President Trump’s White House crypto czar, David Sacks, says that Executive Branch, the upcoming Trump-aligned private club in Georgetown that costs as much as $500,000 to join, will be free of stuffy Washington insiders and any worry “that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist” who “we don’t know and we don’t trust.”
Gareth Banner, the director of the parent company of the sleek new Ned’s Club downtown, says his club members are a bipartisan “top 5 percent in their sector professionally,” among them Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.
The old guard Metropolitan Club, whose past members include six American presidents, still has “Martini Fridays in the Library” and “Trap & Field News” in the club bulletin. The Cosmos Club, which encourages camaraderie among what it trumpets as “the greatest minds of our time,” displays photos of members who have won the Nobel Prize, among them the late Henry A. Kissinger.
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.
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, the journalist, author and authority on social Washington who was married to the late Benjamin Bradlee, the 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.”
Symone Sanders Townsend, the host of “The Weeknight” on MSNBC 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.”
A Hangout for the President?
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 décor inspired by Aman New York, a luxurious hotel and private club that opened in 2022. There are to be no prying outsiders.
“You have to know the owners,” said an Executive Branch spokesman 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.”
Mr. Sacks, a founding member of the club, made clear on his All-In podcast this month (where he announced the club 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,” Mr. Sacks said. “So we wanted to create something new, hipper and Trump-aligned.”
Beyond Mr. 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 Mr. Trump put the lawsuit on hold.
In addition to the president’s son, owners of the club include Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of Mr. 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 co-founded the Rockbridge Network, an influential conservative donor group.
Diana Kendall, an emeritus professor of sociology at Baylor University and the author of “Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion,” said that Executive Branch was “amazing and appalling” to her. When the president dined at the Trump International Hotel, she said, he was at least relatively out in the open.
Now, she said, he has “this ability to go behind the curtain” and not have people know who he is talking to, “particularly business and tech moguls, who really want access to the power of the throne.”
The New Guard
A big question about Ned’s Club, which opened in late January on three Roaring Twenties-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.
“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. Ms. 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 the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban; Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary; Gina Raimondo, the Biden administration’s commerce secretary; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary in Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Bessent, the current Treasury secretary, is spotted at the club regularly.
There are also plenty of journalists, among them Kaitlan Collins and Phil Rucker of CNN and Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post has a partnership with Ned’s Club for events programming, and last month Will Lewis, the publisher and chief executive of The Post, threw a $1 million brunch at the club after the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, drawing outrage from staff members at the financially struggling paper.
A Post spokeswoman said on Saturday that beyond the food and drink, the brunch was meant to highlight press freedom and featured panel discussions with Post reporters, including the paper’s White House correspondents.
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 one journalist who asked not to be identified because his media organization would not allow him to be quoted.
The club’s name comes from Edwin Lutyens, Ned to his friends, the English architect of the former bank building that is the club’s London location. (There are two other Ned’s Clubs, in New York and Doha.)
In Washington, Ron Burkle, the billionaire businessman who created the clubs, partnered with the owner of the five-building complex, Michael Milken, the junk bond billionaire jailed for securities fraud but pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2020. Mr. Milken is now an investor in the club.
As for other private clubs in Washington, Mr. 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.”
The Old Guard
Mr. 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, the Washington Post cartoonist.
Both clubs have older memberships — the average age of Metropolitan members is 60 — and the Metropolitan in particular abhors publicity.
The president of the club, Dr. Deborah Jessiman, the first woman to hold the position, reacted to a call from The New York Times by blurting out “No comment!” before a question was asked. She then hung up the phone. Subsequent calls and emails to Dr. Jessiman and Michael Redmond, the club’s general manager, went unanswered.
Some 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 of Wyoming and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, will be at the Cosmos Club in June. Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, 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.
Eric Lipton contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Elisabeth Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The Times. She was most recently Washington bureau chief. Previously she covered the Pentagon, the White House, the 2008 McCain campaign and City Hall for The Times.
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