sexta-feira, 1 de maio de 2026
July 8, 2025: Laura Loomer, Trump’s Blunt Instrument
Laura
Loomer, Trump’s Blunt Instrument
The
right-wing provocateur and Islamophobe has few friends in the West Wing but a
big fan in the Oval Office.
Ken
Bensinger Robert Draper
By Ken
Bensinger and Robert Draper
Reporting
from Washington and the Florida Gulf Coast
July 8, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/us/politics/laura-loomer-trump.html
Through
battles big and small since President Trump took office, one intense conflict
stands out for the president’s openness to once-fringe views and voices. It is
the struggle by some of his aides to contain Laura Loomer.
Ms. Loomer,
the right-wing agitator whose proud Islamophobia and self-styled role as an
ideological purity enforcer have made her toxic to some members of Mr. Trump’s
inner circle, got the upper hand in late March. Her posts on X about several
National Security Council aides she deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump
got his attention. He asked her by phone to come to the Oval Office the
following week.
On April 2,
Ms. Loomer sat with a thick folder on her lap, facing the president at the
Resolute Desk. She elaborated on her findings about the deputy national
security adviser, Alex Wong, who she pointed out had worked on the 2012
presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a critic of Mr. Trump, and whose wife had
clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor and been involved in the prosecution of the
Jan. 6 defendants. She criticized a dozen other aides in the presence of
several administration officials, including Michael Waltz, then the national
security adviser, who had stepped in uninvited midway through the meeting.
After her
presentation, Mr. Trump barked to Mr. Waltz, “I want all of them fired.” He
dismissed the group and hugged Ms. Loomer on her way out. Mr. Wong survived the
day, but six employees in Ms. Loomer’s folder were ousted.
Two months
later, White House staffers scored a small victory. On June 11, Mr. Trump
attended the opening night of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center. So did
Ms. Loomer, who ascended the stairway to the V.I.P. section, where the
president awaited the curtain. But she was stopped at the top by a White House
aide. Ms. Loomer insisted that she had permission to visit Mr. Trump’s section.
The aide held his ground. A Kennedy Center employee joined the scene. For
several minutes, the employee and the aide blockaded Ms. Loomer’s path to Mr.
Trump. Finally, furious, she stormed back down the stairs.
But the
slight has hardly deterred her from using her prominence on social media to
promote her own take on supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Last week, in an
apparent reference to the entire Hispanic population of the United States, she
expressed relish over the prospect of people being eaten alive while trying to
escape the swampland immigration detention facility known as “Alligator
Alcatraz.”
“The good
news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,”
she posted on X.
In one of
more than a dozen interviews with The New York Times for this article, Ms.
Loomer, 32, dismissed the notion that she was an interloper who lacked credible
standing with the president. “My point of access to the White House is Donald
Trump,” she said. “And that’s really hard for people to comprehend.”
Within the
White House, Ms. Loomer is regarded as an uncontrollable and toxic force whose
deep loyalty to Mr. Trump is tempered by her tendency to turn on almost anyone,
even her allies. No member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing would
speak about her on the record. The same character traits that endear her to the
president and lead him to call her several times a month — particularly her
seemingly total lack of fear — make many top aides treat her gingerly, as if
she might unpin a hand grenade.
She has
filed a defamation lawsuit against the comedian Bill Maher and HBO for Mr.
Maher’s suggestion on his show last September that Ms. Loomer was sexually
involved with Mr. Trump. “Just because a woman is able to get access to the
president, and she isn’t a millionaire and doesn’t work for the Republican
Party, she must be sleeping with the president?” she said in another interview.
“I don’t like using the term, because I don’t want to sound like a liberal, but
there really is a lot of misogyny.”
Still, Ms.
Loomer acknowledges that the president is central to her life. “President Trump
comes first,” she says she has told her boyfriend, “and if you can’t handle
that, then go find somebody else.” After one meeting with Mr. Trump in 2023,
she wrote effusively on X, “I love him so much.”
Mr. Trump,
for his part, frequently praises Ms. Loomer, calling her “a fantastic woman, a
true patriot” at one rally and “amazing” at another.
“She’s got
the same intensity Roy Cohn had,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the podcaster who was
a senior adviser to the first Trump administration, referring to the pugilistic
lawyer who helped Mr. Trump become a player in New York decades ago.
Ms. Loomer
has taken great pains to make herself worthy of the part. She styles herself as
Mr. Trump’s pre-eminent loyalist, declaring on X last month that “America First
is whatever President Trump says it is.” And she’s hyper-conscious of the value
Mr. Trump places on appearance. “Every time I go and see the president,” she
said, “I always buy a new outfit, because I want to look my best.”
Her growing
celebrity was on display one evening last month, when she dined at the Capital
Grille, a prominent Washington steakhouse, with a Times reporter and her
lawyer, Larry Klayman, who had spent the day helping his client prepare for her
deposition in the suit against Mr. Maher. In the crowded dining room, Ms.
Loomer traded warm hellos with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, while
James Blair, a White House deputy chief of staff, came to her table to give her
a hug.
Over dinner,
Ms. Loomer recalled that just 15 years earlier she had been an overweight
teenager who “used to cry in the bathroom” because she couldn’t fit in trendy
clothes. At times, she said, her weight exceeded 200 pounds; now she weighs
about 125. Picking at her scallops, which she ordered despite her fondness for
steak, Ms. Loomer added, “I’ve got to stay thin.”
In
interviews, Ms. Loomer took exception to what she said was the characterization
of her as a “conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim activist.” Rather, she
maintained, she was a person of considerable influence: “On a daily basis, I
communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world.”
Both
descriptions, of course, can be true.
Ms. Loomer
once posted a video on X saying that the Sept. 11 attacks were “an inside job,”
though she now says the post was misinterpreted. She routinely refers to Mr.
Trump’s defeat in 2020 — the same year she lost a congressional race in Florida
— as “the stolen election.” After losing in a congressional Republican primary
two years later, Ms. Loomer refused to accept defeat, explaining on social
media that, “YOU DO NOT CONCEDE WHEN THERE IS THEFT INVOLVED!”
Her
anti-Islamic rhetoric has been even more prolific. She labeled herself a
“#ProudIslamophobe” on Twitter in 2017, a year before the platform banned her
for hateful speech toward Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who
is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.
