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.
