“Washington For Sale” Goes Beyond The Mansions (And Re-Purposed Hotels & Museums)
The inauguration is tomorrow and then Trump replaces Biden as national figurehead. Last week, Matt Taibbi described the Biden in the presidency more accurately than anyone else has. “a ventriloquist’s dummy for unscrupulous campaign aides”. But if Ron Klain, Steve Richetti, Mike Donilon, Jeff Zients, Anita Dunn, Bruce Reed, Jen O’Malley and Jake Sullivan have been running the show for the last 4 years, the new powers behind the thrown will be Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller… perhaps Steve Bannon and Jason Miller… with assists from Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, Marjorie Traitor Greene and Mike Flynn. Let’s not kid ourselves, the return of Trumpism won’t be about governance but dominance, leaving policy decisions to figures whose sole focus is entrenching their ideology and dismantling their opposition.
And, among other things, the new Trump oligarchy is buying up DC luxury properties. Elisabeth Bumiller noted that counting Señor T “there are at least a dozen billionaires among his cabinet picks and those headed for senior roles in the new administration… It is an extraordinary concentration of wealth in a city where power has always been more important than money, but is now more than ever intertwined with it. Trump campaigned as a populist defender of the American working class, but he has put some of his richest donors in commanding roles in the top reaches of government. A number will oversee the very industries that produced their fortunes. ‘It’s tempting to liken this to the Gilded Age, but John Rockefeller didn’t actually run McKinley’s campaign or move into the White House,’ said Michael Waldman, who was President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter and is now president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice, which promotes legal system reforms and works to curb money in politics. He was referring to Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help Trump win and is now expected to have an office in the White House complex.”
But Bumiller’s story is a real estate article, not a look at what the Trump regime is likely to do to Americans. Behind the glitz of billionaire cabinet members and private clubs lies a regime intent on serving the ultra-wealthy while dismantling protections for working families. Trump’s new oligarchy, stocked with tech tycoons, hedge fund managers, crypto-criminals and fossil fuel magnates, is poised to aggressively pursue policies that enrich their own class at the expense of the majority. I think we can all confidently expect a return to slashing environmental regulations, prioritizing corporate profits over clean air and water, leaving countless communities vulnerable to pollution and climate disasters. Social safety nets like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid will caertainly face renewed attacks, as “government efficiency” becomes code for privatization and austerity. Worker protections— already weakened under Trump’s first term— will be further eroded as labor unions face hostility from both the administration and a Supreme Court reshaped in Trump’s image.
On top of that, healthcare access could be gutted by a renewed push to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, throwing millions off insurance while the pharmaceutical and insurance industries see their profits soar. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans will benefit from yet another round of tax cuts, further widening the gap between rich and poor. For ordinary Americans, this means stagnating wages, rising costs of living, and diminished opportunities in a system increasingly rigged against them. This is not governance; it is feudalism with a modern veneer, where the billionaires at the helm buy influence, rig policies in their favor, and entrench their dominance while selling populist rhetoric to a disillusioned electorate. If the last Trump administration was chaos, the next one will be calculated extraction— leaving ordinary Americans with less security, fewer rights, and little recourse against the machinery of greed.
“One of the most immediate effects in Washington,” Bumiller noted, “has been an explosion in the luxury real estate market. The financier Howard Lutnick, Trump’s choice to be commerce secretary (worth $1.5 billion, according to Forbes), last month closed on the French Chateau-style home of the Fox anchor Bret Baier on Foxhall Road for $25 million, a record for the area. Scott Bessent, the nominee for Treasury secretary (his financial disclosure statement shows he is worth in excess of $700 million) has looked at a $7 million Federal-style house on N Street in Georgetown, once the home of the syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop. The 1850 Italianate-style Georgetown home of the late Boyden Gray, an influential lawyer for Republican presidents, sold last month for $10.5 million. Real estate agents would not disclose the buyer, but they did say they were running short of trophy houses in Washington because of a second-term Trump bump. ‘We’ve really been overwhelmed by the wealth factor that has come to Washington since the election,’ said Jim Bell, an executive vice president of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. He said agents have resorted to calling their Washington clients and asking if they’d be interested in selling to the newcomers.”
It is unclear where Musk will live in Washington, although there are local media reports that he is trying to buy the Line Hotel in the buzzy, bar-heavy neighborhood of Adams Morgan and turn it into a private club… Musk is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Building across from the White House as the co-leader of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. His partner in the effort is Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a net worth of $1 billion, according to Forbes, who is also planning to run for governor of Ohio, a seat that becomes open in 2026.
Jonathan Taylor, a founder and managing partner of TTR Sotheby’s, said that the rich with connections to the administration, although not necessarily a part of it, are moving here too. “There are a lot of very wealthy people looking for a seat at the table,” he said.
That is hardly surprising, said David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the private equity Carlyle Group.
Big donors, he said, “would like to get the policies they believe in from the federal government— more oil drilling, easier antitrust policy, more favorable crypto policy, less bank oversight. They also want more support for helping American companies invest overseas, and have ready access to government officials.”
Washington housing, he said, was also a relative bargain for them. “If you want to buy a home in New York or Southampton, a really good house, it could cost $100 million to $150 million,” he said. “You can’t spend $25 million in Washington even if you try.”
Rubenstein, who served as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, said he looked at Baier’s house when it was on the market but decided to stay in the home in Bethesda, Md., where he has lived for decades. He also owns the sprawling compound in Nantucket that President Biden has used for his family Thanksgiving vacations.
…Trump’s billionaires have substantially bigger assets than those top officials who came to Washington for his first term, which was considered the wealthiest administration in American history at the time. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil, had assets of between $289 million and $350 million in 2017. He lasted a little more than a year before Trump fired him by tweet.
Some tech billionaires, who moved here in part to have access to the White House and Congress as their industry came under growing government scrutiny, have been in Washington for years.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post, paid $23 million in 2016 for the former 27,000-foot Textile Museum on a grand street in the Kalorama neighborhood. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who donated more than $1 million to Trump in 2016, paid $13 million in 2021 for a home on Woodland Drive owned by Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce in Trump’s first term. Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, paid $15 million for the home across from Quinn on N Street, where Jacqueline Kennedy lived for a short time after her husband’s assassination in 1963.
“These are really rich people,” said Kara Swisher, a journalist who chronicles the tech industry and is a former opinion writer for the New York Times. “As much as they like to have an image of not being spendy, they’re all really spendy. They all have private planes, they all have assistants, they have people who get them the kind of nuts they want.”
Washington neighborhoods in high demand, real estate agents said, were Kalorama, Massachusetts Avenue Heights off the embassy-lined street of the same name, and Georgetown, whose cobblestone lanes were traditionally the preserve of Washington’s old-line elite. Not anymore, said Jamie Peva, a real estate agent with Washington Fine Properties who has sold houses in Georgetown for 33 years.
“That whole WASP hegemony that started to decline in the ’80s just continued to decline,” he said. “All of a sudden tech starts to come in. It’s a meritocracy.”