President-elect Donald Trump has chosen his youngest daughter’s father-in-law to be his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
Massad Boulus is the father of Michael Boulos, who married Tiffany Trump in November 2022 at Mar-a-Lago after they got engaged at the White House during Trump’s first term. They met on the Greek island of Mykonos at a club owned by actor Lindsay Lohan, People magazine reported in 2022.
Trump’s pick of the elder Boulos on Sunday was the second time over the weekend that he turned to family to make his appointments. On Saturday, Trump announced that Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, would be his ambassador to France.
Boulos, a Lebanese-American billionaire with considerable business interests in Nigeria, met with Arab-American and Muslim leaders on several occasions during Trump’s election campaign, as he sought to increase Lebanese and Arab-American support amid the Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah.
The businessman has influential family ties in Lebanon, with his father and grandfather both having been active in Lebanese politics. His father-in-law was an important financial supporter of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian party with ties to Hezbollah.
Boulos was born in Lebanon but moved to Texas as a teenager, attending the University of Houston and eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.
He operates Boulos Enterprises, based in Nigeria, which makes motorcycles and mechanical equipment. After getting his law degree, he joined the family business and eventually became the CEO.
Boulos is also the CEO of the conglomerate SCOA Nigeria, which operates in the areas of buses, construction equipment, power plants, and food imports.
The billionaire has been in contact with his connections in various factions of Lebanese politics, three sources told Reuters. It’s a rare accomplishment in Lebanon, where factions are separated by feuds going back decades.
Of note is his ability to stay in touch with Hezbollah, the sources told the news agency. The Shi’ite Muslim party has a large number of seats in the Lebanese parliament and several ministers in the government.
Boulos is reportedly friendly with Suleiman Frangieh, a Christian Hezbollah ally and presidential candidate. He’s also in contact with the Lebanese Forces Party, which is an anti-Hezbollah Christian group, and he also has connections to independent lawmakers, according to Reuters. However, Boulos recently pushed back on this version of events in an interview with Newsweek, saying that he wasn’t affiliated with any political party in Lebanon, but he added that he’s “acquainted with most Lebanese Christian leaders.”
A fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, Aron Lund, said Boulos could influence Trump’s Middle East policy after he helped to increase Trump support among Arab American and Muslim voters.
“Boulos’ Lebanese political past gives no real indication of a geostrategic or even national vision, but it demonstrates ambition and a set of political allies that will stand out in Trump’s circle like a sore thumb,” Lund noted, according to the news agency.
Trump won Michigan partly because of Boulos’s efforts to win over some of the 300,000 Arab American and Muslim voters in the state who mostly backed President Joe Biden in 2020 but who opposed his support of Israel amid its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, according to Trump campaign officials and supporters speaking to Reuters.
The co-founder of Muslims for Trump, Rabiul Chowdhury, told the news agency that “Boulos played a big role in the outreach to Muslim voters.”
From September onwards, the Trump campaign organized meetings on a weekly basis with a number of Arab American and Muslim civic and business leaders.
Boulos was in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states with significant Muslim and Arab American populations during the campaign, telling crowds at private lunches and dinners that Trump wants to end the wars in the Middle East.
Just after the election, Boulos told Reuters that the Trump campaign spent tens of millions on getting out the Arab American and Muslim vote.
He added that conservative Arab Americans and Muslims were concerned about what they viewed as “far left ideology” from the Democrats, such as the party’s support for transgender rights.
Boulos’s new post as Middle East adviser to the new president would possibly offer him the kind of political power he was not able to attain in Lebanon. In 2018, he briefly ran for parliament in Lebanon along with candidates backing Hezbollah, but since that time, he hasn’t been aligned with any specific party, sources in Lebanon told Reuters.
The businessman is from a Greek Orthodox family, which would limit his chances to get a top post in government to the level of the deputy speaker of parliament because of Lebanon’s secterian powersharing system.
The presidency, which is the highest Christian role in Lebanon, remains restricted to Maronite Catholics.
