The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and government. Michael Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s husband, and his family have benefited financially from his connection to her family for years, a New York Times investigation found. nyti.ms/3VavaXk
[image or embed]
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) August 21, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Maybe Tiffany is smarter than she’s assumed to be… [unpaywalled version]
Michael Boulos was an aspiring businessman, just a few years out of college, when he knelt in the White House Rose Garden in January 2021 and asked President Trump’s daughter Tiffany Trump to marry him.
Almost immediately after she said yes, Mr. Boulos, his family and their associates were benefiting financially from his proximity to his soon-to-be in-laws.
The first deal was a family affair. Mr. Boulos, working for his cousin’s international yacht brokerage, sold his future brother-in-law Jared Kushner on an investment in a roughly 50-meter superyacht. Unbeknown to Mr. Kushner, the firm overcharged him and worked to conceal the true price from him, contemporaneous text messages show. The exact amount is unclear but the messages and a lawyer’s written description of the deal say the overcharge was $2.5 million.
The second arrangement involved something less tangible: access to the Trumps. Mr. Boulos’s cousin promised to get a Saudi businessman invited to the Boulos-Trump wedding so that the businessman could pose for photographs with the Trumps and project a closeness with the family. “We want you to be at the top of the guest list,” the cousin, Jimmy Frangi, wrote.
Everyone involved denies wrongdoing, and both deals went bad. Mr. Kushner’s yacht sits unfinished in Greece. And the Saudi businessman never got the access (or the wedding invitation) that he had been offered. But Mr. Boulos received about $300,000 from the yacht sale, his cousin says, and $100,000 from the Saudi businessman…
The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and government, with the president conducting diplomacy with the same foreign governments that are negotiating cryptocurrency and real estate deals with his family.
The Bouloses are a variation on that theme. The previously unreported deals — which The New York Times pieced together through contracts, court records, contemporaneous text messages and interviews — show that Mr. Boulos, his family and his associates were in a position to benefit financially as soon as he became engaged to Ms. Trump, the only child of Mr. Trump and his former wife Marla Maples.
The wedding, held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, raised the family’s profile and turned the patriarch, Massad Boulos, into an important Trump campaign surrogate. News coverage portrayed him as a billionaire business magnate, even though there is no evidence that he has significant wealth resulting from his own commercial activities. Massad Boulos’s stake in his in-laws’ Nigerian truck company was worth less than $2, The Times found last year…
Nepo-baby Jared Kushner swindled by a lying associate? Behold my shocked face (*smirk*).
