Washington, D.C.
‘What made you open a restaurant?’ I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party. It’s home to figures from the intellectual right such as Curtis Yarvin and darlings of New Right media including Natalie Winters, the increasingly slim White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
‘Have you read Death in the Afternoon?’ Bart says. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s by Hemingway.’ ‘I know.’
Bart pulls his phone out and starts to recite a few lines: ‘In cafés where the boys are never wrong; in cafés where they are all brave; in cafés where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble table tops among the shucked shrimps of
seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in cafés.’
Not the response I was expecting, yet Bart isn’t the first to get all lyrical about the change happening in Washington. Trump himself has said his second term would usher in a new era of opulence and glamour. He told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago: ‘We’re hotter now than they ever were in the Roaring Twenties, I believe. We’re going to be a lot hotter.’ The contrast with Joe Biden’s D.C. could not be more stark. For Biden-era Washington-ians, to be cool was to be unpatriotic and pessimistic, and to believe that everybody else was bigoted, racist, misogynistic, dumb. The only people you would surround yourself with were people who thought like you.
Magazine articles are subscriber-only. Keep reading for just £1 a month
SUBSCRIBE TODAY- Free delivery of the magazine
- Unlimited website and app access
- Subscriber-only newsletters
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in