Walid Phares: Trump’s Maronite ear to the Middle East

Donald Trump’s first phone call to a foreign leader, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, will have pleased Walid Phares, the Lebanese Maronite-born academic who has the ear of the US president-elect on foreign policy matters. The politics professor has spent the past 26 years pushing his robust anti-Islamist views, honed during the sectarian civil war in Lebanon. He has won an influential audience inside the Beltway in the process; he advised the failed Republican Party (GOP) candidate of 2012, Mitt Romney, and now is being used by the next occupant of the White House to provide guidance on the Middle East and anti-terrorism matters.