With Donald Trump now on his way back to the White House, the Middle East is on tenterhooks about future U.S. policy. If Trump maintains the radical pro-Israel and anti-Iran stance of his first term, he will likely inflame the conflicts around the region and could even drag the United States into war with Iran. On the other hand, if his isolationist streak prevails, he might turn U.S. involvement in the region in a new direction.
But there is also another possibility: a chaotic and inconsistent approach to the Middle East driven mainly by the various personalities in Trump’s orbit. Take the case of Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American magnate who played a small but significant role in expanding Trump’s appeal to Arab-Americans during the campaign—and may now have Trump’s ear on Lebanon policy.
Trump’s Middle East Policy
To the extent that Donald Trump created a distinct Middle East policy in his last term, it was hawkish on Iran and cozy to Israel—and that may very well continue. Trump’s reported early picks for future office are a who’s who of Washington’s Iran hawks and pro-Israel hardliners, ranging from the State Department transition team head, Brian Hook, to Joel Rayburn at the National Security Council and the man tapped as ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee—a pro-settlement, pro-annexation extremist who says there is “no such thing as a Palestinian.” With people like these in charge, Trump’s second term is likely to enact a policy of more sanctions, continued Middle Eastern troop deployments, and heightened tensions—perhaps war—with Iran.
Then again, Trump also has a strong isolationist streak that could point to a different policy. The president-elect has repeatedly criticized U.S. involvement in the forever wars of the Middle East, a region that he describes, not unreasonably, as a sinkhole for U.S. time and treasure. During his 2017–20 presidency, he struggled to overcome the interventionist leanings of his own appointees, including through repeated unsuccessful attempts to pull troops out of Syria, which he dubbed a place of “sand and death.” After Trump’s ouster in the 2020 election, his Syria envoy publicly admitted to “constantly playing shell games” to deceive Trump about the true size of U.S. deployments.
Although Trump’s early staffing choices mainly seem to point in the direction of Iran escalation and interventionism, there are exceptions. The most prominent is likely his controversial pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a populist ex-Democrat who traveled to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and has repeatedly argued against escalation with Iran.
In other words, personalities and staffing choices matter. And with Lebanon now caught up in a war between Israel and Hezbollah, as part of a wider conflagration around Gaza, maybe Massad Boulos’s moment has come.
Who Is Massad Boulos?
A well-connected Lebanese-born American businessman who made his fortune in West Africa, Massad Boulos hails from a locally influential Greek Orthodox Christian family in Kfaraakka in Lebanon’s northern Koura district. Already very wealthy and a long-standing Trump supporter, Boulos’s star rose further in 2022 when his son Michael married Trump’s daughter Tiffany. The marriage has brought the Bouloses into the former president’s small circle of family and friends, where much of the policy work seemed to happen during Trump’s first administration. According to the Associated Press, it has “significantly expanded” his role in the Trump campaign.
As the election approached, Massad Boulos positioned himself as a leading figure in the Trump campaign’s outreach to Arab-American and Muslim voters, many of whom were disenchanted with the White House’s backing for Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump has long been known for his Islamophobia—infamously, he launched his first presidency with an attempt at a “Muslim ban.” But during the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly brought up the issue of attracting Muslim or Arab voters in speeches—and he appears to have been happy with the results of Boulos’s work. According to the New York Times, Boulos also helped facilitate contacts between Trump and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
As the campaign celebrated its victory, Boulos informed Lebanese media that Trump would swiftly end the wars in the Middle East. Most intriguingly, Al-Jadeed TV cited him as saying that once Trump was in office, Boulos himself would assume leadership of efforts to resolve the Israel–Lebanon crisis. That role is currently filled by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who, as a matter of fact, also has a background in the region: he was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. Once the news started to spread, however, Boulos claimed to have been misunderstood and Al-Jadeed deleted the claim from its website and Twitter account.
It’s unclear what role Boulos may now be in line for, if any. Given the close family connection, however, Boulos does seem well placed to influence Trump’s Middle East policy—particularly in relation to his country of birth, Lebanon, whose politics he has been involved with for decades.
