A Truck Salesman as a Middle East Advisor? Sure, Why Not.

This report on Trump’s choice for Middle East advisor is a) what actual investigative journalism looks like, b) another example of the rigid vetting process of the incoming administration, and c) one of the reasons I did not cancel my subscription to The New York Times.

Mr. [Massad] Boulos has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions. Mr. Trump called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.” The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker.”

But. However. Too.

In fact, records show that Mr. Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. The company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show. There is no indication in corporate documents that Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. The truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price. Mr. Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, is worth $1.53.

I never went to Wharton, but there seems to be a certain difficult-to-explain wealth gap between $1.53 and a billion.

As for Boulos Enterprises, the company that has been called his family business in The Financial Times and elsewhere, a company officer there said it is owned by an unrelated Boulos family. Mr. Boulos will advise on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions—a region that Mr. Boulos said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval.

Or, apparently, qualifications of any kind.

Massad Boulos, Trump’s pick to be Middle East advisor, has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy equipment in Nigeria. He’s also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law.

The rest of the story has Boulos tap-dancing around earlier quotes and also tap-dancing around exactly what his business actually is, besides his being a truck salesman whose son married Tiffany Trump.

Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Boulos as a lawyer and ABC News has reported that he graduated with a law degree from the University of Houston. But the school said it has no record of that. Instead, he graduated from a separate school, the University of Houston-Downtown, in 1993 with a bachelor of business administration degree. The couple had planned a move to New York, where she said he had been offered a job at a law firm. But her father intervened, she said, and invited the young couple to work for his business holdings in Africa.

Truth be told, the Boulos family seems like an interesting bunch, if not quite the plutocrats they’ve been made out to be.

Michael Boulos was associate director of the truck dealership when they married and has worked for a U.S. private-equity firm and a yacht-rental company, according to PitchBook.

In Nigeria, the most famous member of the Boulos family is Michael’s brother Fares, who used to perform reggae music on YouTube under the name Farastafari. Now he posts TikTok skits under the name Oyibo Rebel—oyibo means white person. His recurring characters include a caricature of a Black woman, Mama Thank God. He wears a large false bosom and a brightly colored cloth tied around his head, and mocks Nigerian women. His LinkedIn page says he is also a director at the truck dealership.

None of this makes the newspapers if the senior Boulos doesn’t take a job with the president-elect for which he is not remotely qualified. He could have gone along with his life, and the world would never question whether or not he was a lawyer. Mama Thank God still would be an obscure regional phenomenon. But Boulos is like all the rest of the suckers, signing on for an arranged catastrophe from which there always is only one survivor.