The famed comedian Groucho Marx once quipped that he’d never want to belong to a club that would have him as a member.
That might not be a problem for a former U.S. president — and his ex-staffers — as Donald Trump Jr. gets ready to open a hyper-exclusive new club in Washington, D.C.’s already hyper-exclusive Georgetown neighborhood.
President Donald Trump’s oldest son is set to open the club, dubbed Executive Branch, next month, with a membership price of $500,000.
Some insiders have reportedly offered $1 million to join the club, CNBC reported.
So who’s never going to get past the velvet rope at the new venue that, according to The New York Times, is tucked behind Georgetown Park via a set of stairs next to the mall’s parking garage?
That’d be former President George W. Bush and nearly everyone who ever worked for him, The Daily Mail reported.
A bit of background: The club was founded by Trump Jr.; crypto czar David Sacks; Zach and Alex Witkoff; the sons of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, and Chris Buskirk, who cofounded the conservative donor group Rockbridge Network.
But Bush-era Republicans should save their money, Sacks indicated on his podcast last month.
There’s a new sheriff in town, after all.
“To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans,” he said. “So we wanted to create something new, hipper and Trump-aligned.”
An insider familiar with the club’s plans told CNBC that prospective Executive Branch members must be heavily vetted and approved by its founders.
“We don’t want members of the media or just a lot of lobbyists joining,” the source said. “We want people to feel comfortable having conversations in privacy.”
That might not be much of an issue for the nation’s 43rd chief executive, who, if his Instagram account is any indication, is living a full enough post-White House life.
In any case, Bush said in a 2021 interview that “so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment.”
And that alone might be enough to keep out of Trump Jr.’s orbit. Not to mention the well-documented history of bad blood between the two presidential families.
