After Trump’s Remarks On Gaza, Some In Dearborn, Michigan ‘think We Screwed Up.’

Donald Trump won Dearborn, Michigan, a traditionally Democratic Arab American enclave, thanks largely to outrage over Kamala Harris and the Biden administration’s stance on Israel.

Some are starting to have regrets.

After Trump unveiled a plan to “take over” Gaza and relocate nearly 2 million Palestinians to neighboring countries, two mayors in the region who had stumped for Trump have gone silent. And some Dearborn residents have been left horrified by the president’s attitude toward Palestinians.

After Trump made his comments, people in Dearborn are responding “with extreme anger and disappointment with this president who lied to this community to steal some of their votes,” said Osama Siblani, editor of Dearborn’s Arab American News.

Siblani, who declined to endorse in the presidential race, predicted that the proposal will “fail” and that Trump is “acting like a leader of a gangster group and not the most powerful nation in the world. Disgrace.”

One leader in Dearborn, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described a sense of remorse among some in the Arab American community who voted for Trump or sat out the election but now “think we screwed up but we’re not going to admit it.”

Trump’s comments Tuesday, which shocked the world and were quickly recast by his own officials, caused a sense of whiplash in Dearborn, laying bare the deep political divisions in a community fractured by the conflict that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians and decimated the region.

Not long ago, Arab Americans were celebrating the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas — which some credited Trump for helping to reach days before his inauguration. Then came his remarks this week — and alarm over his desire to redevelop Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Arab Americans for Trump, a group that helped with campaign outreach, rebranded itself as Arab Americans for Peace in the hours after Trump said the U.S. would take ownership of Gaza.

“Gaza will always be part of a future Palestinian state, not a casino resort,” said Sam Baydoun, a Democratic Wayne County commissioner in Dearborn.

In Baydoun’s city, Trump’s remarks — and his alignment with Israel — reignited a debate that had been raging in the run up to the November election. Many Arab Americans there who had historically voted as a bloc for Democrats sat out the election, voted for third-party candidate Jill Stein or swung their support to Trump, angry at the Biden administration’s support for Israel and critical of Harris for declining to call for an arms embargo.

Two of the region’s mayors, Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi and Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, stumped on the campaign trail with Trump, arguing that he would follow through on his promise to achieve peace in the Middle East. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, meanwhile, emerged as a leader of the “uncommitted” movement that spurred anti-war protests at college campuses across the country and refused to support Harris.

This week, Bazzi and Ghalib did not respond to multiple requests for comment. On X, Hammoud said that Trump’s proposal “is yet another chapter in the ongoing genocide” and “deploying U.S. troops and using taxpayer dollars to invade Gaza is morally indefensible.”

When Trump, who had been privately discussing the idea for months, unveiled his intentions for Gaza at a press conference standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, some White House aides saw it as a negotiating ploy to give Israel more leverage over Hamas as they work to uphold the cease-fire agreement.

And in the days since, Trump officials have sought to placate some of the outrage over the Gaza proposal — including from some Republicans on Capitol Hill — by reframing Trump’s comments as a way to achieve lasting peace.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump has not committed to sending troops to Gaza and that the U.S. will not pay for rebuilding efforts. She said any removal of Palestinians would be temporary and lauded the proposal as an “out-of-the-box idea.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on his first trip as a member of Trump’s Cabinet, described it as a “very generous” offer to relocate Palestinians while Gaza is rebuilt, which has been decimated by more than a year of war.

But Trump doubled down Thursday, undermining the officials who sought to clarify his remarks. “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

Some Arab Americans, who view Trump’s desire to remove Gazans as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing, said they suspect the idea is so outlandish it will never happen. A takeover of that kind would amount to the most significant U.S. involvement in the Middle East since the Iraq war.

And while they are critical of Trump, there is no universal feeling in Dearborn that Harris would have been any better.

“For those of us who voted against the Democratic Party, in whatever form that was … we understood that we would get this guy, and we understood that we would have to deal with this kind of stuff,” said Amer Zahr, a progressive activist in Dearborn. “But ultimately we don’t believe that we are to blame for this. The Democrats could have solved this problem back in the summer. Our price for supporting Harris was really low — all we asked for was, ‘Say that you would consider an arms embargo against Israel.’ And she wasn’t willing to do that.”