Boulos’s Lebanese Political Past
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.
As many reports have noted, Boulos is an ally of Suleiman Frangiyeh, a Lebanese presidential contender close to Syria and Hezbollah. A fixture in Lebanese politics, Frangiyeh hails from a landowning Maronite Christian family in northern Lebanon, and he is well known for his close relationship with the government in Damascus; he has reportedly been friendly with current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad since their youth. If those are Boulos’s political leanings, too, it would make him an odd bird in a Trump administration dedicated to advancing Israel’s interests and confronting Iran, Assad’s primary ally. On the other hand, connections of that sort could be highly useful if Trump were to lean the other way and pursue his isolationist instincts, aiming to deescalate ongoing wars, deconflict with Iran, and scale down the U.S. presence in the region.
Boulos’s long and checkered past in Lebanese politics does not exactly indicate a firm commitment to either side in Lebanese or regional politics.
According to Boulos himself, he’s not affiliated with any Lebanese party and he denies reports that he ran for parliament in 2009. After digging into the matter, it seems he’s both right and wrong.
According to a report in the now-defunct Lebanese newspaper As-safir, Boulos did not start his political career as a Frangiyeh supporter. Instead, he spent decades as an ally of former Lebanese president Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement party, even acting as a party representative in Nigeria, the site of Boulos’s family business.
General Aoun is a major Lebanese political figure, who led an unsuccessful Christian-tinted resistance to Syria in the final stages of Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war. After the war, he lingered in French exile as Damascus’s enemy number one, campaigning against Syrian and Iranian influence in his homeland. It was only when Syrian occupation forces left Lebanon in 2005 that Aoun was finally able to return. Epitomizing Lebanon’s complex and fickle politics, he then immediately switched roles and began to support Lebanon’s now-weakened pro-Syrian camp and Hezbollah. For Aoun, the pact with his enemies of old was a way to further his political ambitions—and although it would take a while, he eventually did succeed in getting elected president in 2016.
As for Boulos, he apparently did not mind the political 180-degree turn. Over the following years, he appears to have thrown himself into the intricate politics of his home region, Koura, with an eye on securing a parliamentary mandate. In Lebanon, the way to do that is to strike opportunistic alliances between parties, religious groups, and strongmen of every variety.
According to As-safir, Boulos ran for parliament in 2005, the first post-war election not under Syria’s tutelage. He withdrew his candidacy almost immediately, however, to make way for a mixed list involving the Free Patriotic Movement, Marada, and the Communist Party.
In the run-up to the next election, in 2009, reports place Boulos as one of a handful of names on an internal Free Patriotic Movement shortlist for candidates in the Koura region. That he was active on the party’s behalf is evident from an incident in January of that year. The Free Patriotic Movement then accused a rival Christian party, the Lebanese Forces, of attacking Boulos’s supporters as they were going around Koura villages distributing copies of his autobiography. The Lebanese Forces denied doing so, however; it remains unknown whether Koura’s villagers enjoyed the autobiography.
Then, there was a falling out.
As the election approached, General Aoun needed to pick a single candidate to run in Koura alongside his local allies in Marada and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, another pro-Damascus faction. That meant taking sides in the internal feuds of the Free Patriotic Movement’s Koura branch—and in the end, Aoun sided with a rival clique linked to another Koura family, the Atallahs. The candidates who failed to be nominated were not pleased. A report in the Al-Akhbar daily claims that it led to “a massacre” within the party, figuratively speaking, as angry supporters defected this way and that. Both Al-Akhbar and MTV, a Lebanese television channel, claim that Boulos retaliated by moving “to the front of the Lebanese Forces” or that he “joined the Lebanese Forces electoral apparatus.” In contrast to the Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese Forces party, which was formed as a Maronite Christian civil war militia, is a fiercely anti-Syrian group. In the end, Boulos did not run for any party, and all three Koura seats were taken by the anti-Syrian alliance to which the Lebanese Forces belonged, routing Aoun’s competing bloc of parties. It remains an open question whether that result had anything to do with Massad Boulos having backed the Lebanese Forces candidate out of sheer spite.
