PHOENIX (AP) — It was Donald Trump's mispronunciation that first caught attention.
"Also, we have many Asur-Asians in our room," Trump said at a weekend rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona. "We have some incredible people in our room."
Asur-Asians?
It turns out the former president was trying to shout out a small group of Assyrians supporting his campaign. They'd been given prominent seats right behind him, donning red "Assyrians for Trump" shirts as he spoke in a packed arena 90 minutes north of Phoenix.
Assyrians, a Christian indigenous group tracing their ancestry to ancient Mesopotamia in the modern Middle East, are a tiny minority community in the United States, but they happen to have significant communities in two of the seven swing states that will decide the Nov. 5 election, Michigan and Arizona. That could give them outsized influence in an election that polls show is essentially tied.
"Thank you, President Trump, for making a mistake in our name," said Sam Darmo, a Phoenix real estate agent and a co-founder of Assyrians for Trump who was seated behind the president at the rally. "Because you know what? Assyrians became very famous. More Americans know who the Assyrians are today than they did back on Sunday."
Assyrians hail from portions of what is now Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They are descendants of a powerful Middle Eastern empire and early followers of Christianity whose language is a form of Aramaic, the language scholars believe Jesus Christ spoke.
Many Assyrians, some identifying as Chaldean or Syriac, have fled centuries of persecution and genocide in their homeland, most recently at the hands of the Islamic State group. Ancient relics have been destroyed or stolen and trafficked.
About 95,000 people living in the United States identify their ancestry as Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2022. By far the largest concentration is in Michigan, a battleground state home to 38,000 Assyrians. About 5,000 Assyrians live in Arizona. The other five battleground states have fewer than 500 Assyrians each. California and the Chicago area also have large Assyrian communities but are not politically competitive.
Throughout the global Assyrian diaspora, the community has pushed to build monuments to preserve the memory of the atrocities they have faced, including the 1915 deportation and massacre of Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks by the Ottoman Turks. They've also pushed to convince local and national governments to formally recognize the massacre as a genocide, a term widely accepted by historians. Such declarations are vehemently fought by Turkey, which denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
Trump pronounced Assyrian correctly in an interview released Thursday with podcaster Patrick Bet-David, who is Assyrian and Armenian.
"You know why they were there?" Trump said. "They were so nice. I met them, the Assyrians. They said, 'Could you give us a shout out?' I said, 'Who are you?' I didn't know. They said, 'We're Assyrians.' I said, 'What's that mean?' But they were really nice people. But I said — I think I mispronounced it."
Darmo confirmed Trump's account, saying he asked Trump for the favor while four Assyrians posed with Trump before the rally. He said the former president instructed an aide to add a shoutout to the teleprompter and speculated that the aide may have misspelled Assyrians in the script.
"We want the Americans to know who we are, and how much we suffered, and how many massacres, genocides have been committed against our people in the Middle East," Darmo said.
Trump sent his son, Eric Trump, to court Assyrians in Phoenix shortly before the 2020 election.
Mona Oshana, an Iraqi-born Assyrian American who co-founded Assyrians for Trump during his first campaign but is no longer formally involved, said the GOP is a good fit for a religious population that fled persecution by authoritarian governments.
"We are an America First community because we came to America based on the echo of freedom and the Constitution," Oshana said. "We often say we were Americans before coming to America, because we believed in the liberties of America, we believed in the Constitution, we believed in the fight of America."
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris ' campaign also has a grassroots organizing group, Chaldeans and Assyrians for Harris Walz, which is particularly active in Michigan.
Some in the Assyrian community were infuriated by Trump's immigration policies, which significantly curtailed refugee resettlement in the United States. Some were affected by his travel ban restricting entry to the country from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Iraq and Syria.
A low point was the 2019 death in Baghdad of a 41-year-old Chaldean man who had lived in the U.S. since he was an infant. Jimmy Al-Daoud, who had a history of diabetes and mental illness, was deported for committing multiple crimes in the U.S.