Съветник за Близкия изток: втори сват на Тръмп получи пост – haroonabadvital.com
US President-elect Donald Trump announced that Lebanese-American businessman Massad Boulos will be his senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Trump made the announcement on Truth Social. Paul, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, met repeatedly with Arab American and Muslim leaders during the election campaign.
For the second time in recent days, Trump chose the father-in-law of one of his sons to work in his administration.
Trump said on Saturday that he had chosen his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, to serve as US ambassador to France. In recent months, Boulos campaigned for Trump to rally support for Lebanon and Arab Americans, even as the United States supported the Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
- Paul has strong roots in both countries. His father and grandfather were prominent figures in Lebanese politics, and his father-in-law was a major sponsor of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian party linked to Hezbollah.
- His son Michael and Tiffany Trump married in an elaborate ceremony at Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, in November 2022, after getting engaged in the Rose Garden of the White House during Trump’s first term.
- Boulos was in contact with interlocutors in Lebanon’s multipolar political world, according to three sources who spoke to him in recent months. This is a rare achievement in Lebanon, where decades of factional rivalry have run deep. What is particularly striking, they say, is his ability to maintain ties with Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed Shiite party has a large number of seats in the Lebanese parliament and ministers in the government.
The sources said that Boulos is a friend of Suleiman Franjieh, a Christian ally of Hezbollah and its candidate for the position of President of Lebanon. He also has ties to the Lebanese Forces Party, a Christian faction staunchly anti-Hezbollah, and has ties to independent lawmakers.
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Aaron Lund, a fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said Polis is well positioned to influence Trump’s Middle East policy after playing a small but important role in broadening Trump’s appeal to Arab and Muslim voters at campaign time. “Paul’s Lebanese political background does not give a real indication of a geostrategic or even national vision, but it does show ambition and a group of political allies who will emerge in Trump’s circle,” Lund wrote.
Winning at Michigan
Paul, a billionaire with extensive business connections in Nigeria, was born in Lebanon but moved to Texas when he was a teenager, where he attended the University of Houston, obtained a law degree and became an American citizen. Trump’s son and daughter, and her mother, Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, met on the Greek island of Mykonos at actor Lindsay Lohan’s club, People magazine reported in 2022.
Trump’s Michigan election victory came in part thanks to Polis helping convert some of his 300,000 voters. Trump campaign officials and supporters told Reuters that Arab and Muslim Americans in the state overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020 but opposed Biden’s policies in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. “Poulos played a huge role in reaching out to Muslim voters,” said Rabiul Chaudhry, co-founder of Muslims for Trump.
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By early September, the Trump campaign was holding weekly meetings in person and via Zoom with dozens of Arab-American and Muslim civic leaders and business executives.
Boulos spent weeks on the ground in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states with large Arab-American and Muslim populations, where he assured audiences at private lunches and dinners that revealed his own ties to Lebanese-American businessmen that Trump was committed to ending the wars in the Middle East. the East.
In an interview with Reuters shortly after the election, Boulos said that the Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on efforts to mobilize Arab-American and Muslim voters. Trump has won the endorsement of Muslim imams and the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, another city near Detroit with a large Arab-American population as well as a large Bangladeshi community, and has courted Iraqi Americans, Albanians and others.
While events on the ground in Lebanon were a factor, the economy also contributed. Boulos said conservative Arabs and Muslims are concerned about what they see as Democrats’ “far-left ideology,” including support for transgender rights.
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Paul met with members of the Albanian community in Michigan, which numbers 150,000 people.
Political ambitions?
The new role could give Paul the political influence he was unable to achieve in Lebanon. Sources in Lebanon said he briefly ran for the Lebanese parliament in 2018 alongside pro-Hezbollah candidates, but has not consistently aligned with any particular party since then. He comes from a Greek Orthodox family. In Lebanon’s religiously based power-sharing system, this would limit his chances of holding a high-level government position at the level of Deputy Speaker of Parliament. The position of president, which is the highest for Christians, is reserved for Maronite Catholics.
One source said that despite his frequent travel to Lebanon, he had not visited it during the past four years.
Some people in Lebanon were optimistic about the prospects of a friendly face in Trump’s inner circle even before Sunday’s announcement. “It’s a good thing – and we hope it works for Lebanon,” said Hamdi Hula, a Lebanese man over 70 years old. “Maybe Trump is the type of person who makes promises and can be more loyal to him than others.” . “So we’re optimistic about it. These days we’re just holding on to a piece of wood to be optimistic.”