“I don’t
believe Islam is a real religion,” Ms. Loomer said, claiming baselessly that
the Qatari government was “the biggest financier” of the Black Lives Matter
movement. After Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, won the recent Democratic mayoral
primary in New York, she warned on X that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC
and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame.”
Her 1.7
million followers on her reactivated X account include Vice President JD Vance;
Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Kash Patel, the
F. B.I. director; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and Stephen
Miller, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. Republican political
candidates clamor for her endorsement; last month Mr. Vance invited Ms. Loomer
to meet with him in his office.
As she
patrolled the halls of Capitol Hill one recent morning, armed only with a
mobile phone, it was easy to spot the look of terror spreading on the faces of
Republicans who crossed her path: Nobody wants to be the next lawmaker to be
labeled a disloyal RINO, or Republican in Name Only, by Ms. Loomer.
“She’s like
a child wielding a loaded firearm called Twitter,” said Tucker Carlson, the
right-wing media host, whom Ms. Loomer recently attacked on social media for
criticizing U.S. military involvement in the war between Israel and Iran. “I
don’t blame her. I blame the adults who take her seriously.”
Being feared
more than loved appears to suit Ms. Loomer. “I don’t want to be friends with
people,” she said. “That’s why I’ve got four dogs.”
She lives
with her rescue dogs on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a modest red brick ranch-style
rental, splitting the costs with her live-in boyfriend. One bedroom has been
converted into a studio for her twice-weekly podcast, “ Loomer Unleashed,”
which has 80,000 followers on Rumble. The walls are filled with photographs of
herself in combative moments, including when she was ushered out of a House
hearing in 2018 for disrupting the testimony of Jack Dorsey, the Twitter chief
executive.
That
freeze-frame seems apt for a person who remains defiantly outside the
mainstream. She is still locked out of her original Facebook and Instagram
accounts. She is under the binding terms of a settlement not to speak
disparagingly about the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is paying the
nonprofit $1,200 a month to reimburse it for legal costs and other fees after a
lawsuit she filed was dismissed as meritless. (Ms. Loomer is currently suing
her original lawyer in that case for malpractice and will use any proceeds to
help pay her debt to CAIR.) She was denied a concealed-carry firearms permit in
Florida.
Ms. Loomer
professes indifference. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I play for an
audience of one.”
‘If Anybody
Is a Victim, It’s Me’
Ms. Loomer
has spent most of her life searching for an audience of any kind.
She grew up
in Tucson, Ariz., in a tumultuous household. When she was 11, her parents
divorced. Five months later, one of her two younger brothers, who had already
been hospitalized multiple times “due to uncontrollable behavior problems,”
according to medical records, attacked her mother and was placed in a
government group home. A decade after that, the same brother tried to choke his
father to death and was charged with aggravated domestic assault, although he
eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser crime.
By the time
Ms. Loomer was 12, her mother had ceased playing a meaningful role in her life.
Eventually a state court awarded full custody to her father, Jeffrey, a
rheumatologist. In an interview, Dr. Loomer said that he saw only one solution
to maintaining peace in the household, which was to keep the violent child
under his watch while sending his daughter and youngest son off to boarding
school.
“If anybody
is a victim, it’s me,” Ms. Loomer said of her upbringing. She spoke of
binge-eating and suffering severe anxiety and depression throughout her
adolescence, as well as feeling ignored. “I was subjected to a lot of
adversities that a lot of other people would not have been able to overcome,
and I’m proud of myself for that. I think I did a good job.”
At the Orme
School, a small racially and ethnically diverse coed institution in Mayer,
Ariz., which had an annual tuition of around $38,000 and alumni including
Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti, Ms. Loomer did what she could to fit in. She
was manager of the football and rodeo teams and forged a warm friendship with
her roommate, who was Black. But according to two of her former classmates, she
began openly espousing anti-Islam ideas, insisting that the Quran taught its
followers to be terrorists and that Barack Obama, then president, was Muslim.
“Laura often
expressed extreme views,” one of the classmates, Hasan Barkcin, who was born in
Turkey and is Muslim, recalled. “I’d correct her, she’d say, ‘OK, got it,’ and
then she’d go back to repeating the same misinformation.”
Ms. Loomer
said she first started thinking about Islam after the Sept. 11 attacks, when
she was 8. She often justifies her attacks on Muslims by invoking her religion:
Though she admits she’s not particularly observant, she calls herself a “feisty
Jewess” and frequently wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.
Her father
said he disagrees with her stance on Islam. “I am not opposed to any religion,”
Dr. Loomer said in an interview.
At Orme, Ms.
Loomer expressed the desire to be famous and aspired to be valedictorian,
according to another classmate. She came close, but fell short, and was
disappointed again when she wasn’t admitted to Dartmouth, a school her father
attended.
Instead, she
spent a semester at Mount Holyoke College and then transferred to Barry
University in South Florida, where she majored in broadcast journalism,
immersed herself in conservative politics and became the campus president of
the College Republicans.
Her campus
activism drew the attention of James O’Keefe, the founder of the right-wing
undercover media group Project Veritas. Mr. O’Keefe hired Ms. Loomer at the
beginning of 2015, a few months before she graduated. Her first stunt for the
group, in which she infiltrated Black Lives Matter gatherings and recorded
people making unflattering comments about the Rev. Al Sharpton, netted a
front-page story in The New York Post.
But over
time, her anti-Muslim rants began to catch up with her. By 2019, she was banned
by every major social media network and even by the car services Uber and Lyft
after she posted that “I never want to support another Islamic immigrant
driver.” At just 25, Ms. Loomer had lost her megaphone and feared that her
media career was over.
“It was a
massive blow to Laura,” said Shane Cory, a digital fund-raising specialist who
assisted Ms. Loomer in amassing online donors to support her activities, which
included handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York City headquarters with a
yellow Star of David affixed to her clothes in late 2018.
That same
year Ms. Loomer relocated to Palm Beach, and in 2019 she prepared a run for
Congress. Political neophyte though she was, she proved to be an energetic
campaigner and fund-raiser, enough so to win the Republican primary and gain
Mr. Trump’s endorsement. Still, she lost by close to 20 points in a deep-blue
district in 2020 to the Democratic incumbent, Representative Lois Frankel.
She lost
again in 2022, this time in the Republican primary in a different district, to
the incumbent, Representative Daniel Webster. Mr. Trump had refrained from
endorsing anyone in the primary, which Mr. Webster won by nearly seven points.
