Woe to the person who “knows” what Donald Trump is going to do ahead of time. Indeed, all of politics in the Trump era has become harder to predict.

Factor in the uncertainty of the Middle East, and it’s going to be a revelatory first few months of the second Trump presidency. And to add yet one more layer of ambiguity, Trump’s new Mideast adviser appears to be a character out of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

Massad Boulos is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany. Boulos père helped Trump’s campaign woo Arab-American voters, especially in the battleground state of Michigan—where Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign struggled with dissatisfaction over the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.

With Arab-American voters, Trump appeared to benefit from two assumptions. One, that those who cared deeply about the Palestinians in Gaza had nothing to lose by abandoning the Democrats, who had presided over the status quo. Two, that those who didn’t care much about Gaza—Arabs aren’t a monolith; Boulos himself is a Lebanese Christian—had the same concerns as other voters, primarily the economy.

Those assumptions appear to have been on target. Hamtramck, Michigan, the first Muslim-majority city, gave Trump 43 percent of its vote this year, vs 13 percent in 2020, according to one exit poll. (Harris got 46 percent of the vote in Hamtramck.)

Trump capitalized on Arab voters’ dissatisfaction with Harris not by criticizing Israel’s operations in Gaza but by insisting he would be more successful in bringing the war to an end, while remaining supportive of Israel and unequivocally critical of Hamas. In some campaign stops, he mostly avoided the question to focus on economic concerns. Boulos accompanied Trump to such events and held private meetings on his campaign’s behalf. Boulos was rewarded with a Mideast advisory role in the White House.

Boulos has been portrayed as a wealthy business tycoon. In October, the New York Times described him as the “chief executive of a multibillion-dollar automotive manufacturing and distribution company in Nigeria.” That was in line with how the press had generally introduced him to readers.

But now the Times is out with a new piece, the result of dogged reporting into Boulos’s businesses. It turns out Boulos is not exactly who he allows himself to be portrayed as in the media.

For starters, the automotive company is his father-in-law’s, and Boulos’s role seems to be “selling trucks and heavy machinery.” The Times reports that the company made a profit of $66,000 last year. The dealership is worth $865,000 in its entirety.

Then there’s Boulos Enterprises, which the Financial Times reported that Boulos “runs” and which “deals in the distribution and assembly of motorcycles, tricycles and power bikes.” After the Times raised questions about his role there, Boulos “confirmed that he has no relationship with Boulos Enterprises.” His other businesses in Nigeria, according to records seen by the Times, include “a restaurant, some inactive construction companies and … Tantra Beverages, a now-defunct company that was set up to sell an ‘erotic drink.’”

Boulos today told the Times that the family’s wealth primarily comes from his wife’s side.

The Times investigation was limited to Boulos’s business history. But his connections in the Arab world come from politics. As the FT had reported, his father was mayor of the Lebanese town Boulos was born in, and his great-uncle was in parliament.

Boulos tried his hand in politics as well, though he has denied running for Lebanese parliament. According to the progressive Century Foundation’s Aron Lund: “After digging into the matter, it seems he’s both right and wrong.”

The crux of the complicated story is that Boulos, allied with a pro-Syria/Hezbollah party, launched a campaign in 2005 but quickly withdrew his candidacy. In 2009, the party leader passed over Boulos in favor of a local rival. Boulos threw his support to the anti-Syrian side. Boulos is now an ally of Suleiman Frangiyeh, a presidential contender in the Syria/Hezbollah orbit.

Boulos appears to be an opportunist above all. That might quiet concerns about his pro-Hezbollah political ties; now that Hezbollah (like its patron Iran) has been weakened and Bashar al-Assad has fallen, Boulos is more likely to follow the strong horse. At the same time, Boulos until recently clearly still had Lebanese political ambitions.

What does that mean for Trump’s Mideast policy? The details of Lebanese parliamentary politics are meaningless to Trump; he cares about the topline. He wants the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire to hold and be followed by an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, not least because he saw how Biden’s term was swallowed by the war. Boulos’s contacts may help him in that regard, but giving Boulos himself anything more than a bit part will almost certainly backfire. Boulos’s campaign role was low risk and high reward. A White House role of any real substance would be the opposite.