Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy, appointed special envoy to the Middle East

By Lauren Markoe, Jacob KornbluhNovember 12, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and friend, special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff was by Trump’s side at a Palm Beach golf course when a would-be assassin took aim at the former president in September.

“Steve is a Highly Respected Leader in Business and Philanthropy, who has made every project and community he has been involved with stronger and more prosperous,” Trump said in a statement. “Steve will be an unrelenting Voice for PEACE, and make us all proud.”

Witkoff has no known diplomatic experience, but neither did Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was instrumental during the first Trump administration in brokering the Abraham Accords. Witkoff is also similar in that sense to his counterpart from Trump’s first term, Jason Greenblatt, the special representative for international negotiations, who was a lawyer for Trump before becoming his envoy, and served in the role until 2019. If Trump is to achieve his Middle East aims — brokering peace and expanding the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia — he will want, experts say, a negotiator who is known to have his confidence.

Since Oct. 7, Witkoff has served as the Trump campaign’s backchannel to the Jewish business community, particularly after President Joe Biden halted the shipment of 2,000-pound weapons to Israel.

“It was a notable shift,” Witkoff told The Bulwark in May. “I personally received and helped secure large Jewish donors over the last two weeks. And I’m not talking four-figure donations. I’m talking six-figure and seven-figure donations.”

David Friedman, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel who played a critical role in moving the embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, had expressed interest in serving as the special envoy, according to two sources who were familiar with the internal conversations. Friedman, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, remains under consideration for another national security position.

Bronx-born real estate mogul

The son of a manufacturer of women’s coats, Witkoff, now 67, was born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island. He graduated from Hofstra University in 1980, its law school in 1983, and joined the New York real estate law firm Dreyer & Traub, where Donald Trump was a client. In those days Witkoff wore “frayed collars” and “Moe Ginsberg suits,” he said in a 2017 interview, referencing the now-closed discount Manhattan men’s clothing store.

“Every day you were representing these swashbuckling guys,” Witkoff said of the real estate moguls who contracted with the firm. “They felt like rock stars to me.”

Witkoff and a partner, Laurence Gluck, in 1985 founded Stellar Management (a play on their first names, Steve and Larry) during booming times for Wall Street and the New York real estate market. They bought what they could afford: New York tenements that cost a few hundred thousand dollars in Harlem, Washington Heights and the Bronx.

He married Lauren Rappoport, and the couple had three sons: Zach, Alex and Andrew, who died of an opioid overdose in 2013. Five years later, when Trump was president, Witkoff spoke at the White House Opioid Summit.

He founded the Witkoff Group in 1997, which also employs his wife and surviving sons.

Witkoff gravitates to iconic properties, and has purchased the Woolworth Building, the Daily News Building and Park Lane Hotel in New York, among dozens of others.

His success inspired a front-page 1998 profile in The Wall Street Journal, which he resented for its depiction of him, in his early real estate years, as a frenetic, overextended speculator who liked the Godfather movies and wore a licensed handgun on his ankle.

He blasted Democrats after Netanyahu’s July address to Congress 

Witkoff attended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July, and found it moving, especially when Netanyahu talked about the hostages in Gaza — some of whom were at the Capitol that day.

But some Democrats, objecting to Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war, boycotted the speech. Others gave Netanyahu a cold reception.

“It felt spiritual,” Witkoff said on the Fox Business channel the next day, “and yet, that’s not the reaction you sense that you were getting from many of those Democrats.”

He testified at Trump’s fraud trial — about a golf course and a ham sandwich

Witkoff was the first witness Trump’s lawyers called in the New York attorney general’s $250 million fraud case against the former president in Manhattan in November.

The states’ attorneys unsuccessfully tried to block Witkoff from taking the stand. He testified briefly about how one of Trump’s properties, the Doral golf course in Miami, was undervalued. The judge agreed with the state’s lawyers that the matter was not relevant to the case.

But perhaps the ham sandwich was?

Witkoff told the court that he became friends with Trump at a New York City deli in 1986 after they had worked on a transaction together. Trump had no cash on him so “I ordered him a ham and swiss,” Witkoff said.

They ran into each other about seven years later, Witkoff continued, and Trump remembered “the sandwich incident” and they’ve been friends since, with Wiktoff advising him on his taxes during his presidency.

He has given generously to Trump — but also to his GOP primary rival

Witkoff has donated more than $2 million to Trump’s political action groups, according to ProPublica.

But he has also given a six-figure sum to Ron DeSantis and held a fundraiser for him at his Miami Beach home in 2021 as the Florida governor geared up for a primary fight against Trump, Politico reported. More recently Witkoff has helped raise money and campaign for Trump, who beat DeSantis easily in the primary.

He spoke about his son’s death at the RNC to humanize Trump

Witkoff and his son Zach, the executive vice president of development at his father’s firm, took the podium at the Republican National Convention last month to humanize Trump.

Zach Witkoff, who had his 2022 wedding at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, said “the president tore up the dance floor until four in the morning with his signature moves.”

Steve Witkoff told the convention about the death of his son who overdosed, recalling how Andrew befriended and fed the dozen homeless people who hung out outside the church next to the Witkoff’s home, in a Trump property on New York’s Park Avenue.

Witkoff addresses the Republican National Convention in August 2024.

“He and President Trump shared something in common,” Witikoff said. “My boy stood up for people, no matter which side of the train tracks they came from.”

Witkoff said he gave Andrew’s guitar to “fellow music lover Donald Trump.”

“President Trump didn’t say something nice to me and put it in a closet somewhere,” Witkoff said. “He put it right out front at his Trump International West Palm Beach property where he and I both see it whenever we walk in and play.”

I know this man very well,” Witkoff said. “President Trump is as kind and compassionate a man as I’ve ever met in my lifetime.”

JTA contributed to this report.