Ms. Loomer claimed fraud and refused to acknowledge defeat. Mr. Webster’s
campaign said in a statement that she had “lost all sight of truth and
reality.”
She emerged
from the 2022 contest broke and despondent, but soon found two lifelines. One
was the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who began restoring banned accounts,
including hers, soon after taking over the company. The second was a deal she
struck with Rumble, a right-wing video streaming platform, that paid her
$15,000 a month to make content with a Vero Beach, Fla., media company.
Repositioning
herself as Mr. Trump’s fiercest advocate, she focused on attacking Gov. Ron
DeSantis of Florida — who figured to be Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the 2024
Republican presidential nomination. Over the next 18 months, her attacks were
relentless; she once went so far as to suggest that the breast cancer
experienced by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, had “been over exaggerated
in a desperate effort to get votes.”
In February
2023, Ms. Loomer had just returned from staging a ruckus at a book-signing
event for Mr. DeSantis when her cellphone announced that an “unknown caller”
was on the line. “Hello Laura, it’s your favorite president,” Mr. Trump said on
the other end. “I love what you did today.” It was the first time the former
president had called her, and he asked her to come visit him in person.
“I was so
excited,” Ms. Loomer recalled. Weeks later, she drove to Mar-a-Lago, Mr.
Trump’s club in Palm Beach, where Mr. Trump met her, accompanied by Ms. Wiles.
The former
president encouraged Ms. Loomer to take another shot at Congress. She demurred
and said returning Mr. Trump to the White House took precedence. Mr. Trump
turned to Ms. Wiles, according to two people with knowledge of the
conversation, and said: “Let’s hire her. Let’s put her on the campaign.”
Ms. Loomer
filled out a W-9 tax form and was told that her start date would be April 1,
2023. But April 1 came and went. The next week, The Times reported that Mr.
Trump was considering hiring Ms. Loomer, and by the end of the day, a campaign
official announced that the job offer had been withdrawn.
“I was so
depressed,” Ms. Loomer said. “I cried so much. I locked myself in my apartment
for like a month. I lost like 15 pounds.”
She has been
outside looking in ever since.
‘Pleasure in
Humiliating People’
This March,
Sergio Gor, the White House’s director of personnel, called Ms. Loomer and
asked her to pay a visit. Ms. Loomer was delighted. From her perspective, this
could mean only one thing: that she was finally about to be offered a White
House job. She booked a flight to Washington and met in Mr. Gor’s office
adjacent to the White House. To her chagrin, Mr. Gor wanted only to engage in
small talk.
Sitting in
her hotel room, fuming, Ms. Loomer began digging into Mr. Wong’s background,
combing through websites looking for signs of disloyalty. Her best work, she
said, comes “in the aftermath of when I’ve been disrespected.”
She then set
her sights on two holdovers from the Biden administration, Gen. Timothy D.
Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, and
his deputy, Wendy Noble. Both were fired after her Oval Office meeting with Mr.
Trump in early April.
Weeks later,
the White House withdrew the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, the sister-in-law
of Mr. Waltz, for surgeon general after Ms. Loomer savaged her on social media
as “not ideologically aligned” with Mr. Trump.
It is hard
to say how decisive a role Ms. Loomer played in these personnel decisions.
Asked to put a number on the job casualties — which she calls “scalps” — that
she could take credit for, Ms. Loomer replied, “I don’t even know.”
But she
added: “I really enjoy and take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck
at their job.”
Mr. Trump
publicly denied that she had influenced his decision to fire the National
Security Council aides, and White House officials have suggested that Ms.
Loomer has tended to claim credit for work done quietly in the administration.
But some close allies of the president believe that there are those in the
government who have furtively supplied Ms. Loomer with information so she can
do their dirty work of publicly disparaging certain personnel for them.
Ms. Loomer
spends at least 14 hours every day on her phone, scrolling through X, reading
hundreds of incoming text messages, taking phone calls and pounding out lengthy
posts.
While
researching a prospective appointee or a perceived adversary of Mr. Trump, she
relies on basic online tools, including Google, LinkedIn, Instagram and the
Federal Election Commission website. In her quest to find damning information,
she will often focus on the subject’s spouse and their children.
For example,
she seized on the background of the wife of Stanley Woodward, who has defended
allies of Mr. Trump in court and is awaiting Senate confirmation to be
associate attorney general. Ms. Loomer determined that Mr. Woodward’s wife,
Kristin McGough Woodward, was a lawyer who supported the Black Lives Matter
movement.
“In any
revolution, you do have a purity police,” Mr. Bannon said.
But Ms.
Loomer’s influence has limits. Mr. Woodward is still on track for confirmation
despite Ms. Loomer’s protestations. She has not succeeded in dislodging Morgan
Ortagus, the deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, whom Ms. Loomer has
personally disliked for years and has described as being “all about self
enrichment” and “AMERICA LAST.”
Stefanie
Spear, the deputy chief of staff to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has
been accused by Ms. Loomer of being a “Marxist” but she remains in her job. For
that matter, Ms. Loomer said that she finds Mr. Kennedy to be “a very
problematic person” who “is running a shadow presidential campaign” from his
office. But Mr. Kennedy’s job seems safe for the moment, as does that of
Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Ms. Loomer derisively refers to as “Pam
Blondi.”
On Monday
evening, Ms. Loomer posted on X that Ms. Bondi needed to resign for not
delivering promised new information about the disgraced financier Jeffrey
Epstein.
Today Ms.
Loomer derives her living from the attention economy, gaining paying
subscribers on X as well as donors from everyday provocations. On a hot
Thursday last month on Capitol Hill, she and her employee Charles Downs
accosted several members of Congress, shooting video as they asked them whether
they would support designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist
organization. Two House Democrats, Representatives Maxine Waters of California
and Daniel Goldman of New York, did what they could to ignore her. A third,
Representative Ted Lieu of California, said that he would have to do some
reading on the matter.
Ms. Loomer
separately tasked Mr. Downs with lying in wait outside a House committee
hearing room for Ms. Omar, a holding pattern that consumed more than three
hours until the congresswoman finally materialized in the corridor. To Mr.
Downs’s repeated question about the Muslim Brotherhood, she responded, “Enjoy
your clicks, have a nice day!”
