Well, this one probably wasn’t on your election bingo card.
Amer Ghalib—the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, which since 2021 has also been governed by a city council made up of exclusively Muslim officials—on Sunday announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.
“President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles. Though it’s looking good, he may or may not win the election and be the 47th president of the United States, but I believe he is the right choice for this critical time,” Ghalib wrote in a Facebook post. “I’ll not regret my decision no matter what the outcome would be, and I’m ready to face the consequences.”
Trump has since reposted Ghalib’s endorsement on his Truth Social platform, incidentally just hours after another post in which he thanked the emir and prime minister of Qatar for attending a meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
Neither the Qatari officials nor the mayor of Hamtramck appear to have been deterred by the Republican candidate’s long history of Islamophobic remarks and actions.
By way of a quick recap, Trump’s anti-Muslim sentiment featured prominently in his promotion of the “Birther” conspiracy theory about the racial, national, and religious heritage of former President Barack Obama.
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Trump variously floated the possibility of creating a national database of all Muslims in the U.S. and closing the nation’s mosques, as well as claiming to have seen thousands of Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center came down on Sept. 11, 2001.
As president, he also advocated for the indiscriminate execution of extremist Islamist terrorists’ relatives and issued a short-lived travel ban for citizens of six Muslim-majority countries.
Trump also hosted neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes for a private dinner at the White House in November 2022, defended violent 2017 “Unite the Right” protesters in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” and invited self-professed white supremacist Laura Loomer to travel on his private plane this month.
