The moment I arrive at Ned’s, the glitzy new private club in Washington, DC, that’s become a hotspot for the MAGA crowd, I’m handed a dark green sticker by the concierge and instructed to place it over my phone camera. Still in a daze from the heat, I walk into the elevator and fan myself with my book before the doors open and I’m softly launched into a decadent living room.
Soon, I’m sipping a spicy tequila drink while a State Department official laughs off the agency recently firing more than 1,300 employees, suggesting it should’ve been twice as many. Later, a senior administration official, dressed down in a teal golf shirt and sitting in a velvet armchair, introduces himself as the man “protecting the nukes,” before dipping back into his chat with a young man about weapons of war. An acoustic rendition of “Just the Two of Us” plays across the dimly lit bar.
Cabinet secretaries, like Howard Lutnick at Commerce and Scott Bessent at Treasury, are known to swing by Ned’s. Jared Kushner has been spotted here too. On Sundays, members enjoying sundowners on the club’s rooftop bar have watched Donald Trump returning from Mar–a-Lago on Air Force One. One young Republican member, CJ Pearson, suggests that Ned’s “isn’t a partisan club,” but is “definitely the place to be in DC these days.”
“On any given day, you can find yourself next to a cabinet official in the Trump Administration or an anchor for MSNBC,” Pearson tells VF. “You never know who you’ll run into, which I think is a part of the appeal.”
He’s right that Ned’s member list also includes Democrats, like Symone Sanders-Townsend, the former Kamala Harris adviser and current MSNBC host, as well as journalists, such as CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey. It’s also been the location for extravagant soirees since launching in January, from The Washington Post’s reported million-dollar brunch following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to a recent invite-only AI event, where the tech elite, like OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap, hung out with Washington policymakers.
Yet, on this night, the vibe feels decidedly Trumpy, which surely speaks to a cultural shift in the capital these past six months. It feels rare now to be at a club, restaurant or social occasion that is truly non-partisan. My friends tell me that even sports bars and Mexican restaurants in D.C. have been weaponized politically – after-work havens for the young, ever-ambitious MAGA set.
I’m not the only one who senses it with Ned’s. “When I’ve been there, it’s been packed with Republicans,” Sally Quinn tells VF.
Quinn, a trailblazing journalist, author, and Washington society fixture, isn’t a member of Ned’s, but has visited the club, including for a recent crypto party. She says some younger journalist friends have joined because there will be “someone from the administration they can hit up about a story they’re doing,” making it valuable from a reporting perspective. Meridith McGraw, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal, suggests you can sense how the city’s social scene changes with who’s in power.
“It might be a polarizing era of American politics, but Democrat or Republican, MAGA or not, everyone wants to try the trendy new restaurant or go to a fun party to meet people,” she says. McGraw adds that in addition to Ned’s, a newer restaurant near the White House called The Occidental is another spot where you’re highly likely to run into someone from the administration.
Members’ clubs aren’t a new phenomenon in DC, where they’ve long functioned as havens for those with power and influence to socialize discreetly. The Metropolitan Club, for one, lists at least a half dozen former presidents as members, while Cosmos Club, founded in 1878, has had its share of presidents and Supreme Court justices hobnobbing beneath its Renaissance–style ceiling paintings. I’m told, though, they’ve become more popular in DC under the new administration—where hot spots have shifted, and even the places that were popular under Trump’s first term have gone out of fashion.
CNN’s Alayna Treene, who covered Trump’s first presidency for Axios, says the scene has very much changed this time around, with old Republican haunts like The Trump Hotel being replaced by the growing number of members’ clubs. Speaking of the hotel, Treene says, “Often you would find Rudy Giuliani lounging in an armchair, holding court with a drink in hand. Other times, you’d find Kellyanne Conway, Sebastian Gorka, or a MAGA influencer. Back then, even Trump himself would take his motorcade the short distance down Pennsylvania Avenue to socialize at the hotel.”