At some later point, however, Boulos found his way to Marada and the Frangiyehs, returning to Damascus’s orbit.
When the next election finally rolled around in 2018, after repeated postponements, Boulos issued a statement saying that he had decided, after consultations with “the leader and friend Suleiman bek Frangiyeh” (bek is an honorific) that he would not run. Instead, he would carry on as “an ally of the Frangiyeh family” through other means, while offering full support to Marada’s candidate list.
Disposable Campaign Asset or Trump’s Lebanon Whisperer?
In short, then, the reports that Boulos is a Marada ally appear to be true; at least they were true, recently. Then again, Boulos’s long and checkered past in Lebanese politics—first as a supporter of Aoun’s anti-Syrian exile activism and then of the general’s pro-Syrian turn, followed by a spell alongside the anti-Syrians of the Lebanese Forces, before finally hooking up with Marada, a stalwart pro-Assad group—does not exactly indicate a firm commitment to either side in Lebanese or regional politics.
Will that help him secure a position in the coming Trump II administration, though? It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, Boulos was quick to discredit reports that he’s got a Lebanon envoy job lined up—but on the other hand, he has spent the time after the election meeting Lebanese political figures. Indeed, the mere fact that Middle Eastern leaders see Boulos as a channel to reach Trump could help him claim that role. To be sure, Boulos’s family connection to Trump makes it unlikely that he would simply be discarded the way other campaign figures could be. Meanwhile, the war between Israel and Hezbollah will ensure that Lebanon sits high on Trump’s agenda.
Whether that’ll be enough to position Massad Boulos as Trump’s Lebanon whisperer remains to be seen. Either way, this colorful character offers a useful reminder that Middle East politics under Donald Trump will often be more readily understood in light of the personalities orbiting Mar-a-Lago than through an ideological prism or in terms of U.S. national interest.
Cover Image: People drive past the ancient western gate of the Baalbek Citadel in Lebanon on November 4. The Citadel had been damaged the week before by Israeli airstrikes. Source: Ed Ram/Getty Images
Tags: lebanon, foreign affairs, donald trump
Trump’s Would-Be Lebanon Whisperer
With Donald Trump now on his way back to the White House, the Middle East is on tenterhooks about future U.S. policy. If Trump maintains the radical pro-Israel and anti-Iran stance of his first term, he will likely inflame the conflicts around the region and could even drag the United States into war with Iran. On the other hand, if his isolationist streak prevails, he might turn U.S. involvement in the region in a new direction.
But there is also another possibility: a chaotic and inconsistent approach to the Middle East driven mainly by the various personalities in Trump’s orbit. Take the case of Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American magnate who played a small but significant role in expanding Trump’s appeal to Arab-Americans during the campaign—and may now have Trump’s ear on Lebanon policy.
Trump’s Middle East Policy
To the extent that Donald Trump created a distinct Middle East policy in his last term, it was hawkish on Iran and cozy to Israel—and that may very well continue. Trump’s reported early picks for future office are a who’s who of Washington’s Iran hawks and pro-Israel hardliners, ranging from the State Department transition team head, Brian Hook, to Joel Rayburn at the National Security Council and the man tapped as ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee—a pro-settlement, pro-annexation extremist who says there is “no such thing as a Palestinian.” With people like these in charge, Trump’s second term is likely to enact a policy of more sanctions, continued Middle Eastern troop deployments, and heightened tensions—perhaps war—with Iran.
Then again, Trump also has a strong isolationist streak that could point to a different policy. The president-elect has repeatedly criticized U.S. involvement in the forever wars of the Middle East, a region that he describes, not unreasonably, as a sinkhole for U.S. time and treasure. During his 2017–20 presidency, he struggled to overcome the interventionist leanings of his own appointees, including through repeated unsuccessful attempts to pull troops out of Syria, which he dubbed a place of “sand and death.” After Trump’s ouster in the 2020 election, his Syria envoy publicly admitted to “constantly playing shell games” to deceive Trump about the true size of U.S. deployments.
