The Trump sideshow of circus-like appointments to his Cabinet and various positions associated with the White House has been a carousel of castoff has-beens. He doesn’t seem to get that these folks were cast off for a reason.

From the abominable Matt Gaetz — who thankfully didn’t survive the media gauntlet even as far as a Senate confirmation hearing — to his reprehensible pick for Defense, Pete Hegseth, Trump has been drawing names from what seems like a gas station trash can of losing scratch-off tickets.

But there’s one name you might not have known yet, and he’s going to be Trump’s top advisor in the Middle East: Massad Boulos.

Boulos checks all the boxes. Lebanese, so he’s from the Middle East, at least. Staunch conservative, so he’ll do whatever Trump says. Billionaire business owner, so he knows how to screw the little guy. Oh, and he’s Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law.

Excuse me, I mean Tiffany Boulos. She’s that daughter you forgot Trump had with Marla Maples while he was cheating on Ivana. You forgot her even harder when she actually took her husband’s last name.

This marks the second father-in-law of a daughter Trump has appointed this time around. Boulos follows Charles Kushner, Ivanka’s father-in-law, who Trump has penciled in as ambassador to France.

Kushner was famously convicted nearly 20 years ago for felony charges of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Trump pardoned him in 2020, just before he left office the first time. That makes the conversation about Joe Biden pardoning Hunter a little awkward, since Kushner is a family member through marriage, and actually did things that harmed others. Biden, by contrast, was convicted for owning a gun that he never loaded or fired for a total of 11 days, in a purely political prosecution.

Kushner was disbarred in 3 states.

Boulos, on the other hand, seems to be squeaky clean. That is, unless you count the fact that he’s a major funder of the Lebanese Free Patriotic Movement Party. That major party in Lebanon’s parliament is aligned with both Hezbollah and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party.

But Boulos did his due diligence, and by that I mean he donated enough money and time to the Trump campaign to be worth an ambassadorship. Trump always repays favors (although he seldom pays actual bills).

Trump’s Truth Social announcement of Boulos’s appointment said all he needed to say:

He has been a longtime proponent of Republican and Conservative values, an asset to my Campaign, and was instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American Community.

In other words, “He’s on board with Project 2025, and he helped me win Michigan by promising those idiot Muslims that I wasn’t going to harass them.”

Is this going to be another FAFO situation for Arabs and Muslims in the United States? It seems pretty likely.