Just months before Michael Boulos met Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump infamously insulted the country of his childhood. In a January 2018 meeting, the then-president criticized a plan to protect immigrants from places he deemed “s***hole countries,” mentioning Haiti, El Salvador, and some African countries, The Washington Post reported. Nigeria’s then-foreign minister asked the government to clarify the comments. “They were deeply hurtful, offensive and unacceptable,” Geoffrey Onyeama said, according to Reuters.
That wasn’t the first time Donald reportedly made his dislike for Nigeria known. Just months earlier, he had complained about the 40,000 Nigerian immigrants who had entered the country in 2017. Once in the U.S., the Nigerians would never “go back to their huts,” he said in a June 2017 meeting, according to The New York Times. Unlike his father-in-law, Michael is proud of the place he grew up in. On his Instagram bio, he features the Nigerian flag alongside those of the U.S., Lebanon, and France.
Despite his disparaging remarks, Donald appears to make an exception for Michael. Ahead of the wedding, Donald put aside his contempt for Michael’s country of origin to congratulate the two. “She and Michael are a beautiful couple who will be very happy together,” he wrote on Truth Social in November 2022. Similarly, the Boulos family seems to hold no ill feelings toward Donald. “[He is] the best president in recent U.S. history,” Michael’s father, Massad Boulos, told the Daily Mail in 2021.