Even many
Republicans Ms. Loomer approached, like Representatives Mary Miller of Illinois
and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, regarded her tentatively, as if she might just
bite. She received a warmer welcome from Representative Nancy Mace of South
Carolina. Ms. Loomer entered Ms. Mace’s office with a beagle named Oliver
rescued from a military testing laboratory to accentuate her recent success in
persuading the Navy to halt such testing on dogs and cats.
“You’d be a
hero,” Ms. Loomer said, urging Ms. Mace to lead Congress in designating the
Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Ms. Mace pledged to do so. Later,
Ms. Loomer said that she and Ms. Mace “have a mutual hatred of Marjorie,”
referring to another close female ally of the president, Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
It has not
escaped Ms. Loomer’s notice that many of her peers in the MAGA ecosystem have
become rich. Recently, in hopes of improving her financial fortunes, she
started a consulting business, Loomered Strategies, with a business partner in
New York State.
“I’m kind of
like pivoting,” she said. “I do journalism, but also I’m now going to be doing
a lot of advising in terms of opposition research, executive-level vetting and
advocacy.” She says that she has five clients and that overall her activities
earn a gross income of about $300,000.
Even when
working with clients, Ms. Loomer remains mindful of her primary audience. A
rare slip came in May, when her anti-Islam impulses led her to criticize the
Trump administration for accepting a luxury 747 from the Qatari government,
which she labeled “jihadists in suits.”
Mr. Trump
called her the next day from Air Force One en route to Saudi Arabia and,
according to several people with knowledge of the exchange, conveyed his deep
displeasure with her. She apologized in a lengthy post on X in which she also
reminded others of her special access to the president: “I know I could have
probably just had a private conversation about the plane instead.”
Ms. Loomer
said that she has had at least four conversations with Mr. Trump since that
time and is confident that their relationship is as strong as ever, despite
continuing efforts by some White House aides to marginalize her. She is less
sanguine about what lies ahead.
“I feel like
Western civilization is in a death spiral,” she said, likening Mr. Trump with
the lone source of light in an otherwise dark world. “Eventually, a candle
burns out. But it’s a slow burn.”
And once
that dim source of optimism was snuffed out? “I don’t know what my life is
going to look like when President Trump is out of office,” she said.
Robert
Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the
author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos?
Someone
Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos?
As half
of an unfathomably powerful couple, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos seems to have influenced
the uber-rich to stop apologizing, and start enjoying themselves.
By Amy
Chozick
April 11,
2026
A lot of
things make Lauren Sánchez Bezos ridiculously happy. Helicopters. Fashion.
Protecting the narwhal. Her little sister, Elena. Her five best girlfriends.
And, of course, her new husband, Jeff Bezos.
She and
Mr. Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up
around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an
exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.” They don’t
touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re
grateful for — and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.
From
there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun
rise: hers from a mug that reads “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again,” his from one she
got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. They play
pickleball. Six days a week, they work out for an hour with a private trainer.
“He looks good, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of her new husband, in an
interview in Miami in January. She slow-nodded, repeating, “He looks good.”
By now,
it is hard to conjure the version of Mr. Bezos that existed before. Mildly
awkward; faintly hermetic in Seattle. The logistical mastermind of two-day
shipping. Now, he is gym-hardened, frequently shirtless, captured mid-laugh in
paparazzi photos, canoodling on his megayacht, a man who has discovered joy,
love and cosmetic dermatology.
Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos has, in turn, adopted some Jeff-isms, like Amazon corporate
rituals — such as requesting memos no more than six-pages long ahead of
meetings at the Bezos Earth Fund, where she is the vice chair.
The
couple is now best thought of as a unit. “I talk about everything with him.
Everything! Jeff is my best friend, and I don’t say that lightly,” Mrs. Sánchez
Bezos said.
Mr.
Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, relies on her advice on nearly everything
— and vice versa. For instance, in early March, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos published
her second children’s book, “The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea,” about Flynn, a
dyslexic fly whose wrong turn leads to an undersea adventure. Mr. Bezos edited
the book, suggesting a change to the illustrated submarine on the cover. “He
said it should be fantastical, not realistic,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said.
“Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I don’t.” She changed it.
I met
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in January at an Argentine restaurant in Miami Beach; a
security guard named John arrived first to scope out the place. If Mrs. Sánchez
Bezos is alone, she can often blend in, but if Mr. Bezos is on her arm, all
hell breaks loose. She had been across the street at a J.P. Morgan leadership
conference, where Mr. Bezos had spoken the day before about Project Prometheus,
his new artificial intelligence start-up, with $6.2 billion in funding.
In
person, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is surprisingly tiny, less lacquered than the glossy
images that circulate online. She picked out a window booth, and when the
hostess said it was reserved, she smiled. “Oh,” she said. “I want to know who’s
sitting there.” She tossed her black Birkin bag, adorned with each of her
children’s names and a Flynn the Fly keychain, on another corner table and
asked the server his name. (“That’s Luciano,” she said to me. “He’s from
Argentina.”) When somebody suddenly turned the music up, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos
shimmied and joked: “Want me to dance on the table? That gets a lot of
attention.”
You would
think that marrying into obscene wealth would transform a person, but in this
case, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos appears less changed than her husband; the world has
long been her Everything Store. Even before she married Mr. Bezos, whose net
worth is estimated to be roughly $250 billion, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos liked to
think she was 20 percent happier than the average person. Even when she was 18,
crashing in a cousin’s garage in Carson, Calif., after she hadn’t gotten her
dream job as a Southwest Airlines flight attendant because she was a few pounds
over the weight limit, she was still basically happy.
“If
baseline is here,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said, holding her hand about chest
height, “I’m up here,” with her other hand above her head.
The
couple had recently returned from Seattle, where Mr. Bezos celebrated his 62nd
birthday by making pancakes for all of their seven children from previous
marriages. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, 56, adores kids. Having them. Raising them.
Encouraging other people to have them. Over several interviews, she repeatedly
urged me to have another baby. “Do it!” she said. “I would have another one
tomorrow. Tomorrow.” I finally asked if she and Mr. Bezos were considering it,
as a couple of her friends had suggested to me. “I would have a baby tomorrow,”
she repeated, with a coy smile. (A spokeswoman later called to say Mrs. Sánchez
Bezos was not having a baby.)
But
honestly, why not? Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has shown that with the right attitude
and mind-boggling wealth, anything is possible. Space travel. The Met Gala.
Fertility after 50.
