He campaigned for Biden in Michigan. Now he’s working against him.

Abusalah, 23, pinched the bridge of his nose with his left hand and shook his head. He’s heard Biden say those things about democracy before. He had said such things himself. In 2020, he had knocked on the doors of fellow Arab American voters here in this suburb of Detroit and asked them to help Biden topple Trump. But that was then.

Abusalah, whose Palestinian family immigrated to Dearborn from Jordan in the 1970s, had been a Bernie Sanders guy first. But in the run-up to Election Day, he had made some 1,500 calls and sent several thousand texts on Biden’s behalf, he says. That November, on his 20th birthday, his family bought him an Oreo cake from Dairy Queen with “Biden 2020” spelled out in blue piping. The next day, the news projected — after several tense days of ballot-counting — that the Democrat had prevailed.

He hadn’t thought Biden was a perfect president before Oct. 7, but what Abusalah saw in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel felt like a betrayal: Biden’s reiteration of Israel’s disputed claims about beheaded children. His choice not to publicly advocate for a permanent cease-fire. His continued support for sending funds to Israel.

“I don’t think there is anything that I can tell people in my community to justify voting for this guy,” he said now. “Even if I was still in the mind-set that I was in four years ago, which is, ‘He’s not Trump.’”

He got out of the truck and walked into the community center that served as a headquarters for Listen to Michigan, a campaign that was urging Michiganders to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary as a protest vote against the administration’s policy on the war in Gaza. Abusalah’s day job is in local government, handling communications for a county agency, but he was also one of Listen to Michigan’s organizers — transporting supplies around town, training volunteers, speaking to reporters. One from the BBC was waiting to interview him. They sat down at a round table, and Abusalah turned the point Biden had made on the radio, about democracy, into a quotable retort.

“Democracy,” he told the reporter, “is listening to what your people want.”

Democrats nervous about Trump’s return may now be inclined to listen to Michigan, hoping that the voters who are holding out against Biden want something the president can deliver to change their minds before the general election. In the week after the Michigan primary, the administration would start signaling some policy changes on Gaza: airdropping meals on the Gaza Strip, advocating for an “immediate cease-fire for at least the next six weeks,” as Vice President Harris put it Sunday.

But what Abusalah wants in November — what he says he’ll keep organizing to achieve — might be hard for them to hear.

Abusalah was once proud to be the “politically correct person, wearing a suit with a lapel pin,” and “being nice to everybody.” He volunteered for Rashida Tlaib, a fellow Palestinian American from Detroit, when she successfully ran for Congress in 2018. He thought he might run for office one day and got involved with local Democrats. He recalls accepting invitations to “weird-ass” dinners with elected officials because he thought they could help him get ahead, but the “wining and dining” part of politics felt disjointed from the idea of helping people who are hurting. Abusalah’s souvenirs from that earlier phase in his young political life include a photo on his phone of himself beaming next to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D). Showing it now, he cursed under his breath.

His usual affect is good-natured and polite. But Abusalah has soured on niceness as a political strategy.

“I don’t think that whole playing nice — I don’t think it works,” he says. “I mean, we as a community, we’ve played nice, and we’ve been good to a lot of these politicians for so long. And look where we’re at now.”

His father’s side of the family fled their home in Beit Hanina, near Jerusalem, amid the 1967 war, Abusalah says. After some years in Jordan, his paternal grandmother, Bahia Abusalah, settled on the top floor of a yellow two-story home on the south side of Dearborn. “When I first talked to her about everything that was happening, literally her words were, ‘It’s nothing new,’ in Arabic,” he says.

On the day of the Democratic primary, Abusalah was driving near his grandmother’s old neighborhood when a headline from Reuters appeared on his phone — a screenshot from a friend. At an ice cream shop in New York City, a day earlier, Biden had told reporters that his advisers were close to securing a temporary cease-fire. But now, according to Reuters, a Qatari official was saying that there was no real breakthrough yet on the deal.

“Look, I know this is something people might not say,” he said, processing this news. “I personally don’t think Joe Biden’s running the show. I think Antony Blinken is making all the decisions and that — I know this is going to sound crazy, because he’s the president of the United States, but I just think that they let him know what they’re going to do.”

That kind of passivity is a key difference Abusalah sees between Biden and Trump. Yes, the former president was pro-Israel and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. But Abusalah can at least imagine Trump refusing to play nice with the prime minister and his national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir.

“I think when Ben Gvir and Netanyahu come out and say that they’re not going to listen to the United States, and that they’re not going to follow the United States in whatever they ask, I think Biden’s and Trump’s response to them at that point would have been different,” he says. “I think Trump would have stood up to them.”

