A Little-Known Trump Relative Is Leading a Campaign for Arab American Voters

A Trump in-law, along with a former administration official, is on a mission to exploit Democrats’ new weakness with Arab American and Muslim voters.

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Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, has been trying to persuade Arab American voters to vote for former President Donald J. Trump, or just not to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

After Donald J. Trump wrapped up a recent speech at the Detroit Economic Club, two local imams were waiting for him backstage.

One was Belal Alzuhiry, a Yemeni American cleric at the United Community Center, a Sunni mosque in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Mich. He was eager to question Mr. Trump about his description of Yemeni immigrants as “known terrorists” at a rally this month.

In the 15-minute meeting, Mr. Alzuhiry said, Mr. Trump gave the religious leader what is, for him, an extraordinarily rare thing: an apology.

“He said, ‘I made a mistake and I apologize for it,’” said Mr. Alzuhiry, who is still undecided about how he will vote, but who came away pleased with the answer.

The exchange was a small victory for a quiet, unlikely campaign to persuade a potentially decisive group of voters in the presidential race. Since early this year, a pair of unofficial Trump emissaries — Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and an in-law of Mr. Trump, and Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence chief — have been crisscrossing Michigan, trying to repackage and sell Mr. Trump to skeptical Arab American and Muslim voters there.

In 2020, these overlapping but different constituencies — many Arab Americans are Christian — largely rejected Mr. Trump, who as a 2016 candidate proposed a national registry of Muslims and vowed a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States. But the war in Gaza and Lebanon has strained their support for Democrats, and Mr. Boulos and Mr. Grenell have set out to exploit the weakness.

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