Her
happiness is infectious, undeniable, world-historical. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos
treats the pursuit — and spreading — of joy as a kind of mandate. But when one
of the world’s wealthiest people radiates this much happiness, is it
celebration, or provocation? Is she just rubbing it in?
There’s a
perception that Mrs. Sánchez Bezos started rolling with the A-list only after
marrying Mr. Bezos, but it’s actually the other way around. Back when Mr.
Bezos’ connection to Hollywood largely consisted of his deep involvement with
adapting the theological nuances of Middle-earth into a billion-dollar
television version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings,” Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos was already known in Los Angeles as a networker. A modern-day
Brentwood Country Mart Babe Paley who counts Kris Jenner, Katy Perry, Leonardo
DiCaprio and Lydia Kives, wife of the superconnector Michael Kives, among her
close friends.
“People
act like he’s my new friend,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of Mr. DiCaprio. “No,
I’ve known Leo since I was 25. Twenty-five.”
In June,
Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos wed in a lavish three-day bacchanal in Venice.
The weekend included a prewedding foam party on Mr. Bezos’ superyacht and water
taxis that ferried 200 guests — including Sydney Sweeney, Jared Kushner and
Ivanka Trump, Queen Rania of Jordan, and five members of the Kardashian-Jenner
family — across the Venetian lagoon to watch the couple exchange vows on San
Giorgio Maggiore. To some, it was a tone-deaf display of staggering wealth at a
time of historic inequality.
Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos gets choked up talking about what the public didn’t see: the
toasts by all their children; the high school friends of Mr. Bezos’ whom nobody
bothered to photograph. Phones were banned from the ceremony and reception. But
“no NDAs!” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said, referring to nondisclosure agreements.
“They’re our friends! And you did not see one picture come out of that
wedding.”
This is a
frequent lament from her: that people don’t see the couple’s actual life. “What
you see is 5 percent of my life,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. (At The New York
Times’s 2024 DealBook Summit, Mr. Bezos said he “gave up on being well
understood a long time ago.”)
Hours
after she said “I do,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos wiped her entire Instagram account.
“I did a whole reset,” she said. “You’re still yourself, but you are
different.” A stream of bikini selfies and bachelorette shots was replaced by a
single photo of herself in a demure lace wedding gown with a traditional veil.
Would marrying into extreme wealth at a moment of rage over inequality chasten
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos? Would she embrace cashmere and the muted wardrobe of quiet
luxury? Retreat into the refined, semi-reclusive existence of the uber-rich,
where foam is on an amuse-bouche, not Sydney Sweeney?
After
all, for decades, there was an unspoken bargain with America’s ultra-moneyed.
They could enjoy unimaginable privilege as long as they projected austerity or
stayed largely out of the limelight. Warren Buffett in a modest home in Omaha.
Mark Zuckerberg in hoodies and an Acura. They mostly left the conspicuous
displays of the good life — over-the-top birthday parties, flashy cars,
cosmetic enhancements — to celebrities and reality-TV stars.
But Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos is nothing if not a woman intent on sampling the full menu. She
hasn’t just changed Mr. Bezos into a man who hosts Kris Jenner’s James
Bond-themed 70th birthday party at his Los Angeles home: Sometimes it seems
she’s taken the entire culture with her.
After
years defined by financial crisis, pandemic lockdowns and moral earnestness,
unabashed rich-person exuberance is back with a Blue Origin bang, a Mar-a-Lago
makeover of the White House and a Zuckerberg rap cover. The Bezos’ marriage
seems, at times, as much a cultural inflection point as a love story — the
moment American money stopped apologizing and decided it might as well enjoy
itself.
“They are
to quiet luxury what Las Vegas is to the Mormon Church,” said Graydon Carter,
the longtime Vanity Fair editor.
“They
have this symbiotic relationship with the press and their haters,” said Janice
Min, the chief executive of Ankler Media, known for its buzzy Hollywood
newsletter, and a former editor of Us Weekly. “The haters feed them, and it
feels like the more outrage they create, the more they double down.”
From the
outset, the couple have embraced spectacle. When The National Enquirer dropped
an 11-page, salacious exposé of their affair in 2019, Mr. Bezos didn’t hide
behind legalese. He came out slugging, accusing the tabloid’s parent company of
political motives and arguing that his ownership of The Washington Post, with
its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” posture during President Trump’s first term,
had made him a target.
Today,
the talk is less about Mr. Bezos’ adversarial relationship with Mr. Trump and
more about his supposedly cozy one. After years of hostility — much of it tied
to Mr. Trump’s attacks on The Post — the temperature between the two men has
cooled. Mr. Bezos personally intervened to stop a planned endorsement of Kamala
Harris by the paper, according to newsroom employees. (He argued in a note to
readers that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an
election,” and “create a perception of bias.”) He then attended Mr. Trump’s
inauguration last year, seated front and center. Amazon paid roughly $40
million to license “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady — a move that
some critics saw as an attempt to curry favor with President Trump.
The
détente comes as Democrats have aggressively targeted Amazon’s market power,
and other tech titans have embraced the Trump presidency. Mr. Bezos’ former
wife, MacKenzie Scott, has given much of her fortune to liberal causes, but he
has long held broadly libertarian views. Lately, he seems more comfortable
expressing them. Last year, Mr. Bezos instructed The Post’s opinion pages to
advocate “personal liberties and free markets.”
When she
was married to the Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos
attended President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and she gave money to
Democratic candidates, including Ms. Harris in 2019 and Senator Cory Booker in
2018, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks political spending. When I
asked her opinion of Mr. Trump, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who is breezy and agile at
pivoting back to the fun topics, waved me off. “I am not talking politics,” she
said. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”
People
close to Mrs. Sánchez Bezos often argue that it’s not fair to criticize her for
her husband’s political and business decisions. The frequent refrain is, “What
does that have to do with Lauren?” But that is the downside to being a
conjoined organism to a master of the universe: It all has to do with you.
In
January, the couple made the couture rounds in Paris. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was
dripping in vintage Dior with fur and diamonds. She stepped out of a
chauffeured Mercedes in a blood-red Schiaparelli skirt suit alongside Anna
Wintour. The trip happened to coincide with an announcement that Amazon planned
to lay off 16,000 employees. It was a juxtaposition that some TikTok users
compared to “The Hunger Games.” (Mr. Bezos stepped down as chief executive of
Amazon in 2021, though he remains executive chairman and its largest individual
shareholder.)