Although Trump’s early staffing choices mainly seem to point in the direction of Iran escalation and interventionism, there are exceptions. The most prominent is likely his controversial pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a populist ex-Democrat who traveled to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and has repeatedly argued against escalation with Iran.
In other words, personalities and staffing choices matter. And with Lebanon now caught up in a war between Israel and Hezbollah, as part of a wider conflagration around Gaza, maybe Massad Boulos’s moment has come.
Who Is Massad Boulos?
A well-connected Lebanese-born American businessman who made his fortune in West Africa, Massad Boulos hails from a locally influential Greek Orthodox Christian family in Kfaraakka in Lebanon’s northern Koura district. Already very wealthy and a long-standing Trump supporter, Boulos’s star rose further in 2022 when his son Michael married Trump’s daughter Tiffany. The marriage has brought the Bouloses into the former president’s small circle of family and friends, where much of the policy work seemed to happen during Trump’s first administration. According to the Associated Press, it has “significantly expanded” his role in the Trump campaign.
As the election approached, Massad Boulos positioned himself as a leading figure in the Trump campaign’s outreach to Arab-American and Muslim voters, many of whom were disenchanted with the White House’s backing for Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump has long been known for his Islamophobia—infamously, he launched his first presidency with an attempt at a “Muslim ban.” But during the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly brought up the issue of attracting Muslim or Arab voters in speeches—and he appears to have been happy with the results of Boulos’s work. According to the New York Times, Boulos also helped facilitate contacts between Trump and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
As the campaign celebrated its victory, Boulos informed Lebanese media that Trump would swiftly end the wars in the Middle East. Most intriguingly, Al-Jadeed TV cited him as saying that once Trump was in office, Boulos himself would assume leadership of efforts to resolve the Israel–Lebanon crisis. That role is currently filled by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who, as a matter of fact, also has a background in the region: he was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. Once the news started to spread, however, Boulos claimed to have been misunderstood and Al-Jadeed deleted the claim from its website and Twitter account.
It’s unclear what role Boulos may now be in line for, if any. Given the close family connection, however, Boulos does seem well placed to influence Trump’s Middle East policy—particularly in relation to his country of birth, Lebanon, whose politics he has been involved with for decades.
Boulos’s Lebanese Political Past
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.
As many reports have noted, Boulos is an ally of Suleiman Frangiyeh, a Lebanese presidential contender close to Syria and Hezbollah. A fixture in Lebanese politics, Frangiyeh hails from a landowning Maronite Christian family in northern Lebanon, and he is well known for his close relationship with the government in Damascus; he has reportedly been friendly with current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad since their youth. If those are Boulos’s political leanings, too, it would make him an odd bird in a Trump administration dedicated to advancing Israel’s interests and confronting Iran, Assad’s primary ally. On the other hand, connections of that sort could be highly useful if Trump were to lean the other way and pursue his isolationist instincts, aiming to deescalate ongoing wars, deconflict with Iran, and scale down the U.S. presence in the region.
According to Boulos himself, he’s not affiliated with any Lebanese party and he denies reports that he ran for parliament in 2009. After digging into the matter, it seems he’s both right and wrong.
According to a report in the now-defunct Lebanese newspaper As-safir, Boulos did not start his political career as a Frangiyeh supporter. Instead, he spent decades as an ally of former Lebanese president Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement party, even acting as a party representative in Nigeria, the site of Boulos’s family business.
General Aoun is a major Lebanese political figure, who led an unsuccessful Christian-tinted resistance to Syria in the final stages of Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war. After the war, he lingered in French exile as Damascus’s enemy number one, campaigning against Syrian and Iranian influence in his homeland. It was only when Syrian occupation forces left Lebanon in 2005 that Aoun was finally able to return. Epitomizing Lebanon’s complex and fickle politics, he then immediately switched roles and began to support Lebanon’s now-weakened pro-Syrian camp and Hezbollah. For Aoun, the pact with his enemies of old was a way to further his political ambitions—and although it would take a while, he eventually did succeed in getting elected president in 2016.
