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Boston Globe
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Members only: A new Trump club, Ned's Club, and the enduring old guard
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a 2025 Washington firebombed by political and ideological differences, all four clubs are growing, have wait lists, or both. While they have varied levels of snobbery and exclusivity, Executive Branch is an outlier because of the price of its access to the White House and its enrichment of the Trump family. Advertisement But all four clubs reflect the sorting of the city's establishment into separate corners at a turbulent time. 'Everybody is so disoriented and depressed and untethered,' said Sally Quinn, a journalist, author, and authority on social Washington who was married to the late Benjamin Bradlee, a storied editor of The Washington Post. 'It's comforting to know there's a place where they know your name, you're going to see your friends, and you can always get a table. And that's a lot.' Advertisement Symone Sanders Townsend, host of 'The Weeknight' on MSNBC and who is on the Ned's Club membership committee, said she uses the club to connect with members of Congress she would like on her show and to meet sources and friends. 'I enjoy walking into the Ned and seeing other young Black professionals,' she said. As for Executive Branch, she said, 'I don't think I'll be on the membership list for that one.' Executive Branch is set to open in June in a subterranean space tucked behind the Georgetown Park shopping mall, reachable from Wisconsin Avenue via a set of stairs next to the mall's parking garage. A grand entrance it is not. And that is the point. Unlike the other three clubs, which are in grand early-20th century buildings that have landed on the National Register of Historic Places, Executive Branch is a hidden cavern for fewer than 200 members of the Trump ultrarich. The expectation is that the president will drop by now that he no longer has the Trump International Hotel, where he spent nights in his first term holding forth in the steakhouse and providing fodder for journalists on alert in the lobby. Executive Branch, which has taken over the sprawling space of a defunct bar called Clubhouse, will have what members say is modern decor inspired by Aman New York, a luxurious hotel and private club that opened in 2022. There are to be no prying outsiders. Advertisement 'You have to know the owners,' said an Executive Branch spokesperson who declined to be interviewed on the record but did say he was speaking on a private jet heading back to the United States from overseas. 'This is not just for any Saudi businessman.' Members, he said, want a place 'where they're not annoyed.' Sacks, a founding member of the club, made clear on his 'All-In' podcast this month (where he announced the club's ban on media members) that the chosen ones are unlikely to include traditional Republicans who frequent decades-old Washington clubs. 'To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be like more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans,' Sacks said. 'So we wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned.' Beyond Sacks, founding members of the club include Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fund-raiser, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose crypto firm was targeted by the Securities and Exchange Commission until new agency leaders picked by Trump put the lawsuit on hold. In addition to Donald Trump Jr., owners of the club include Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of Trump's Middle East envoy; Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a senior executive; and Chris Buskirk, a close ally of Vice President JD Vance who cofounded the Rockbridge Network, an influential conservative donor group. A big question about Ned's Club, which opened in late January on three Roaring '20s-themed floors in a five-building complex across from the Treasury Department, is whether it can attract enough members of both parties willing to be in the same room. That, at least, is the goal of Joiwind Ronen, the club's executive director of membership and programming, who in a town of warring camps keeps a careful watch on the ratio of Democrats to Republicans. Advertisement 'Say someone from the administration joins and it's a visible face,' she said over coffee on a recent rainy morning in the club's sumptuous library. 'I make sure we have a Democratic senator who is also recognized. I want people when they walk in to feel comfortable.' It costs $5,000 to join the club, plus another $5,000 in dues a year. Government workers pay $1,000 to join. Ronen said there are 1,500 members, a waiting list, and 10 to 30 applicants a day. The average age of members is 45. There are more members in technology than in any other field, including law, finance, government, and real estate. 'Founders Club' members pay $125,000 to join and get their own dining room. Members of all kinds include billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; Gina Raimondo, the Biden administration's commerce secretary; and Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary in Trump's first term. Bessent is spotted at the club regularly. Journalists like the place, which includes a rooftop terrace with views of the White House, because they can cozy up to sources. 'The Trump folks are there; Lutnick is always there; half the lobbyists in town are always there,' said a journalist who asked not to be identified because his media organization would not allow him to be quoted. As for other private clubs in Washington, Banner called them 'all very niche.' In other words, he said, 'You have to have gone to an Ivy League university or you have to be a published author.' Advertisement Banner appeared to be referring to the Metropolitan Club, founded in 1863, now housed in an imposing Renaissance Revival building on H Street near the White House, and to the Cosmos Club, founded in 1878, located in a beaux-arts-style mansion on Massachusetts Avenue just beyond Dupont Circle. For the record, the Cosmos Club does not require members to be published authors, although it does display photos of members who have won Pulitzer Prizes, among them the late Herbert Block, a Post cartoonist. About 1,300 people belong to the Metropolitan Club, and 2,500 belong to the Cosmos Club. Both have active speaker series. Former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, will be at the Cosmos Club in June. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was at the Metropolitan Club in May. Both clubs are also on the lookout for younger members. So far, they do not seem bothered by the two new clubs in town, although in their comfortable corners of Washington, many members have not heard of either of them. This article originally appeared in
Fox News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Jill Biden accused of 'elder abuse' by Washington Post columnist for pushing husband to seek re-election
A Washington socialite and journalist accused former First Lady Jill Biden of "elder abuse" in an explosive new interview after former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Sally Quinn, a DC insider and longtime columnist for the Washington Post, took aim at the former first lady during a wide-ranging interview with journalist Tara Palmeri on the "Tara Palmeri Show" on Wednesday. She accused Jill Biden of pushing him to run for re-election despite his apparent cognitive decline. "I blame Jill Biden for this. Jill Biden is his wife. And if Jill Biden had stood up and gone to him and said, 'Joe you can't do it'… He wouldn't have run," Quinn told Palmeri. "She clearly was in favor of his running and I just think it was a terrible disservice to the country." Quinn described feeling aghast by how Jill Biden continued to push ahead and rally support for her husband's presidential campaign immediately after the "hideous" June 2024 presidential debate, which sparked debate over whether Biden was fit to serve another four years. "She wasn't protecting him… I thought it was elder abuse, really," Quinn declared. Quinn, who has dined with the Washington establishment for decades, said Biden's apparent worsening health was an open secret among the Washington elite, who were worried about Biden's ability to handle another four years in the Oval Office. "Everybody thought he shouldn't run," she told Palmeri. "People were just distraught that he was running and terrible for the party." "I think everybody was horrified that he was put in a position where he was allowed to run, by his staff and by his wife," she continued. "People felt sorry for him. But still it was his egotistical decision to stay in office and look what happened." The journalist famously was married to Watergate-era Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who suffered from demential until his death in 2014. She said Biden's forgetfulness and habit of wandering off reminded her of how her late husband acted during his last years of life. "It looks like the beginning of dementia to me," she said of Biden. The DC insider said she was shocked to learn, alongside the rest of the country, of Biden's late-stage cancer diagnosis and wondered how it could not have been caught sooner. "The President of the United States has the best medical care in the world, or should, and it should've been diagnosed a long time ago," she said. "It's hard for me not to believe that they didn't know about it and were waiting to reveal it until it got too aggressive." A Biden spokesperson confirmed to Fox News that the former president's last known prostate cancer screening test was in 2014. Biden's health is once again in the media spotlight after the release of CNN journalist Jake Tapper and Axios journalist Alex Thompson's new book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," which reports claims of a White House cover-up of the then-president's apparent cognitive decline. Jill Biden's office did not return a request for comment.