A few
weeks later, The Post, which Mr. Bezos bought in 2013, laid off about a third
of its newsroom. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — and seemingly
every journalist with a social media account — criticized Mr. Bezos’ ownership,
accusing him of gutting the paper that broke the Watergate scandal. Chuck Todd,
the former NBC host, said Mr. Bezos was “leaning into the evil, rich-guy
stereotype.” Many saw the move as a deliberate effort to appease Mr. Trump. And
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was considered to be complicit. During Paris Fashion Week,
Blakely Neiman Thornton, an internet personality and fashion critic, called
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos “capitalism’s concubine” in a post.
The
constant criticism wears on her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “I can never imagine
writing something mean on somebody’s Instagram,” she added. “It would actually
break my heart. I want positive: You look great. You’re amazing. I want to just
give everyone flowers. Why wouldn’t you?” Recently, her eldest son, Nikko, whom
she shares with the former National Football League tight end Tony Gonzalez,
installed an app on her phone to block her from using social media during the
day.
When I
asked about the layoffs at The Post — the union implored its members to tag
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in a social media campaign protesting newsroom cuts — she
turned cautious again. “I was a journalist, and I know how important journalism
is,” she said. “But I don’t make those business decisions, so I really can’t
answer them.”
Several
friends of the couple told me the same thing: If they had been married back
then, Mr. Bezos never would have bought a newspaper. He would have bought an
N.F.L. team. Like a normal billionaire.
If Kate
Middleton Were a Kardashian
Another
day in January, I met Mrs. Sánchez Bezos at the Santa Monica Airport in
California, near where she keeps a sleek, black Bell 429 helicopter. If there’s
one thing she wants people to know, it’s that she is a helicopter pilot, a
rarity in the notoriously male-dominated industry. She and Mr. Bezos first fell
in love when she flew him around in a helicopter like this one. “I feel most
myself in the air,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “It’s like controlled excitement.”
(It’s also a bit of a press strategy for her: She took a Vogue reporter on a
trip like this one, too.)
The
daughter of middle-class Mexican American parents in Albuquerque, Mrs. Sánchez
Bezos always exhibited a driven, buzzing restlessness, which she now chalks up
in part to her A.D.H.D. diagnosis. When the Southwest Airlines flight attendant
dream died, she pivoted to broadcast journalism. “People are like, oh, what has
she ever done,” she said. “And it’s like, oh, my gosh, I’ve had an entire
career that I was super proud of.”
As a
co-anchor on “Good Day L.A.,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos went skydiving on camera. At
“Extra,” she interviewed Cher and Bill Clinton. She hosted the first season of
“So You Think You Can Dance” and auditioned twice to co-host “The View,” but
didn’t get the job. (“That was rough, by the way,” she said.)
In 2005,
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos married Mr. Whitesell, previously the executive chairman of
Endeavor, the sports and entertainment conglomerate. He’s something like the
Tom Brady of Hollywood agents, with a client list that has included Ben
Affleck, Matt Damon and Hugh Jackman.
In 2012,
at 42, she got the itch to fly, and later founded Black Ops Aviation, an aerial
production company. Friends say Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has always been savvy about
her image. She would urge the tabloids to cover her red-carpet appearances,
deftly turn on the charm for the paparazzi and reach out to trade reporters to
write about her helicopter production company.
The day
we met, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association asked her to speak to a
group of mostly Black and Latino high school students interested in careers in
aviation. She arrived in an S.U.V. with a small entourage, glammed down in a
ponytail, a brown leather bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses.
When she
works these nonprofit events, it’s a little like if Kate Middleton were a
Kardashian. She’s a big hugger, pulling teenagers in to ask their names and
what they’re studying. A pilot handed her a book he wrote, adding, “It’s
available on Amazon.” She held it up for the cameras. “Got to support the
family business!” she said.
It was an
overcast day, but Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was optimistic. “The clouds aren’t that
dense! We can cut right through them!” she said, settling into the buttery
leather pilot’s seat. She banked past the Hollywood sign and over verdant hills
dotted with mansions and tennis courts. “That’s Beverly Hills,” she said.
“Would you look at those homes!”
In May,
Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos will serve as honorary chairs of the Met Gala.
Amazon sponsored the event in 2012, and the couple attended it in 2024. But
serving as lead sponsors is a different animal, essentially anointing them
fashion royalty. The announcement of the sponsorship was met with abject horror
by fashion industry insiders, who said the couple had “hijacked” the gala.
Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos told me that Ms. Wintour had reached out directly to ask if the
couple would back the fund-raiser. “Anna called me, and I was like, ‘Anna
who?’” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos joked, then called it “such an honor.”
Ms.
Wintour said the gala this year required a high-octane chair. “Lauren is a
force,” she wrote in an email. “The Costume Institute’s exhibition this year is
an enormous, complicated project in a new gallery at the heart of the museum,
and I thought the gala needed that energy.” (When I asked Mrs. Sánchez Bezos
about rumors that she and her husband were buying Vogue’s parent company, Condé
Nast, she teased, “I wish!” She then said, “No.”)
Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos has appeared in Vogue twice, including a cover spread on her
wedding, and she recently enlisted stylist-to-the-stars Law Roach to help her
with her image in advance of the Met Gala. Ms. Wintour was once famously averse
to featuring large-busted women in the magazine, I pointed out. Mrs. Sánchez
Bezos shrugged. “Maybe she likes them now,” she said.
A lot of
the snark about her appearance and her clothes feels rooted in racial
stereotypes, she argued. “It’s the shape of my body,” she said. “Is someone
going to give me a gunnysack and ask me to put a belt on it and cinch it? I’m
Latin. I’m Latin. I’m Latin.”
That’s
not to say she isn’t aware of the backlash to her look. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos
thought she had dressed conservatively for Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, in
a white Alexander McQueen pantsuit. “I was super proud of myself,” she said.
When the event suddenly moved indoors, she removed her coat. The blazer opened,
revealing a lace bra. Since they were seated directly behind Mr. Trump, the bra
was in pretty much every photo of the event. “I get it,” she said. “No lace at
the White House. Noted.”
Can
Happiness Scale?
