Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Suzy Weiss sits down with Julie Macklowe, the thrice-Trump-voting socialite who shocked the New York elite by supporting Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax—then found out this week that she was erroneously expected to pay it. “Maybe the mayor should spend less time on TikTok and more time figuring out how to run a portal,” she says.
Julie Macklowe, in her Gucci tank top, Louis Vuitton sneakers and load-bearing Hemmerle diamond earrings, has some bones to pick. We’re at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Four Twenty Five restaurant in Manhattan, and we’re drinking—what else?—cocktails made from Macklowe’s own line of single malt whiskey, the “first luxury, and only luxury, American single malt,” she tells me. The blond mom of two and New York society fixture is having a lemonade and a few fingers of Macklowe Gold, which retails for nearly $300 a bottle; I’m sipping a Manhattan, made with her rye.
Not long ago, Macklowe—a loyal Donald J. Trump voter—made headlines by coming out in favor of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, an annual levy on second homes worth over $5 million that took effect July 1. “You have people popping in from Palm Beach and throwing galas,” she says. “They don’t even pay New York taxes, and they’re chairing it.”
Macklowe tells me she’s gotten “dirty looks at parties in the Hamptons” and a few people being “asshole-y,” but says her approach is: “Deal with it. And if you can’t, I don’t care.”
