President Biden doesn’t push for a permanent cease-fire, he may not be remembered as “the president who saved American democracy in 2020, but rather as the president who sacrificed it for Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024.”
It is understandable that Arab Americans and some of their progressive allies would use the recent primary to demonstrate their opposition to the Biden administration’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war. And it is their right as Americans—as Asma Mohammed put it—to push Biden “to his limit.” But, if Arab Americans and the young progressives supporting them withhold their votes from Biden in the general election, they will be choosing to be ruled by a dictatorship utterly hostile to them.
Based on Mayor Hammoud’s words, he is fully aware that another Trump presidency will be the death of democracy. No matter how he attempts to shift responsibility for such a result to the president, the voters are responsible for their choices. In the general election, any Arab Americans or progressives who, by action or inaction, help Trump to become president again, will be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Perhaps a short recitation of Trump’s past misdeeds and a catalogue of his proposed future actions will serve as a reminder of what is at stake.
Donald Trump vs. Arab Americans
As early as 2017, the Brennan Center for Justice identified five ways in which former president Trump was targeting Muslims:
the use of anti-Muslim rhetoric; the elevation of Islamophobic staff members to key positions in the White House; the ban on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country; the goal of making vetting procedures “extreme” for potential visitors and immigrants; and a lack of response to the rise in hate crimes targeted at Muslims and other groups.
As president elect in 2016—before even taking the oath of office—Trump proposed requiring Muslims in the U.S. to register in a special database. According to the Brennan Center, “One of his surrogates suggested that Japanese internment camps served as a suitable precedent for the Muslim registry.”
Within one week of taking office, he issued an executive order banning entry into the U.S. from seven Muslim nations. That order applied as well to legal permanent residents along with students and others holding valid visas. (Although not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arab, the Trump Administration’s policies apparently did not distinguish between religious and national identities or heritage—and would have been no less malevolent if they had made such distinction.)
Lower federal courts struck down that executive order as unconstitutional. But in 2018, the Supreme Court reversed those decisions. And it is difficult to conceive that the Supreme Court will strike down any order issued under a next Trump regime, however unconstitutional. (Already, Trump’s Supreme Court has placed its partisan fist on the scale, taking up his ridiculously specious immunity claim—thus deliberately delaying his criminal trials in order to aid his effort to regain power.)
Trump is renewing his reactionary schemes and then some. According to Politico, Trump plans to bring his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, back with him into office. During Trump’s first term, Flynn called Islam a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that must be “excised.” He maintained that “fear of Muslims is rational.” Flynn, a Christian nationalist zealot, is currently recruiting what he calls an “Army of God.”
Furthermore, according to AP, Trump intends to target for deportation people who are legally living in the United States but allegedly harboring “jihadist sympathies.”
Although Arab Americans may be upset with Biden, his administration is attempting to get aid to Gazans while it searches for a solution to the death and destruction caused by the Israel-Hamas stalemate. There is nothing in Trump’s actions—current or past—to suggest that he would try to do anything but egg on further mayhem on either side. Based on Trump’s stated plans, a defeat of Biden will likely make life in the U.S. a nightmare for Arab Americans and make the situation in the Middle East worse as well.
Progressives’ Self-Sabotage

Whatever the progressive left’s thoughts on the Israel-Hamas war, it would behoove them to take a broader view. Serious consideration of what Trumpian control of government would mean for all the matters they claim to value is essential.
The New York Times has observed that if Trump regains the presidency, he plans to increase “the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates…with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Even independent agencies currently answerable to Congress would be brought under direct presidential control. Forget any remaining balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government.
According to the Washington Post, the former president and his allies are already mapping out specific plans to use the federal government—in particular, the Department of Justice—to punish critics and opponents.
Trump’s confederates at the right-wing Center for Renewing America think tank are developing plans to enable him to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office so he can set the military on any arising civil demonstrations—something Trump tried to do against Black Lives Matter demonstrators during his last term. Russell Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America is being considered for the position of Trump’s chief of staff. So much for free speech, the Constitutional right to petition the government, or any organized form of dissent.
Trump’s plans include an end to birthright citizenship; that is, automatic citizenship for children born in the United States if their parents are in the U.S. illegally.
He will reestablish detention camps to hold undocumented immigrants for mass deportation and use federal and local law enforcement to assist in large-scale arrests.
Criminalization of homelessness is also on Trump’s agenda. He wants to force the homeless into tent cities on large open parcels of inexpensive land. Magnanimously, he’ll give the homeless a choice between that so-called relocation and going to jail.
In keeping with proposals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Trump plans to repeal policies supporting LGBTQ+ rights, increase surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in states, make the Food and Administration revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs,” and protect “religious and moral” objections for employers who refuse to have insurance that covers contraception for employees.
Hospitals and health care providers that offer transitional hormones or surgery will be blocked from receiving federal funds, including Medicaid and Medicare dollars.
He will cut funding for any school that has a vaccine or mask mandate and will promote prayer in public schools.
Trump has also pledged to terminate the Department of Education, yet retain power over school curricula to promote right wing views. Rather than expose children to ideas and teach them how to think, he and his cronies will create a world that inculcates children with their narrow-minded propaganda.
Trump will again try to send the National Guard to large cities and use the federal government to strong-arm local governments into doing what he wants them to do.
Local law enforcement agencies that receive Justice Department grants will be required to use stop-and-frisk. Even worse, in one recent speech, Trump said local police should be empowered to shoot suspected shoplifters in the act: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
These are Donald Trump’s plans. Even if the Democrats manage to obtain a majority in both houses of congress, it’s not clear that they could sufficiently overcome Republican obstructionism to stop him. The Republicans have already demonstrated their willingness to back Trump to the hilt, whether they are in the minority or majority. And the Supreme Court—with five to six justices sitting in Trump’s pocket—is likely to rubber stamp his position in most if not all cases that come before them.
If progressives vote against President Biden or sit out the 2024 election altogether because of pique or anger over any one issue, they will help usher in a totalitarian Trump world and all the reactionary repression that comes with it. There will be no democratic opportunity to undo that damage.
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