In
September, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos headed to the Winthrop STEM Elementary Magnet
School in New London, Conn. She had just signed on as a “literacy ambassador”
for Scholastic and would be reading to kindergartners from her first book, “The
Fly Who Flew to Space,” about Flynn, the dyslexic fly. The book is in some ways
autobiographical. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos struggled in school and always thought she
was dumb, until a college teacher recognized that she had dyslexia. “I grew up
literally thinking I was the stupidest person on the planet,” she told me. “I
got kicked off the cheerleading squad because I couldn’t even keep a 2.0 G.P.A.
Who can’t keep a 2.0?”
“I was
one bad decision away from something really bad, a bad life,” she said. (She’s
joked with friends that she could’ve wound up a stripper.) It wasn’t until she
met Mr. Bezos that she truly felt intelligent. “He literally tells me all the
time, ‘You’re one of the smartest women I know,’” she said.
Today,
she reads technical papers about the cost of nuclear and geothermal power as
part of her work at the Bezos Earth Fund. “She wants to have an opinion and
speak about these things intelligently,” said Tom Taylor, chief executive of
the fund and a longtime Amazon executive who is close to Mr. Bezos.
Last
year, Mr. Bezos tapped Mr. Taylor, who ran the Alexa division at Amazon, to
lead the fund, which operates less like a traditional nonprofit than an
extension of Mr. Bezos’ worldview: that invention and technological progress
can often lift more people than simply cutting a check. In addition to more
traditional climate initiatives, it is investing in satellite systems to detect
wildfires, deploying A.I. tools to Indigenous tribes for reforestation and to
Alaskan fishermen to monitor illegal fishing. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos recently
visited a remote island off Costa Rica to meet rangers who work to protect
hammerhead sharks and sea turtles.
The
nonprofit has so far distributed at least $2.4 billion in grants, making Mr.
Bezos “among the biggest climate philanthropists around,” said David Callahan,
author of “The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age.”
And yet,
he added, Mr. Bezos’ charitable work lags compared with his tiny cadre of
peers. “He’s a big philanthropist, just not relative to his fortune.”
And he is
frequently compared with his former wife, Ms. Scott, who has upended
traditional philanthropy, giving away roughly $26 billion of her fortune,
quietly and with few conditions.
Ms. Scott
seems to be following in the grand tradition of the American uber-rich who
burnished their reputations via noblesse oblige, established in our last Gilded
Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers. Their descendants have continued the
mission.
Mr. Bezos
and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos can seem more allied with the rising class of
billionaires who, frustrated with the glacial pace of nonprofits, want to
improve the world with privately funded ventures, like their space company or
their A.I. explorations. “So, 10,000 years ago, or whenever it was, somebody
invented the plow, and we all got richer,” Mr. Bezos said at a tech conference
last year.
In a
joint interview with Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in November 2022, Mr. Bezos said he
would give away a majority of his then-roughly $124 billion fortune. Today, he
has more than double that amount. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos would like to expand the
couple’s footprint, but emphasized a deliberate approach. “Philanthropy is a
job,” she said. “You have to vet everyone, make sure the money is being used in
the right way.”
The
couple’s charitable giving has been closely linked to their social and
celebrity ties. This summer, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, with the Earth Fund, and Mr.
DiCaprio’s Re:wild organization will announce a joint commitment to save
species near extinction. In 2021, Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos started the
Bezos Courage and Civility Award, giving José Andrés, Dolly Parton and Van
Jones each $100 million to grant to charities and nonprofits of their choosing.
Later, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ longtime friend Eva Longoria was given $50 million
for similar work. More recently, smaller, targeted grants have included $5
million to Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and prominent critic of
social media’s effect on young people.
“With
that kind of money, you can’t just sprinkle it around at galas,” said Mr.
Callahan, who also edits Inside Philanthropy.
This
tension may be at the heart of what unsettles some of Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’
critics. Fairly or not, she’s often compared with Ms. Scott — bookish, private
and almost defiantly out of the spotlight. Whereas Mrs. Sánchez Bezos embraces
philanthropy, but also the pleasure that comes with wealth — the visibility,
the proximity to power, the fashion, the fun.
She is
fluent in fame. But power is a whole other language, especially as one half of
a couple whose reach rivals that of a nation-state. She wants to spread
happiness into every room she enters, but happiness can’t scale. Happiness
can’t pay the rent.
Back at
the elementary school in Connecticut, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told the students
about going to space on Mr. Bezos’ private Blue Origin rocket. “I went to space
with Katy Perry,” she said. “Yes! How fun is that? It was like a girls’ trip to
space.” The flight was widely mocked as a “boondoggle,” an emblem of late-stage
“end times” excess.
Mrs.
Sánchez Bezos, however, does not traffic in cynicism. “It was the coolest thing
ever,” she told the students. A little boy raised his hand to ask if she’s ever
been to another planet.
“No,”
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos replied. “Sometimes it feels like I’m on another planet —
but no.”
June 14, 2025: A Dream Wedding for Jeff Bezos in Venice? No Way, Locals Say
A Dream
Wedding for Jeff Bezos in Venice? No Way, Locals Say
The lavish
nuptials, scheduled for this month, have raised the hackles of some residents
exasperated by their city becoming a playground for the rich.
Elisabetta
Povoledo
By
Elisabetta Povoledo
Reporting
from Venice
June 14,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/world/europe/venice-bezos-sanchez-wedding-amazon.html
If a bunch
of irate Venetians have their way, the star-studded dream wedding that Jeff
Bezos, the Amazon founder, and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, are planning in the
ancient city at the end of June could be a nightmare.
On Friday
evening, representatives of various citizens groups gathered in a square near
Rialto Bridge and vowed to organize a series of protests on June 26, 27 and 28,
when hundreds of guests are expected to descend on the lagoon city for the
lavish nuptials of Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sánchez, a journalist.
Though
details of the festivities have been wrapped in secrecy, “we have our moles,”
said Federica Toninello, a protest organizer, revealing that one of the venues
could be the The Misericordia, a former charity turned events hall. “Bezos will
never get to the Misericordia,” she vowed, urging the roughly 300 people
present to take a stand. “We will line the streets with our bodies, block the
canals with lifesavers, dinghies and our boats,” she said to loud applause.
She spoke
under a large banner that read: “No Space [an image of a spaceship] For Bezos,”
playing on his ownership of Blue Origin, the spaceflight venture. “We have to
block Bezos, we have to block this idea of this city” as a tourist haven that
has driven up housing costs so that most ordinary Venetians can no longer
afford to live here, she said.
Representatives
for Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sánchez did not respond to a request for comment.
