Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, it seemed as if Tiffany Trump had been stepping up to filled the Ivanka-shaped hole in her father’s life. On the night Donald Trump announced his reelection bid in 2022, Ivanka Trump declared, “I do not plan to be involved in politics.” Then she proceeded to skip almost all campaign-related activities. Meanwhile, the younger Trump daughter became more prominent than ever. Tiffany and her husband, Michael Boulos, were in court for the Trump hush-money trial verdict. Donald leaked news of Tiffany’s pregnancy at a campaign event. He expressed his love by publicly lying about Tiffany’s grades, just as he’d lied about his own academic achievements. And Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, was a Trump campaign surrogate, appealing to Arab American and Muslim voters.
So with Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that he’s giving Massad Boulos a White House job, naming him senior adviser to the president on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, it should feel like the age of Tiffany is truly upon us:
But it doesn’t because Ivanka’s father-in-law got an even more outrageous assignment: A day earlier, Trump announced he would nominate Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, to be U.S. ambassador to France:
Both Boulos and Kushner have one primary qualification for their respective roles: their children married into the Trump family. In another political era, Trump’s handing out White House jobs to distant relatives (to say nothing of hiring Jared and Ivanka in his first term) would have been a huge scandal.
But Trump’s second-term hires are all about maximum brazenness with the president-elect almost daring Republican politicians to say he’s gone too far. And Tiffany’s father-in-law just can’t compete with Ivanka’s on that point.
While Trump cited Boulos’s “extensive experience on the International scene,” that does not involve any policymaking experience. Boulos is a Lebanese American automotive tycoon with “somewhat murky” political affiliations, per the New York Times:
Mr. Boulos’s political connections to leaders in Lebanon are also somewhat murky. According to reporting by The Associated Press and several Lebanese outlets, Mr. Boulos sought a seat in Lebanon’s Parliament in 2009 and described himself as a “friend” of a Lebanese presidential candidate who had received support from the militant group Hezbollah.
Mr. Boulos has more recently denied running for Parliament in Lebanon or being affiliated with any political party there, according to Newsweek.
However, Boulos’s lack of political expertise is nothing compared with Trump’s naming Kushner, a felon who allegedly does not speak French, as U.S. ambassador to France. Here’s a reminder of the reasons Kushner needed a pardon from Trump in 2020, per my colleague Chas Danner:
Kushner once served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama after he pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 felony counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Kushner admitted to a revenge and intimidation scheme in which he hired a sex worker to seduce his brother-in-law — who had turned state’s witness against him. Kushner had them filmed having sex in a New Jersey motel room and then had the video sent to his sister, the man’s wife, in order to pressure her not to testify. Former U.S. attorney Chris Christie famously called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.
Kushner’s role requires Senate confirmation, while Boulos’s does not, making the former’s nomination all the more audacious.
Tiffany is finally asserting her unearned influence on national politics. But even after she’s been sitting on the bench for two years, no one beats Ivanka in a nepotism contest.