The war has devastated infrastructure in Gaza and pushed it to the brink of famine. More than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since it began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Biden recently described Israel’s military response as “over the top,” but Abusalah noted that his administration hasn’t threatened to cut off military aid.

“Trump is a business executive,” he says. “I don’t know, I really don’t. But I mean, we’ve seen Trump come out and speak ill of Netanyahu.” (In October, Trump faulted Netanyahu for Hamas’s attack on Israeli soil, but he later retreated from those comments. That month, he also pledged to “immediately restore and expand the ‘Trump travel ban’” and apply it to people who want to “abolish Israel.” On Tuesday, Trump told Fox News that Israel’s military had to “finish the problem” and said that Hamas’s attack wouldn’t have happened with him in the White House.)

Weren’t Biden’s remarks proof that he was trying to end the killing — that the president was advocating, at least in some imperfect form, for the cease-fire Abusalah wanted?

“I don’t have much faith in any words that come out of his mouth until I see actions,” he says. “But again, it’s the same thing: It’s a little too late.”

In the long run, he’d like to see Democrats pushing a one-state solution with equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis. But for now, Abusalah says, there’s nothing Biden can do to earn his vote back. At this point, he figures, the only way that Democrats will learn not to take Arab American votes for granted — as they have, in his view — is for Biden to lose, even if that means a second Trump presidency.

“If Trump becomes president again, so be it. I mean, for me, it does not matter. For people who have lost family in Gaza, they don’t care. They don’t care, whichever — like, if Trump is president again. I think for us, it’s not that we want Trump to be president, it’s that we don’t want Biden to be president,” he says.

“And if that means another Trump presidency, that’s on Biden. It’s not on us.”

He thinks about the fears he had about Islamophobic rhetoric during the Trump years, and the fears he has now for his family, some of whom live in the West Bank.

“If you gave me two options,” he says, “and you said, ‘Do you want a Muslim ban, or do you want your family killed?’ I’ll choose the Muslim ban.”

He has decisions to make. Not just about the election, but also about where he fits in the political landscape — and who sees him as an ally.

“Do you know Louis Farrakhan?” Abusalah asked over the phone, a week before the primary.

Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, was coming to Detroit. The Black nationalist religious movement was founded there, and Farrakhan — whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled “an antisemite who routinely accuses Jews of manipulating the U.S. government and controlling the levers of world power” — was set to give a speech in front of as many as 20,000 people about the Middle East. (Farrakhan is suing the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for defamation for describing his rhetoric as antisemitic, arguing that the label is false and violates his First Amendment rights. The defendants have said Farrakhan’s claims lack merit.)

Someone on Farrakhan’s team, Abusalah said, had invited him to speak at the convention after seeing how outspoken he was on CNN and social media. He was thinking of taking it. He didn’t know too much about Farrakhan at that point, except that he’d made some controversial comments in the past.

“To be honest, I think, I mean, Joe Biden has said controversial stuff before,” he said later, addressing the matter of sharing a stage with such a controversial figure. “I mean, Donald Trump has said controversial stuff before. A lot of people have said controversial stuff before.” Abusalah wasn’t trying to dismiss Farrakhan’s remarks, he said. “I was looking at this more as an opportunity just to be able to speak to a lot of people about the struggle of my family back home.”

He eventually declined the invitation because of a scheduling conflict.

Abusalah wonders whether, come November, he’ll have a home in the Democratic Party. Or whether he’ll find one in the Republican Party. Or whether he’ll be on the streets — bound only to fellow activists. He could see himself voting for Cornel West, the academic who has long spoken in favor of Palestinian rights.

His grandmother — the one who left Beit Hanina nearly six decades ago — died in mid-February at 100. Her passing had opened a hole in Abusalah; he could only imagine the grief Palestinians in war-torn Gaza feel, surrounded by death.

“I can only imagine if I were to lose my parents, and if I was married, I lost my wife and my kids and my siblings and everything — I’d want to commit suicide,” he says. “And this is what the American administration is doing to people.”

Of course he worries about how his activism — and his calling the president things like a “genocide lover & maniac” online — might affect his future job prospects. But the grim scenes in Gaza that he sees on TikTok, X and Instagram seemed bigger than all that.

“What am I going to lose?” he says. “Am I going to lose my job? Am I going to lose, you know, a contract? That’s fine.”

“What am I willing to lose, when these people are losing everything?”

Earlier that night, it had become clear that the anti-Biden sentiment in Michigan could not be ignored as fringe. Abusalah was hoping for around 35,000 “uncommitted” votes, more than Listen to Michigan’s conservative stated goal of 10,000. By the time the counting was done, “uncommitted” would clock more than 101,000 votes statewide.

“You know what’s one way to describe Biden right now?” he had said, beaming as the results came in.