Republicans in the UAE rally to the Trump cause

Supplied

Republican supporters in the UAE are confident Donald Trump will prevail in November’s US presidential election, and expect their candidate to act quickly to resolve a host of international crises, including in the Middle East.

That was the consensus of a discussion panel hosted by yours truly in the Capital Club in the Dubai International Financial District last week.

The GOP-dominated panel also thought that current polls of voters’ intentions – which mainly show Democratic contender Kamala Harris with a slender lead – do not reflect the true state of support for their candidate.

This panel was originally scheduled to take place in June, and how glad I am that it was postponed.

Since then, the election landscape has changed drastically, with President Joe Biden pulling out of the race to be replaced by his vice president, while Trump has survived two assassination attempts.

Tensions in the Middle East, which Trump has pledged to defuse, have only become more acute.

So, it was good to get the views of some top American experts on the changing landscape ahead of polling on November 5.

The evening was sponsored by Bob Amsterdam, founder of the DC and London law firm that bears his name.

He has been at the heart of legal intrigue for many years, mostly as a defender of politically exposed people around the world – notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch who fell foul of Vladimir Putin two decades ago and ended up spending eight years in the Siberian gulag.

You might think that experience would have set Amsterdam against all things Russian, but he has lately made waves in DC by taking on the advocacy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which Kyiv says is a front organisation for Russian subversion.

That made for some interesting exchanges on one of the next president’s biggest challenges – whether the US continues to support Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s invasion.

Amsterdam said President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had too much control over US foreign policy under the Biden administration.

Supplied

Alongside Amsterdam was Sheila Shadmand, the partner-in-charge for the Middle East at US law firm Jones Day.

Shadmand, a native of Washington DC and of Iranian heritage, was keen to point out that her firm had acted for Trump’s campaigns in the past, and that the views she expressed from the stage at the Capital Club were not necessarily those of Jones Day.

Nonetheless, she believed Trump would win because of his mastery of the media and the loyalty he inspired in his supporters. “The medium is the message”, she said, quoting Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan.

The 70-strong audience was keen to hear the views of panellist Joe (Youssef) Beydoun. Born in Lebanon, he spent some time as deputy mayor of Dearborn, Michigan – the US town with the highest proportion of Arab American voters.

He is currently the chairman of Republicans Overseas UAE, the GOP’s regional grouping.

Not surprisingly, Beydoun thought Trump would win – but advised him not to let his tough stance on immigration open him up to charges of racism. You could almost hear the cats howling in agreement in Springfield, Ohio.

The panel was topped off with the presence of Hadley Gamble, star of stage, screen and power forums around the world, including a famous encounter with President Putin on stage in Moscow three years ago.

Perhaps she and Amsterdam swapped notes on the Russian president’s vulnerabilities?

Gamble, with an experienced journalistic eye, was the least confident that Trump would be victorious in November and not prepared to make a call on the tight race.

With that line-up, my job was less to moderate the session than to play Democrat devil’s advocate, which I did to the best of my ability, but with a sinking feeling from swimming against the Trump tide.

I had called for a show of hands at the beginning of the session as to which candidate the audience thought would win, which showed a narrow advantage to Trump.

Obviously, my Kamala advocacy was ineffective because the audience vote at the end of the panel session showed a bigger Republican majority.

Coincidentally, I closed the evening with one of my favourite quotes from any US politician.

In 1962, when Democrat Dick Tuck lost in a primary for a seat in the California Senate, he told supporters: “The people have spoken – the bastards”.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia and is a media adviser to First Abu Dhabi Bank of the UAE