A billionaire's club — and you're not in it: What drama at a swanky bar says about Washington

Imagine, if you can: not liking somebody at work. Maybe it’s the way they suck at their teeth after eating microwaved fish at their desk, or just the emails that have too few exclamation points or a few too many. Or it’s more egregious: a colleague makes clear, time and again, that they have thoroughly Roganite views on politics, conspiracy theories and women’s role in society.

The point is that, for reasons petty or otherwise, you have come to the conclusion that you cannot stand someone; you think that they make life a little bit worse. It then follows that you won’t be attending the after-work happy hour; indeed, you won’t be doing anything that risks extending those 40 hours of irritation.

Now let's think about politics. Given what they say about each other in public, the earnest observer might assume elected Democrats and elected Republicans would not wish to mix after Congress closes for the day. It's hard enough to relax with everything that's going on in the news — would you willingly go to the same place as the worst of the worst on the other side?

Conventional wisdom holds that political disagreements are no reason to be impolite. It’s a mark of sophistication, as well as a displayed commitment to the democratic virtue of tolerance, to respect the person even as one opposes their political agenda.

In another era, when the heated debate is over whether to extend a tax credit for first-time homeowners by three years or five, it would be good counsel to remember politeness. Today, though, the government of President Donald J. Trump is asserting the right to send anyone who smirks at an ICE agent to a prison in El Salvador where they will be subjected to forced labor, indefinitely. Each day brings news of another government agency gutted or federal program eliminated in open defiance of laws passed by Congress. Academic research is grinding to a halt as universities suspend admissions and deny opportunities to the next generation of scientists, victims of a foreign billionaire’s expensive push for austerity.

In light of the circumstances, there is reason to be quite mad at those in government who support the total elimination of checks and balances in favor of an aging strongman’s personal judgment. But some Democrats aren’t as angry as they suggest in their fundraising emails, instead showing that they don’t loathe their Republican colleagues nearly as much as you might hate that guy in IT.

Highlighted in a recent gossip item, it reads like a Marxist screenwriter’s caricature of American politics: Democrats and Republicans are getting fashionably sloshed at a private club owned by a billionaire who donates to both parties, literally on top of a neoliberal think founded by a disgraced Wall Street guy who got a Trump pardon.

Kari Lake, the oft-defeated Republican from Arizona who President Donald Trump made the head of Voice of America, which she is eliminating, reportedly made a fool of herself at a place called Ned’s.

“As Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) headed toward the elevator to leave on a recent late-winter day, he ran into his former opponent, the infamous Trump acolyte Kari Lake,” The Bulwark reported. “As Gallego went for a handshake, Lake accepted it with both hands — a gesture that usually accompanies a warm greeting,” the outlet noted, but which in this case was followed by a personal attack, Lake asking: “How does it feel to be bought and paid for by the cartels?” The Daily Beast’s version of the story claimed one of her associates also flipped Gallego off, the outburst resulting in Lake being banned from a club that costs $5,000 to join and another $5,000 a year to remain a member (federal government employees get a $4,000 discount).

“I mean, look, it is pretty gross,” Gallego said of the exchange afterward. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., also reportedly witnessed the conflict and chastised Lake for talking to a senator like that.

But is that all that's gross here? That the interaction was even able to happen. Lake was being a sore loser, in keeping with her refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat, but at least she was not being quoted in the paper about infringements on decorum at the club.

What is any elected official doing in such a place right now at all? In fundraising emails, Gallego’s office is telling supporters that he’ll “fight as hard as he can” against an “unconstitutional power grab from the Trump administration”; two thousand miles away from Arizona, he’s hanging out at the same “art-deco-inspired spaces” as those who are aiding that constitutional coup d'état.

“The glamour of the Roaring Twenties is something I really want to capture,” Gareth Banner, Ned’s managing director, said in a Washington Post feature on the DC property. But aesthetic alone does not a vibe make. How’s the crowd? And is it recalling the right decade?

On any given night, according to the Post, a guest at Ned’s could spot Trump Cabinet officials and members of the Democratic leadership alike, according to the Post: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary; Howard Lutnick, the secretary of Commerce; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the head of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee; and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Head to the two-story bar and you’ll find, at least when the Post was there, a crowd of “tipsy and flirty” Washingtonians (can a crypto lobbyist and a pardoned J6 defendant find love?) — imbibing top-shelf liquors (try the “Nedgroni”) and $24 potato chips (honestly, they sound good).

For added populist grist, the club is located above the Milken Institute, a think tank founded by a formerly incarcerated financier, Michael Milken, and is majority owned by Ron Burkle, a billionaire investor. If you hate Wall Street, Trump or the two-party system, there’s a lot to work with here.

But the issue is not some club that scans more “corny” than cool, a symptom of the moral corruption in Washington but not its cause. Kari Lake getting in a fight with Ruben Gallego is an amusing tabloid story that hits a real nerve: DC is full of people who only pretend they can’t stand each other, but in practice do little to avoid each other’s company. The norm — one of the few still standing, Lake’s immaturity aside — is to act as if no one is personally responsible for the evils they personally sanction, be it children starving to death or babies being born with HIV because Elon Musk read conspiracy theories about USAID; to earnestly maintain one’s values is cringe and uncouth.

It’s cynicism, not a healthy democracy, that allows politicians from both sides to get buzzed at the same place while the country’s about to burn. That was on display when Gallego sat for an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, released after his club kerfuffle. Asked about the Trump administration’s decision to send hundreds of immigrants to a hellhole in El Salvador without any judicial process, and in apparent defiance of a court order, Gallego — who himself voted for the Laken Riley Act, gifting Trump the power to deport undocumented immigrants merely accused but not convicted of a crime — professed opposition but paired it with impotence.

“I honestly don’t know if there is much of anything we can do,” he said about “innocent people” being sent to Guantanamo Bay or a Salvadoran prison with no release date. His party, he continued, should highlight “real abuses,” but, at the same time, avoid the appearance of caring too much about too many of those sentenced without judge or jury, saying: “Look, what Donald Trump did was set up a trap for Democrats to run into because, of the 500 people they sent there, I’m sure 200 of them are actually hard-core criminals. Now, are we going to run to the podium and defend and try to get those people back? No, absolutely not.”

Cynicism is also accompanied by naivete in Washington, where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — having watched his Republican colleagues deny the outcome of an election and defend the man who encouraged a mob to march on the U.S. Capitol — remains convinced that members of the 2025 GOP are still his work friends. His hangout is by the stationary bicycles, where he develops a rapport with Trump’s most craven enablers.

“I talk to them,” Schumer recently told The New York Times. “One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.”

The head of the Democrats in the Senate doesn’t really dislike his Republican counterparts and thinks they’re a bad news cycle away from finally breaking with Trump. In another time, and maybe at Thanksgivings past, getting along with people on the other side of a political debate could be considered a virtue; in an era of fascism or competitive authoritarianism or whatever you want to call a government by and for the worst among us, it is how a democracy curls up and dies.