“It’s like a sports bar. And the sport is politics,” Bill Thomas says. We’re standing in the Capitol Hill Club—more specifically, the club’s downstairs grill—where, a few minutes shy of noon on a recent Monday, lawmakers and operatives have started gathering for lunch in this members-only hotspot for Republicans. The grill’s furniture is nondescript, the color palette heavy on yellows. The decor will never grace the pages of Elle. But a subtle electricity pulses through the space, and it’s not just the Fox News playing on the TVs. As Thomas says, “You can feel the aura of power.”
Founded in 1951, and now housed in a five-story brick building just south of the Capitol, the club has welcomed Richard Nixon for breakfast meetings and Ronald Reagan for fundraising appeals. The Republican operative Lee Atwater held court here, Thomas recalls; so did former House Speaker John Boehner, who shared a few teary-eyed farewells after his political retirement. And it was here that Donald J. Trump cozied up to House Republicans last June, as he attempted to unify the party during his campaign.
Thomas, who founded a tour company, Private Tours of Washington, in 2013, discovered during Trump’s first term that tourists thirsted for a MAGA-themed excursion much in the way the President guzzles Diet Cokes. He’s now launched Trump Tour II, and offered to give us a peek. Which is how we found ourselves observing the lunchtime politicking at the club—the first stop on a two-hour romp around the city.
After hopping into his black Volvo parked out front, Thomas, outfitted in a red tie and gray half-zip, unpacks more stories as we cruise by the Capitol. The inauguration was originally staged on the east side, he notes, until 1981, when Reagan took the oath of the office overlooking the National Mall, and worked the setting into his speech: “Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history”—a riff that culminated with Reagan’s reference to Arlington Cemetery, and the cost borne by prior generations to ensure our freedom. As Thomas says, “Reagan knew the value of a good set.”
And Thomas knows the value of a good anecdote. A longtime journalist, he worked for the Baltimore Sun, Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly, and Glossier, a now-defunct magazine about Washington society; scored bylines in the likes of Vanity Fair and Spy magazine; and has authored or co-authored four books, including Capital Confidential: One Hundred Years of Sex, Scandal, and Secrets in Washington, D.C. “There’s a chapter called ‘The President’s Pants are Missing’ about Warren Harding, who makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout,” he says of the man who famously had liaisons in a White House closet with Nan Britton, who bore his child. Thomas, who in 2010 made an unsuccessful bid for Congress, running in the Republican primary for Maryland’s eighth district, has assembled an overstuffed archive of such political nuggets. He’s like a museum curator, unpacking and polishing them for display.

We’re on the west side of the Capitol now, and Thomas recalls how workers taped over the company name affixed to the port-a-Johns assembled here during Trump’s first inauguration—Don’s Johns. Not good optics for a President fixated on image. “Trump didn’t want a shot of Don’s Johns in the foreground with him speaking,” Thomas recalls. “He’s the king of branding.”
Indeed. Perhaps the President’s name will once again adorn our next stop, the former Trump Hotel-turned-Waldorf Astoria. Trump is reportedly attempting to negotiate a new licensing agreement or purchase of the lease, where he once famously dined at the now-shuttered BLT Prime, table 72 held in reserve for him: “He would be up having dinner, and then he’d come down and schmooze and take selfies,” Thomas says. But even without a name change, the MAGA faithful have reportedly returned, including the likes of Don Jr., his former fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, and freshman Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick.
Where will Elon Musk live? Is he still planning to turn the Line Hotel into a private club? Thomas will adapt the tour to reflect breaking news. In addition to Trump II, he also offers history and espionage tours, and he weaves in a few historical digressions on our jaunt. “This used to be Soviet embassy,” he says, as we double-park outside the Russian ambassador’s house on 16th Street, a gated Beaux Arts mansion. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, “the fate of the world hung in the balance of this four-block stretch”—the half-mile or so between the former embassy and the White House. “The Soviet ambassador at the time was a guy named Anatoly Dobrynin. Cool guy, very dapper, funny, suave as hell. I met him in Moscow in the mid 1990s.” Thomas was there writing a book about “adventure capitalism” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Dobrynin and an ABC TV News correspondent named John Scali, who served as a messenger between the Russians and the White House, helped save us from the brink.
While Russia continues to figure prominently in foreign policy debates, it’s been joined, thanks to Trump, by an unexpected interloper: Greenland, for now still part of the Danish empire. “Denmark hasn’t been in the news since like Hamlet,” says Thomas, as we stop in front of the Danish embassy. “Greenland could be like a frozen version of Puerto Rico.”
The Danish embassy confers the advantage of being a “two-fer,” because across the street sits Whitehaven, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s DC house, a neo-Georgian affair whose interior decoration is enhanced in part by two paintings made by former James Bond Pierce Brosnan. “You’d see Huma all the time,” Thomas says, referring to Huma Abedin, the former Clinton adviser and then-wife of sexting New York politician Anthony Weiner, back when Hillary was running for President. “Do you know who Huma’s marrying now? George Soros’s son, Alexander. That’s a move. That’s a move and a half.”

We descend from the heights of Wisconsin Avenue, skipping Bret Baier’s former Foxhall mansion, recently purchased by Trump’s incoming Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick ($25 million, all cash), and make one final stop in Georgetown: the Federal-style red-brick townhouse where the Kennedys lived during his Presidential campaign. After his election, John Kennedy managed his transition from the house, emerging to make announcements about cabinet choices to the assembled crush of reporters. A Miss Helen Montgomery and her father, Charles Montgomery, who lived across the street, invited the scribes inside for coffee and saltines. Today, a plaque on the Montgomery house, donated by the “newsmen who were given warm haven,” commemorates their kindness. Asks Thomas, well aware of the modern contempt for the Fourth Estate: “Can you imagine anybody inviting reporters into their house today?”
And then, he polishes one final nugget. About 45 minutes after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK in Dallas, he killed a police officer named J.D. Tippit before he was apprehended. One of Thomas’s writer friends, Gus Russo, had acquired a letter Jackie Kennedy had written to Tippit’s widow, Marie, a week after the shooting, and he finally agreed to share it after Marie died, age 92, in 2021.
“Dear Mrs. Tippit, What can I say to you?” Thomas reads from a photo of the note on his phone. “My husband’s death is responsible for you losing your husband. Wasn’t one life enough to take on that day? You must be so bitter, I don’t blame you if you are. Please know that I think of you all the time.” And then, the emotional heart of her missive: “If there is anything I can ever do for you for the rest of my life, it would make me so happy if I knew that you would ask me.”
Perhaps it’s Thomas’s artful delivery, or the yearning for a measure of decency, or the unexpected intimacy of the prose, but the lines hit like a thunderclap. Just a week after losing her husband to an assassin’s bullets, here was the first lady offering of herself.
“Talk about class,” says Thomas.
It may be Trump’s Washington now, but if you know where to look, the ghosts of administrations past still have something to say.