President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his daughter’s father-in-law Massad Boulos as a senior adviser on the Middle East, thrusting the Lebanese auto tycoon into the fragile effort to uphold a US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Trump said Boulos would be senior adviser to the president on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, joining real estate developer Steve Witkoff, who he named special envoy to the region, and his nominee for US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
None have traditional diplomatic backgrounds and reflect Trump’s penchant for elevating close friends and family to key positions.
“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 said in a post on Truth Social.
Boulos, whose son Michael is married to Trump’s youngest daughter Tiffany, spent most of the past year drumming up support for Trump among Arab Americans in the battleground state of Michigan.
Boulos recently travelled to Washington to meet senior Lebanese officials and other diplomats and US representatives. It was widely assumed he would be the next person to oversee relations between Israel and Lebanon, taking up the file from President Joe Biden’s senior adviser Amos Hochstein.
Born into a Christian family in Kfar Akka, Lebanon, he moved to Texas as a teenager to attend the University of Houston. After graduation, Boulos joined his family’s automotive business in Nigeria, rising to lead Scoa Motors and Boulos Enterprises, which dominate the Nigerian market for motorcycles and vehicles.
He is known to have close ties across Lebanon’s Christian political class, including with Suleiman Frangieh, a leading Christian politician and Hizbollah’s preferred candidate to fill the vacant presidency.
The US last week announced that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a ceasefire, ending more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hizbollah.
The US-brokered ceasefire deal outlines a gradual withdrawal of Israeli and Hizbollah forces from southern Lebanon over the course of 60 days. The Lebanese army and Unifil troops are set to deploy widely in the region, which will be enforced by a US-led monitoring mechanism.
