One night in late August, Washington’s ruling class piled into the home of Katie and Stephen Miller for a party. There were White House staffers, law enforcement officials, and what felt like the entire Cabinet of President Donald Trump’s second administration. Hibachi chefs erected onion volcanoes and squirted sake into the mouths of guests. On the lawn, a mechanical bull bounced shrieking children into the air. The occasion was Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s birthday, and a cake made to resemble the Briefing Room lectern was served alongside cookies with “No More Questions” written in icing. With events like these, Katie has turned the home she shares with Trump’s most powerful aide into one of the most gossiped about party addresses in this strange new Washington.
She may not mean to, but Katie is reviving an ancient Washington tradition. In the days before Trump’s hostile takeover of the capital, there was a quaint idea that partisan warfare was left at the drawing room doors. “When the five o’clock bell rang on the Hill, in the old days, that’s when they’d get out the bottles of bourbon and start drinking together,” says Sally Quinn. “And then they’d move on to the dinner parties.” Such parties, often thrown by the grandes dames of Washington in their palaces dotted around town, were an opportunity for political rivals to meet in fizzing comity over catered meals and coupes of Bollinger. These hostesses greased the gears of power in the capital, and an invitation to their dinners was a chance to rub shoulders with Cabinet members and ambassadors and, occasionally, a bona fide celebrity. Ina Ginsburg, the Courrèges-clad convener, even managed to lure Andy Warhol down the Acela Corridor for dinners at her Georgetown mansion.
That kind of dining-table diplomacy has been extinguished by a decade of MAGA-fied political combat. Trump’s movement has never been fond of bipartisan bonhomie, and there’s always been something a little silly about his officials mingling with the press (“the enemy of the people”) or political opponents (“evil,” “scum,” “lock them up”) anyway. “When Trump got elected the first time, that’s when the whole thing fell apart,” says Quinn. “That’s when people stopped talking to each other.”
But at the home of the Millers, who live on a military post south of the White House, a new kind of partygiving has emerged. Over the summer, Katie hosted a bash in celebration of Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general along with that birthday party for Leavitt, which tripled as a goodbye party for the soon-to-depart press secretary and a celebration of Stephen Miller, whose birthday lands the day before. There were “almost 100 people there,” one regular guest of the Millers’ tells Vanity Fair. “It’s almost the whole Cabinet. Sometimes we joke: ‘Do we need a designated survivor for this one?’”
At these executive functions you might find the Rubios, the Hegseths, the Burgums, and Kash Patel with his fiancée, Alexis Wilkins. They are major productions. Katie has hired pizza trucks for the backyard, bartenders to serve cocktails, and even livestock: One of her children’s birthday parties featured a petting zoo with donkeys and other assorted animals. Katie strives to use catering companies that adhere to the teachings of the Make America Healthy Again movement, one regular guest says, which encourages the consumption of raw milk and the avoidance of seed oils. Though there is an exception: A shaved ice truck that uses syrups that partygoers say contains one of the food dyes against which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the warpath.
