Arab Americans are moving toward former President Donald Trump because he is promising “peace,” Ric Grenell, former acting Director of National Intelligence and a top Trump ally, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Host Matthew Boyle cited a poll showing that 30 percent of Muslim voters are going to back Trump in this election over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“That’s an increase of at least seven percent since 2020 where Trump got about 23 percent of the Muslim vote. You’ve been tracking this whole uncommitted [movement],” Boyle said, explaining that it morphed into the “abandon Harris movement.”
“Well, one of the reasons in 2016 why I joined the Trump team is because I had spent eight years working in the Bush administration. I spent eight years at the U.N. inside the Security Council, watching us foment war and push for regime change,” Grenell said, explaining that he watched these “neocon ideas” failing.
“They were not working, and no one was willing to say it. You know, Dick Cheney was the leader of this regime change movement, and a lot of Republicans and even Democrats joined him in talking about the benefits of regime change,” he said, noting it did not work, and the U.S. lost “a lot of money, a lot of treasure, [and] blood.”
“What happened in 2016–that is that Donald Trump was the only one to call it out. It wasn’t popular back then to take on the Bushes and the Romneys and the McCains and all of the strategy of pro-war and neocon policy, but Donald Trump had the backbone to say, ‘You know what, guys, this isn’t working. And I know I’m running in a Republican primary, but it’s not working, and I’m going to do something different.’ And I remember back then that every single foreign policy person who I knew in the establishment called me to say, you will never work in foreign policy again if you support this guy. He is wrong, and I did it anyway, and Donald Trump proved to be right,” he said. “Now, fast forward. He didn’t start any wars.”
Speaking specifically about Arab Americans moving toward Trump, Grenell said he has been “spearheading a strategy of talking to the Arab Americans in Detroit and in Phoenix, where they have a huge, powerful base.”
“And what I love about Donald Trump is that we have three, really two strong messages to Arab Americans that are convincing them to support Trump, but those same two messages are very consistent with what we say to evangelical Christians and to Jews in America,” he said, praising Trump for his consistent messaging.
“Donald Trump is not saying anything different to these groups. Kamala Harris is. She’s secretly trying to say one thing to one group and another to another group. But Donald Trump has two messages. One which is, I produce Arab-Israeli peace agreements. These are hard to do. It’s easy just to let conflict go into war. But Donald Trump didn’t do that. He forged peace between Arab Israel and Israelis. We didn’t have a war. We didn’t have killing,” he said.
“The second point that we say to the Arabs is, what do you expect when you have a government that funds Iran? We, in the Trump administration, had isolated Iran. We had sanctions on Iran. They didn’t have the money to pursue a nuclear weapon and they didn’t have the money to pay their proxies to go start wars,” he said, explaining that these proxies are now “well-funded” because of the actions of President Biden and Harris.
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“They dropped the sanctions on Iran, the Trump sanctions,” he said, noting they dropped the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
“I could argue with the first reason why Putin invaded in Ukraine and started a war in Europe is because he saw the weakness of dropping those sanctions on his pipeline,” he said, noting this was the “same thing [that] happened with the war in Israel.”
“Iran was funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, cash and credit. When they got that money, they start paying the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah to wreak havoc. And we’ve seen now the impact of what we have — 17 military ships, American U.S., military ships in the region right now trying to control what’s going on. We don’t have a single peace plan that we’re pushing, but we have 17 warships,” Grenell said, adding that he is sick of watching establishment media figures asking politicians if they are for or against funding for Ukraine.
“This is the question of, do you want more war, or do you not want more war? There’s no one who is pushing a peace plan. We don’t have a State Department that’s tough,” he continued, adding, “I’ve spent 12 years at the State Department, and I know people who are tough.”
“Diplomacy is hard. It’s not about speaking five languages and sitting in Paris at a restaurant. It is forging peace agreements in conflict zones. It’s dangerous. It’s frontline work,” he added.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.