US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday named Massad Boulos as his senior advisor on the Middle East, catapulting his Lebanese-American in-law to the centre of his foreign policy in the region as it grapples with multiple crises.
Boulos’ son, Michael, is married to Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany. Boulos led the Trump campaign’s successful outreach to Arab-American voters.
Tiffany met Michael in 2018 at the Lindsey Lohan Beach Club in Mykonos, Greece.
The billionaire businessman’s nomination suggests he will continue to play a key role once Trump returns to the White House in January.
Bringing Boulos on board as an advisor will inject a new personality into Trump’s inner circle, which has mainly been dominated by pro-Israel Jewish Americans, like his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and evangelical Christians, including Michael Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel.
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Boulos will be the highest-level official of Lebanese descent to serve in the White House since Philip Habib, a career US diplomat who was Ronald Reagan’s envoy to the Middle East during the Lebanese Civil War.
Boulos represents a small, powerful social and economic class of eastern Christians who maintain one foot in the world of the western elite and another in the Middle East’s politics.
Nigerian auto empire and elite insider
Boulos comes from a Greek Orthodox Christian family in Kfar Akka, Lebanon’s northern Koura district. Like many of Lebanon’s business elite, his wealth is generated outside the Mediterranean state. As a teenager, he moved to Texas and attended the University of Houston.
Boulos then moved to Nigeria, where tight-knight Lebanese families have owned business empires for over a century. He became chief executive officer of his in-laws’ automotive conglomerate, Scoa Motors, and runs Boulos Enterprises, which has a monopoly on the distribution of Japanese Suzuki vehicles and China’s Jincheng motorcycles.
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Boulos’ wife, Sara, was born in Burkina Faso and is an arts patron in Nigeria. They have four children together.
Although Boulos was relatively unknown in the US until the election, he has close ties to Lebanon’s powerbrokers who have been beating a path to his door since Trump’s election victory.
Boulos met with Samy Gemayel, the leader of the Christian Kataeb Party, which opposes Hezbollah, and Nadim Gemayel, the son of Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel, who was assassinated in November. He also met with Amin Salam, a Sunni Muslim who is Lebanon’s minister of economy and active in the Arab-American business community.
“Massad is part of our world,” a Lebanese businessman who counts Boulos as a friend told Middle East Eye. “He is not ideological or naive about Lebanon. He knows it as a businessman”.
Boulos himself made two unsuccessful runs for a seat in Lebanon’s parliament. His family was involved in local Lebanese politics, and his father was mayor of Kfar Akka until 2011. His great-uncle was a minister and politician after Lebanon won independence from France.
Boulos’ brother serves on Kfar Akka’s municipal council, and his mother still lives there. According to L’Orient Today, Boulos has not travelled to Lebanon for four years.
As a Greek-Orthodox Christian, Boulos’ official political heft inside Lebanon would always be limited – the highest office a Christian can attain is the presidency, but that is reserved for a Maronite by tradition.
Lebanon’s presidential contenders court Boulos
Boulos, however, has shown an ability to weave outside Lebanon’s polarised sectarian system. He counts Suleiman Frangieh, scion of a powerful Christian family and a key ally of Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as a friend. Frangieh, who heads Lebanon’s Marada Movement, is Hezbollah’s pick for the presidency.
Boulos has already been consulting with Lebanese politicians who are positioning themselves as presidential candidates. Lebanon has been run by a caretaker government since 2022, but its parliament is slated to elect a president on 9 January.
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Lebanon’s speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, had been blocking the election of a president amid Hezbollah’s demand that Frangieh take the position. But analysts tell MEE that Israel’s blows against Hezbollah have weakened the group enough that a consensus candidate could emerge.
Boulos’ role is still unclear. Earlier, Trump nominated Steve Witkoff, a Jewish-American real estate developer and golfing friend, as his envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff has cut business deals with Gulf states, including the $623m sale of New York’s Park Lane Hotel to Qatar.
Boulos’ rise comes as Lebanon emerges from the rubble of Israel’s devastating war amid a shaky ceasefire with Hezbollah.
Lebanon was a key banking and trade hub for the Middle East after it won independence from France in the 1940s. Legions of early American diplomats passed through the country as Arabic language students or missionaries. Before its 15-year civil war, Beirut attracted international businessmen.
Hezbollah cemented its control of Lebanon in the 1990s and 2000s after it emerged as the only militia group allowed to keep its arms following the Taif Accords, which ended the war.
Lebanon remained a tourism and banking hub, but by then had lost its relative economic power to oil-rich Gulf states.
A blistering financial crisis that started in 2019 cemented Lebanon’s status as a struggling state in which the US and its Gulf allies had all but lost interest. Israel’s offensives against Hezbollah have weakened the group, allowing western-aligned Lebanese powerbrokers to jostle for power.
With Lebanon again at the centre of the US’s radar after years of being seen in the grip of Hezbollah, Boulos is likely to find himself in a unique position to influence his homeland from inside the White House.
