In his first campaign for president, Donald Trump appealed to LGBTQ voters by pledging to protect them from a “hateful foreign ideology” that he falsely linked to ordinary Muslim Americans. Seven years later, Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from LGBTQ rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith.

The anti-Muslim politics that Trump tapped into for years — offering cash to stop a “Ground Zero Mosque,” spreading inflammatory lies about Arab neighborhoods, proposing a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. that turned into a travel ban that mostly affected Muslims — don’t have as much traction with GOP candidates anymore.

What replaced it? Trump told a Republican crowd in a recent speech that “transgender” is a guaranteed applause line even though “five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was.”

Nobody’s explicitly disavowed the old Republican politics, but presidential candidates don’t warn about “Islamofascism” in Des Moines; they don’t talk about banning sharia law in Charleston; and Trump himself has only talked off-camera about restoring the “Muslim ban.” Support for deepening ties with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia increasingly codes as MAGA thanks in part to Trump’s friendly diplomatic and business relationships.

That’s created some space for a project that conservatives shelved for two decades: Making cultural appeals to observant Muslims, and separating them from a secular, progressive Democratic Party. The Muslim vote collapsed after the party’s post-9/11 turn, and didn’t recover when Trump led the GOP.

“They are not big on ‘woke’ stuff and are not susceptible to being bullied,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans of Tax Reform, whose own effort to bring Muslims into the GOP fizzled during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “They are woke-resistant.”

Muslim voters are a small share of the electorate; pre-Bush GOP outreach was focused mostly in Michigan, a swing state where support from Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs can be decisive. Last year, after Muslim parents in Dearborn, Mich. demanded that “filth” and “pornography” be taken out of public schools, Republicans rushed in. The party’s unsuccessful statewide ticket rallied in the city; in February, the state GOP chose Rola Makki, its first-ever Muslim official, as its outreach director.

Michigan Democrats swept the midterms, but their vote share declined in Dearborn. Makki told Semafor that the shift helped convince GOP delegates to elect her to the outreach role. She wanted to introduce Muslims and Islam to more Republicans, in a state where an anti-Muslim state senator ran for governor just five years ago. And she wanted to convince more Muslims that the Democrats had abandoned them.

“A lot of people from the Middle East were persecuted for their beliefs and wanted to come here for religious freedom,” said Makki. “How did we go from love, tolerance, and acceptance to forcing beliefs on people?”

Gender identity and LGBTQ content in schools were forcing that question, said Makki; in March, she tweeted that when “someone asks me why as a Muslim I’ve aligned with the GOP, I just go to the Libs of TikTok page and show them the insanity from the progressive left.”

“The kids are too young to be exposed to this ideology,” said Khalil Ahmed-Saif Othman, a Dearborn activist and former Democrat who joined Makki and state chair Kristina Karamo at a GOP outreach event at a banquet hall in the city last month. “The Michigan GOP is becoming more welcoming to minorities.”