As for Boulos, he apparently did not mind the political 180-degree turn. Over the following years, he appears to have thrown himself into the intricate politics of his home region, Koura, with an eye on securing a parliamentary mandate. In Lebanon, the way to do that is to strike opportunistic alliances between parties, religious groups, and strongmen of every variety.
According to As-safir, Boulos ran for parliament in 2005, the first post-war election not under Syria’s tutelage. He withdrew his candidacy almost immediately, however, to make way for a mixed list involving the Free Patriotic Movement, Marada, and the Communist Party.
In the run-up to the next election, in 2009, reports place Boulos as one of a handful of names on an internal Free Patriotic Movement shortlist for candidates in the Koura region. That he was active on the party’s behalf is evident from an incident in January of that year. The Free Patriotic Movement then accused a rival Christian party, the Lebanese Forces, of attacking Boulos’s supporters as they were going around Koura villages distributing copies of his autobiography. The Lebanese Forces denied doing so, however; it remains unknown whether Koura’s villagers enjoyed the autobiography.
Then, there was a falling out.
As the election approached, General Aoun needed to pick a single candidate to run in Koura alongside his local allies in Marada and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, another pro-Damascus faction. That meant taking sides in the internal feuds of the Free Patriotic Movement’s Koura branch—and in the end, Aoun sided with a rival clique linked to another Koura family, the Atallahs. The candidates who failed to be nominated were not pleased. A report in the Al-Akhbar daily claims that it led to “a massacre” within the party, figuratively speaking, as angry supporters defected this way and that. Both Al-Akhbar and MTV, a Lebanese television channel, claim that Boulos retaliated by moving “to the front of the Lebanese Forces” or that he “joined the Lebanese Forces electoral apparatus.” In contrast to the Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese Forces party, which was formed as a Maronite Christian civil war militia, is a fiercely anti-Syrian group. In the end, Boulos did not run for any party, and all three Koura seats were taken by the anti-Syrian alliance to which the Lebanese Forces belonged, routing Aoun’s competing bloc of parties. It remains an open question whether that result had anything to do with Massad Boulos having backed the Lebanese Forces candidate out of sheer spite.
At some later point, however, Boulos found his way to Marada and the Frangiyehs, returning to Damascus’s orbit.
When the next election finally rolled around in 2018, after repeated postponements, Boulos issued a statement saying that he had decided, after consultations with “the leader and friend Suleiman bek Frangiyeh” (bek is an honorific) that he would not run. Instead, he would carry on as “an ally of the Frangiyeh family” through other means, while offering full support to Marada’s candidate list.
Disposable Campaign Asset or Trump’s Lebanon Whisperer?
In short, then, the reports that Boulos is a Marada ally appear to be true; at least they were true, recently. Then again, Boulos’s long and checkered past in Lebanese politics—first as a supporter of Aoun’s anti-Syrian exile activism and then of the general’s pro-Syrian turn, followed by a spell alongside the anti-Syrians of the Lebanese Forces, before finally hooking up with Marada, a stalwart pro-Assad group—does not exactly indicate a firm commitment to either side in Lebanese or regional politics.
Will that help him secure a position in the coming Trump II administration, though? It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, Boulos was quick to discredit reports that he’s got a Lebanon envoy job lined up—but on the other hand, he has spent the time after the election meeting Lebanese political figures. Indeed, the mere fact that Middle Eastern leaders see Boulos as a channel to reach Trump could help him claim that role. To be sure, Boulos’s family connection to Trump makes it unlikely that he would simply be discarded the way other campaign figures could be. Meanwhile, the war between Israel and Hezbollah will ensure that Lebanon sits high on Trump’s agenda.
Whether that’ll be enough to position Massad Boulos as Trump’s Lebanon whisperer remains to be seen. Either way, this colorful character offers a useful reminder that Middle East politics under Donald Trump will often be more readily understood in light of the personalities orbiting Mar-a-Lago than through an ideological prism or in terms of U.S. national interest.
Cover Image: People drive past the ancient western gate of the Baalbek Citadel in Lebanon on November 4. The Citadel had been damaged the week before by Israeli airstrikes. Source: Ed Ram/Getty Images
Tags: lebanon, foreign affairs, donald trump