Tiffany Trump's Father-In-Law Another Fake Billionaire, If You Can Believe That
Well, they say little girls always marry their dads.
Is there anybody with even the remotest connection to the Trump family who is not a grifter, a liar, a phony, or a con artist?
The answer is no, there is not. Everyone is working an angle. Jim Thompson couldn’t have made up any of these people. “Who on Earth would buy any of these characters,” Thompson would have grumbled. “I’ll just write Savage Night instead.”
Even Tiffany, the forgotten Trump, the one her mother smartly raised 3000 miles from the rest of the clan, could not fully escape the gravitational pull of the gas giant at the center of the family solar system. Which is how she apparently found herself with a father-in-law who, while not anywhere near her own father’s level of bullshitting ability, has nonetheless shown a real facility for exaggeration about himself and his position in the world.
On Thursday, The New York Times published a story digging into Massad Boulos, father of Tiffany Trump’s husband and newly named Middle East adviser to President-elect That Fuckin Guy. Boulos has been described variously by the press and by Hairplug Hitler himself as a highly respected globetrotting billionaire tycoon with extensive experience in the Middle East. Just the sort of guy Donald Trump gloms on to in his desperate, thirsty, never-ending need to be validated by wealthy movers and shakers.
Except, ho ho, isn’t this funny, Boulos is none of those things. According to the Times, he’s a truck salesman running a dealership owned by his father-in-law in Nigeria. The company made a profit of under $66,000 last year. Yes, with only three zeroes. Donald Trump’s monthly bronzer bill is higher than that.
The Times also reports that the truck dealership is worth around $865,000 at its current share price. Boulos’s stake is worth $1.53. Yes, $1.53. There are not missing decimal points or zeroes. We wouldn’t even need to empty the coin tray in our 11-year-old Honda Civic to buy him out.
Boulos, however, has allowed the media to spread the impression that he’s the head of something called Boulos Enterprises, which as best we can tell from the Internet is a company that mostly builds motorcycles and outboard motors in Nigeria. It’s a large company and worth a chunk, and Massad Boulos finally admitted this week that he has no connection to it whatsoever:
“Your company is described as a multibillion-dollar enterprise,” a reporter said. “Are you yourself a billionaire?”
Mr. Boulos said he did not like to describe himself that way, but that journalists had picked up on the label.
“It’s accurate to describe the company as a multibillion-dollar—?” the reporter followed up.
“Yeah,” Mr. Boulos replied. “It’s a big company. Long history.”
But in a subsequent interview on Tuesday, Mr. Boulos said that he had only meant to confirm that other news outlets had written — incorrectly — that he runs such a company.
[…]
He confirmed that he has no relationship with Boulos Enterprises. Asked why he had never corrected the record, he said that he made a practice of not commenting on his business.
So he’s a no-talent dilettante who lives off his rich father-in-law. Which actually is a long tradition in the Trump family, cough Lara Trump, cough cough.
Boulos is a small-timer who has some small business credits to his name, one of which also fits very much within the right-wing universe of selling bogus products like vitamin pills and colloidal silver to the rubes dumb enough to think Alex Jones is an honest journalist:
Mr. Boulos has a history of small business ventures. Corporate records in Nigeria tie him to a restaurant, some inactive construction companies and to Tantra Beverages, a now-defunct company that was set up to sell an “erotic drink” that “gives men and women the ultimate stimulating push,” according to its manufacturer.
A magic elixir that restores your sex drive! All he’s missing is the horse and covered wagon carrying him from small town to small town to hawk his wares to impotent rubes.
In announcing Boulos’s appointment as advisor, Trump also said his daughter’s father-in-law is a highly accomplished lawyer. ABC reported that he earned a law degree from the University of Houston. But the school told the Times it has no record of Boulos earning a j.d there. He did earn a bachelor’s in business administration from something called the University of Houston-Downtown, which Wikipedia tells us used to be a junior college that was bought up by the University of Houston 50 years ago and now seems to function as an all-commuter school separate from the larger university.
We should note that we are not education snobs, and there is nothing wrong with any of these credentials. Your average junior college graduate is probably way more intelligent than Wharton School of Business grad Donald Trump. But conservatives are always guilty of the credentialism they decry in everyone else.
Boulos’s younger son Michael is the one married to Tiffany, and he was reportedly an associate director of the truck dealership when they met. But the real piece of work in the family is Michael’s older brother:
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.
Oh cool, Tiffany Trump’s brother-in-law is a minstrel performer. That’s neat.
Trump said of Boulos’s appointment that he would be a “Senior Advisor … on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.” We suppose he’s well-qualified if one issue in the Middle East that concerns Donald Trump is where he can buy distributor caps in bulk.
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Greetings Sir/Madame:
I am your new Mideast envoy and need your help in securing a lasting peace agreement. It is currently held up in customs and they require a small cash deposit to release the paperwork.
Boulos is also a Nigerian Prince, just trying to get innocent people's money out of the hands of corrupt forces.