Donald Trump appealed to Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan on Friday, exploiting the ongoing war in the Middle East and his increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, in an attempt to rally support from the Arab and Muslim voting bloc that traditionally votes for Democratic candidates.

“A lot of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans have friends and family living in the Middle East, and Kamala [Harris] is campaigning with warmongers like Liz Cheney,” Trump said at a rally in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “They want to get the Arab American vote, they want to get the Muslim vote. So she chose Liz Cheney, whose father pretty much destroyed the Middle East. I don’t think that’s a good thing at all.”

On Friday, Trump visited members of the Lebanese community in Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab-majority city in the country.

Arab and Muslim voters face a tough choice in this election. Although Arab Americans tend to vote Democratic, Harris is 18 points below Joe Biden’s support level in 2020, while Trump has a narrow lead. That’s because many Arab and Muslim voters find it unconscionable to vote for Harris when the Biden administration, they say, is complicit in Israel’s bombing of Gaza and southern Lebanon.

Thus, Arab Americans find themselves in a unique and rare position in American politics these days, as election campaigns are intensifying and focused on the state of Michigan, where Arabs constitute a significant percentage of the population.

And in the hotly contested battleground of Michigan, which has a population of about 400,000 Arab Americans, that could make a crucial electoral difference.

At the rally with Arab and Muslim voters, Trump continued his attacks on Cheney, whom he called a “radical war hawk” on Thursday who should be “shot nine barrels.” Cheney’s father, Dick Cheney, was vice president under President George W. Bush and helped oversee the U.S. invasion of Iraq after previously serving as CEO of Halliburton, an arms manufacturer that made billions of dollars from the war.

Trump has now called Liz Cheney a "war hawk" while claiming she would be a coward on the battlefield.

“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her in a fight facing the other side with guns pointed at her, she wouldn’t have the courage, the strength or the stamina to look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said. “That’s why I broke up with her. All she wanted to do was go to war with everybody because, like Kamala, she’s a stupid person.”

“If Kamala wins, nothing but death and destruction awaits her because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace,” Trump continued. “I am peace.”

And so the former president, who in his first month in office signed an executive order banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, made an unlikely plea: “I need every Muslim American in Michigan to get out and vote.”

“Many Muslim and Arab Americans have friends and family living in the Middle East,” Trump said.