Lebanese-american magnate makes a most unlikely buddy for Donald Trump. But in battered Beirut and elsewhere in the Arab world many are looking at Massad Boulos as they try to puzzle out how the incoming American administration may handle the region and its wars.
Mr Boulos was propelled into Trump’s orbit when his son Michael married Tiffany Trump, the president-elect’s fourth child, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Yet it was not just Boulos junior who was marrying into the Trump family.
The wedding also pushed his father, a successful Lebanese-American businessman largely unknown in the wider world, into Mr Trump’s inner circle. Mr Boulos’s profile rose this year as he cast himself as the liaison to Arab-American voters in the presidential election, campaigning hard in Arab-heavy cities.
Mr Trump romped home in some of them, partly on the back of promises to end the war in Lebanon.
The Boulos family is Maronite Christian, hailing from Lebanon’s far north, with an illustrious history. Mr Boulos senior left Lebanon as a teenager for Texas, eventually ending up in Nigeria, where like many Lebanese he made a big fortune, largely out of auto sales. But he kept tight links with his family back in Lebanon.
He had joined the Republican Party long before his son met Tiffany; he also tried in vain to get elected to Lebanon’s parliament. But it was Tiffany’s wedding and Trump’s gains among Arab-American voters this year that have made him a potential influencer in Middle Eastern affairs.
At events for Arab-American voters, where those of Lebanese heritage are the biggest bloc, Mr Boulos said Mr Trump was Lebanon’s “last hope”.
Unpicking where he fits into Lebanon’s political kaleidoscope is tricky. He is a close childhood friend of Suleiman Frangieh, a Christian politician who ardently backs Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and was the preferred candidate of Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian party recently hammered by Israel, to fill the current presidential vacuum.
Yet he has managed to reassure other figures in Lebanon that he does not share all of Mr Frangieh’s views.
Joseph Gebeily, a prominent Lebanese-American who knows Mr Boulos, says Mr Trump’s new friend understands that the issue with Iran is “not just focusing on the nuclear programme but also on the militias”.
