Trump says Lebanese-American in-law will be senior aide on Arab and Mideast affairs
Massad Boulos has ties to both pro- and anti-Hezbollah parties in Lebanon, is expected to work with Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff to expand Abraham Accords, end region’s wars
US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday announced the appointment of his Lebanese-American in-law Massad Boulos to be his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
Boulos’s son Michael is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany. The businessman and lawyer played an integral role in expanding Trump’s support among Arab and Muslim Americans in last month’s election, echoing the GOP leader’s pledge to end wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Boulos will likely work alongside Steve Witkoff, who Trump last month appointed as his special envoy for the Middle East.
A source familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel that Witkoff will deal more directly with Israel, while Boulos will be Trump’s point-man to Arab countries. The president-elect campaigned on expanding the Abraham Accords that he brokered at the end of his first term, which saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco normalize relations with Israel.
Boulus has also served as Trump’s conduit to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, handing over a letter that the latter wrote to the then-Republican nominee condemning the July attempt on his life. Trump sent the letter back to Abbas with a note expressing thanks for the well-wishes.
Boulos then met Abbas in person on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September, and, earlier this month, coordinated the first phone call between the two leaders in over seven years, during which Abbas congratulated Trump on his election win.
In a Truth Social post announcing the appointment, Trump touted Boulos as a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.”
“He has been a longtime proponent of Republican and Conservative values, an asset to my Campaign, and was instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American Community,” Trump continued. “Massad is a dealmaker and an unwavering supporter of PEACE in the Middle East.”
It was the second time in recent days that Trump chose the father-in-law of one of his children to serve in his administration.
On Saturday, Trump said that he had picked his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, real estate mogul Charles Kushner, to serve as US ambassador to France.
In recent months, Boulos campaigned for Trump to drum up Lebanese and Arab American support, even as the US-backed Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Boulos has powerful roots in both countries.
His father and grandfather were both figures in Lebanese politics and his father-in-law was a key funder of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian party aligned with Hezbollah.
Boulos’s son, Michael, and Tiffany Trump were married in an elaborate ceremony at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago Club in November 2022, after getting engaged in the White House Rose Garden during Trump’s first term.
Boulos has been in touch with interlocutors across Lebanon’s multipolar political world, three sources who spoke to him in recent months say, a rare feat in Lebanon, where decades-old rivalries between factions run deep.
Particularly notable is his ability to maintain relations with Hezbollah, they say. The Iranian-backed Shiite terror group has a large number of seats in Lebanon’s parliament and ministers in the government.
Boulos is a friend of Suleiman Frangieh, a Christian ally of Hezbollah and its candidate for Lebanon’s presidency. He is also in touch with the Lebanese Forces Party, a vehemently anti-Hezbollah Christian faction, the sources say, and has ties to independent lawmakers.
Aron Lund, a fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said Boulos was well placed to influence Trump’s Middle East policy after playing a small but significant role in expanding Trump’s appeal to Arab American and Muslim voters during the campaign.
“Boulos’s 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 wrote.
Boulos, a billionaire with extensive business ties in Nigeria, was born in Lebanon, but moved to Texas as a teenager, where he attended the University of Houston, earned a law degree and became a US citizen.
Trump’s election win in Michigan came in part because of Boulos’s help flipping some of the 300,000 Arab Americans and Muslims in the state who overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020, but opposed Biden’s policies in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, Trump campaign officials and supporters told Reuters.
“Boulos played a big role in the outreach to Muslim voters,” said Rabiul Chowdhury, co-founder of Muslims for Trump.
Beginning in September, the Trump campaign held weekly meetings in person and via Zoom with dozens of Arab American and Muslim civic leaders and business executives.
Boulos spent weeks on the ground in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states with big Arab American and Muslim populations, assuring audiences in private lunches and dinners that tapped his own connections to Lebanese American businessmen that Trump was committed to ending the wars in the Middle East.
The Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort to mobilize Arab American and Muslim voters, Boulos told Reuters in an interview shortly after the election.
Trump won endorsements from Muslim imams and the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, another town near Detroit with a large Arab American population, as well as the large Bangladeshi community, and courted Iraqi Americans, Albanian Americans and others.
While the events on the ground in Lebanon played a factor, the economy did too. And conservative Arabs and Muslims were concerned about what they saw as the Democrats’ “far-left ideology,” including support of transgender rights, Boulos said.
The new role could offer Boulos the kind of political clout he could not achieve in Lebanon. He had a brief run for Lebanon’s parliament in 2018 alongside pro-Hezbollah candidates, but since then he has not consistently aligned himself with any particular party, sources in Lebanon said.
He hails from a Greek Orthodox family. In Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system, that would cap his chances at a senior role in government at the level of deputy speaker of parliament. The post of president — the highest Christian role in the country — is reserved for Maronite Catholics.
While he used to travel to Lebanon frequently, he has not visited in the last four years, one of the sources said.
