United States President-elect Donald Trump has selected Lebanon-born billionaire Massad Boulos as his senior White House adviser for Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, citing the businessman’s outreach to Arab Americans during the election campaign.
The announcement of the appointment on Sunday comes as the Trump administration continues to take shape, particularly in terms of the officials who will oversee US policy in the Middle East, although the purview of Boulos’s role was not immediately clear.
Before the selection of Boulos, who is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, the president-elect tapped pro-Israel hawk Marco Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state; Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, as his ambassador to Israel; and friend Steven Witkoff, a businessman with scant policy experience, as special envoy to the Middle East.
In a statement on Trump’s Truth Social platform, the president-elect hailed Boulos as “an accomplished lawyer and a highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the International scene”.
“Massad is a dealmaker, and an unwavering supporter of PEACE in the Middle East. He will be a strong advocate for the United States, and its interests, and I am pleased to have him on our team!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s envoy to Arab Americans
Boulos was a key figure in the Trump campaign’s outreach to the Arab American community and sought to capitalise on outrage over President Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel during the war in Gaza and, more recently, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
It was a difficult balancing act. Trump had repeatedly promised to end the war in Gaza and prevent further escalation but had long been the preferred candidate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
During his first term from 2017 to 2021, Trump had fully embraced Israel, moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, long seen as the capital of a future Palestinian state; recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights in Syria; forging a series of normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab countries; and allowing for the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law.
His selection of Huckabee – an evangelical Christian minister who in 2008 said there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” – has signalled the makings of a similarly permissive approach in his second term.
Boulos also sought to calm concerns over Trump’s 2017 bans on travellers from several Muslim-majority countries, a swiftly reversed executive order seen as blatantly discriminatory.
Boulos’s efforts received mixed marks from leaders in the large Arab American community in Michigan, a key battleground state.
Some embraced Trump, identifying with his socially conservative message or just seeking to punish Biden, while others derided Boulos for failing to give specifics about how Trump would chart a different path than Biden in the region.
Still, the election saw a historic shift away from Democrats from within Arab American and Muslim American communities.
In Dearborn, the largest Arab American majority city in the US, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris received just half of the votes that Biden had in 2020. All told, the vice president won just over 36 percent of the vote in the city with Trump taking more than 42 percent and Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate, carrying 18 percent.
In the family
For his part, Boulos has been largely silent on his personal views on the Middle East and has not articulated his own policy positions.
He was born to a politically connected Christian family in Lebanon but moved to Texas as a teenager and eventually joined his family’s business ventures in Nigeria.
While The Associated Press news agency had previously reported that Boulos ran for parliament in Lebanon in 2009, he disputed that account in a recent interview with Newsweek.
He also pushed back that he was “a friend” of Suleiman Frangieh, a Lebanese politician with ties to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose presidential ambitions have been backed by the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.
Boulos instead said he was not affiliated with any party in Lebanon but remained “acquainted with most Lebanese Christian leaders”.
The businessman has described himself as a longtime Republican who supported Trump in 2016. He came more firmly into Trump’s orbit after his son Michael married Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
His selection was announced a day after Trump said he would nominate Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, as the US ambassador to France.