Now, Treene says, many in government opt for membership clubs instead. “One of the biggest differences in the second term is those closest to the president are far more reserved and less inclined to want to meet, even off the record, with journalists like myself,” she adds. “And they go to great lengths to socialize away from the spotlight.”
Ned’s opened earlier this year on the top three floors of the Walker Building, a historic, imposing structure that overlooks the White House and the Treasury. The initiation fee is $5,000, with annual dues of $5,000, though government workers pay a discounted $1,000. For elite-level founding members, that cost rises to $125,000, but they receive an additional range of benefits, including an even more exclusive restaurant experience and access to locations in other cities, such as New York, London, and Doha. (And a clarification, should you wonder: “Ned’s Club” refers to the private members’ spaces. The DC location is only a club with no public hotel, hence it is referred to as “Ned’s Club Washington, DC” not “The Ned,” as some of the hotel outposts are called.) The interior space is decorated with heavy curtains, dark green walls, and velvety armchairs; there are nooks and libraries, smaller rooms, and bars where one can order chips with caviar ($50), sakura martinis ($23), or a $1,250 bottle of Opus One red wine from Napa Valley. Twenty three dollars seems to be the standard price for a cocktail, with the spicy picante a firm fan favorite. The cost of still hearing the faint strains of political protest on the street 10 floors below: priceless.
“My feeling is that you go places that you see people you want to see, hang out with people you want to be with,” says Quinn. “The MAGA crowd has found their place there.”
Most of the Ned’s members I talk to are comfortable with a reporter in the midst, even if they prefer speaking on background—and can recall less enjoyable interactions with journalists. One of the first members I chat with laments how a reporter had managed to get into his inauguration party. He recollects setting up IV drips in his penthouse as a recovery station for the week of raucous partying, and how panic set in as Giuliani was coming up in the elevator with a reporter.
Gareth Banner, the group managing director for Ned’s, who has held several hotel management roles in London, says that at its core, the club is a social one, and that they are proud of the membership community their team has curated. The goal was to “create the most interesting dining room in DC” with high performers who “may not share all the same views.” Banner adds that “it is important to state that just because you can afford to be a member doesn’t mean you get to be—or stay—one.”
The club also hosts events, including tennis watch parties, an evening featuring an Emmy-nominated spoken-word poet, and an after-party for Trump’s address on his Artificial Intelligence Plan. Max Bernstein, a 23-year-old member who works in commercial real estate, says he joined to be somewhere that felt removed from the hectic, daily work life and where he could host his friends and meet new people. “You have a lot of political people that go, you also have other captains of industry,” Bernstein says. “They want a safe and relaxed place to eat, have good vibes, and have a good time with people around them.”
The Ned’s waitlist is said to be long; the club’s directors want to draw in the top 5% of people across a range of industries, but it is competing with other establishments, such as The Clayton, and more recently, the Executive Branch, the club cofounded by Donald Trump Jr. and Omeed Malik, the president of 1789 Capital. Members of the Executive Branch pay an annual fee of $500,000, with additional yearly dues. Tucked away in the city’s Georgetown district, it sets up as a private oasis for the innermost circle of Trumpworld.
“DC is without question a very blue city,” Malik tells VF. “What happened is, even if they went to the Ned, a lot of their conversations are being leaked to reporters. There is nowhere they can go where they can have a sense of privacy with their friends.”
According to the Post, the club’s cofounders also include 1789 Capital partner Christopher Buskirk, and Alex and Zach Witkoff, sons of Steve Witkoff, the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East; while members include White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The club had something of a soft launch in the spring, and I’m told is set to reopen in September when many of its high-end clientele return from summer travel.
Back at Ned’s, it’s 10 p.m. and things are winding down. A younger group, including some junior staffers on the Hill, decides to move over to Butterworth’s, another MAGA hangout, where ex-Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam is an owner. In the elevator down, three older men discuss negotiating for the release of hostages, one of whom says he “has to come home and watch cartoons.” The younger crowd was chatting excitedly about the Epstein files and whether they would make it to a party at their friend’s apartment in the Navy Yard later on, but that all depended on whether Butterworth’s was serving espresso martinis.
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