Let’s start this article the right way: I’ve already reported for you once before on Muslim voters in Dearborn who were undergoing the second half of the “F*ck Around and Find Out” routine. You can read the headline of this one again, and it may make you wonder if I’m attacking Muslims specifically for Trump’s win.

I am not at all.

The problem is, there was such a unique factor at play — protest votes over the Harris stance on Palestine — in this particular demographic voting for a man who once tried to ban Muslims from entering the United States that the FAFO is a little more amplified than it otherwise might be.

I am generally an ally to Muslim voters, but in this case, despite the fact that I agreed with them on Harris’s weak stance against what I consider a genocide, I (and most others) understood that Trump would be worse.

I’m not a big “I told you so” guy, especially with marginalized people. But Trump is. You see, the reason I knew Trump would be worse is because he told everyone he would be worse. The play for the protest voters was a gamble on forcing Kamala to shift her position, but when they followed through and voted for Trump, they got exactly what he told them they were going to get.

The circle of Muslim voters lamenting their protest votes is widening as Trump’s Cabinet picks get more frequent and worse.

Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who founded the “Abandon Harris” movement in Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Muslims for Trump summed up the general sentiment among them, if a somewhat subdued telling of it: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”

That seems to be putting it mildly. Why are they mad at Trump over Marco Rubio? It’s not like he was a sexual predator like Matt Gaetz or Pete Hegseth. He’s seemed to be one of Trump’s least controversial picks, and one we all saw coming since Trump selected JD Vance as his running mate. Remember when Rubio was on that shortlist? Yeah, after the Vance pick, it was VERY widely understood that Rubio would get the Secretary of State nod.

How did those voters miss it? You’d think they might have been paying attention to every scrap of news about a prominent politician who publicly declared earlier this year that he would never call for a ceasefire in Gaza, since he believes that Israel should destroy “every element” of Hamas. “These people are vicious animals,” he said, using language akin to Trump’s description of immigrants here at home.

We compared Trump to Hitler for using authoritarian rhetoric like that. I wonder why Muslim voters didn’t think the same about the guy Trump TOLD THEM he was going to pick before they actively gave Trump the authority to pick him.

But Rubio was far from the only and not close to the worst pick that these voters are lamenting today. And the worst part is, almost all of them were relatively predictable. Maybe not Mike Huckabee, who Trump wants to install as his ambassador to Israel. People had incorrectly assumed that Huckabee had mostly faded from the political scene, leaving his daughter Smoky Eye Sarah to assume the crown of Royal Pain in the Ass.

Even if he was unexpected, he certainly set the tone for Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Muslim picks. Back in 2008, when Christian Nationalist Mike was running for president himself, he told a group of pro-Israel supporters that “Palestinian” identity is just a “political tool” designed to “take land from Israel.”

Trump even picked Elise Stefanik to be his UN ambassador, despite the fact that she’d be joining what she very recently called a “cesspool of antisemitism” over their condemnation of the genocide in Gaza.

So what are Muslim voters, organizers, and activists who either voted for Trump or otherwise opposed Kamala Harris saying now? According to Reuters, it’s not good.

Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network (AMEEN), said Muslim voters had hoped Trump would choose cabinet officials who work toward peace, and there was no sign of that.

“We are very disappointed,” he said.

“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement.”

Nazarko said the community would continue pressing to make its voices heard about ending the war in Gaza. “At least we’re on the map.”

On the contrary, Rex, this is one of the very, very few recorded instances of Trump keeping one of his promises. Just not to you. See, Muslims may have supported Trump (or opposed Harris) with their votes, but the people who support Trump with money and power are all very pro-Israel. They always have been, openly.

So even if Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, and Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, reached out to Muslims to reassure them that Trump would be a candidate for peace, there’s little evidence of it so far.

Instead, Hassan Abdel Salam says, the picks aren’t surprising in anything but their extremism. Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota and the co-founder of “Abandon Harris,” told Reuters something very similar.

“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” he said. “We were always extremely skeptical … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played.”