Their
wedding coincides with peak season in Venice, as tens of thousands of visitors
arrive in the city daily, prompting City Hall to impose a controversial entry
fee on weekends and holidays. Protesters said they were also concerned that the
logistics of the wedding, including security for some top-tier guests, will
further disrupt the life of Venice’s dwindling resident population.
The guest
list is not public, but Vogue reported that it could include Katy Perry, some
of the Kardashians and Eva Longoria, all friends of the bride-to-be. And TMZ
reported that Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King had been invited.
Reported
estimates of what the wedding might cost range from as low as 10 million euros
to as high as $21.5 million. Part of that cost involves taking a fleet of water
taxis out of circulation.
One taxi
driver who will be involved in transporting guests for the wedding said he had
been booked to be on call from June 25 to June 30.
City hall
officials said that only 30 of the city’s 280 water taxis had been booked, and
that as Venice was accustomed to hosting major events, citizens would not be
inconvenienced. More than 600 couples marry each year in Venice, “recognized as
a city of love on an international level,” and this was just one wedding more,
the statement said.
Some
Venetians think it’s one wedding too many. On Thursday, activists unfurled a
large banner with a bold red X over Mr. Bezos’ name from the steeple of the
Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island that will be another of the
Bezos-Sánchez wedding venues.
“Let’s make
sure that Venice is not remembered as a postcard venue where Bezos had his
wedding but as the city that did not bend to oligarchs,” said Na Haby Stella
Faye, another protester. “We have a chance to disrupt a ten million dollar
wedding — let’s do it.”
Elisabetta
Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the
culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
June 25, 2025: The Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky
Opinion
Guest
Essay
The
Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky
June 25,
2025
By Amy
Odell
Ms. Odell
is the author of “Anna: The Biography.”
Some of
the world’s richest people are gathering for the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the
world’s third-richest man, in one of the world’s most touristy cities, Venice,
and it’s easy to ask: What happened to understatement and restraint? In the
run-up to the wedding, Mr. Bezos was photographed by paparazzi on the deck of
his yacht with his intended, Lauren Sánchez, both in their swimsuits,
frolicking in foam like a couple of college kids on spring break. Meanwhile,
missiles and bombs have been falling just a few time zones away.
Not so
long ago, members of high society were fixated on trying to low-key their way
out of the perils of income inequality. Minimalism and quiet luxury were in
vogue. But in the wake of President Trump’s second election, it’s the luxe life
at full volume. He gilded the White House, turning it into a rococo Liberace
lair. Swaggy and braggy have replaced stealth wealth. Flaunting it is in. For
women, that means sequins, diamonds, tight silhouettes and big hair. TikTok’s
latest star, Becca Bloom, has drawn millions of fans by regularly sharing
videos of her lavish jewelry and Hermès shopping hauls. Even the bandage dress
is trending again. The breast implant business just keeps getting bigger and is
expected to reach $4.6 billion by 2030, up from nearly $3 billion in 2024.
For men,
it means a hypermasculine look: muscles and slicked-back hair; tight, tailored
suits with big Windsor knots.
And now
there are the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials, the most internationally notable
ruling-class wedding since the Ambani-Merchant union last year in India. It’s
already drawn protesters determined to make Venice the city “that did not bend
to oligarchs.” (The couple had to move their main reception to a new location
to avoid activists who threatened to fill the canals with inflatable
crocodiles.) Since news of Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sánchez’s relationship broke in a
tabloid scandal in early 2019, Ms. Sánchez has become an object of public
fascination, her every movement parsed by tabloids and gossipmongers. With this
much attention, she’s become one of the most visible women on (or off, as it
may be) the planet, and therefore a significant fashion influencer.
Her
fiancé, who shed his nerdy image and baggy office clothes for a
personal-trained body, tight polo shirts and aviators, has already been
anointed an unlikely style icon. Like the MAGA bros who favor traditional
suiting and clean-shaven faces, his athleisure emphasizes his power, not
cutting-edge fashion sense.
Ms.
Sánchez, too, dresses to emphasize her clout. She’s long preferred belts with
noticeable-from-a-distance hardware, embellished dresses, stiletto heels,
low-cut necklines, high-cut hemlines and big jewelry. Her engagement ring is
thought to be in the vicinity of 30 carats and to have cost somewhere between
$3 million and $5 million, but it was easily dwarfed by the diamond-encrusted
choker she wore to a gala in Cannes recently, with a stone that looked to be
the size of a bike reflector. There was nothing low-key about her recent
flaunty Paris bachelorette party, which was attended by stars such as Kim
Kardashian and Kris Jenner, and included a visit to the Hermès store with
executives from the brand.
The
luxury industry — which faces its first slowdown in 15 years, according to a
recent study — has economic interest in embracing Ms. Sánchez, who represents
the wealthy Very Important Clients who make up 2 percent of luxury customers
and 40 percent of sales. “The customer driving global luxury is quite tacky in
a lot of cases, and no one really admits it,” an unnamed fashion investor told
The Cut for a 2024 article about this crucial group of shoppers. V.I.C.s are
always looking for a reason to get decked out in their designer finest, social
norms and sensitivities be damned, and Ms. Sánchez seems to embody the idea
that if you’re rich enough, you may as well.
What has
fascinated the public about Ms. Sánchez, like any number of women who personify
a certain period, is how she puts herself together. Seemingly unafraid to flout
sartorial norms, she attended a state dinner at the White House in 2024 wearing
a gown with a sheer lace corseted bodice, causing People to wonder if the dress
broke “White House protocol.” She later attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration with
what looked like lingerie peeking out of her white blazer, leaving a Vogue
headline to note that she “forgoes inauguration style codes.” She never
conformed to the look of oversize minimalism popularized in the 2010s by the
designer Phoebe Philo for Céline, still revered by elite crowds who live in
places like Manhattan and Montecito, Calif., and fancy themselves practitioners
of good taste.
Ms.
Sánchez’s journey from the tabloids to the pages of Vogue, which did a splashy
feature on her in its December 2023 issue, has fascinated and repelled
onlookers, the same way Ms. Kardashian’s entree to the magazine — and therefore
to the fashion world — did when she landed on its cover for the first time in
April 2014, pegged to her marriage to Kanye West. Ms. Kardashian had been a
tabloid star for many years, but until that point, Vogue hadn’t been featuring
her much.
After the
cover dropped, people threatened to cancel their subscriptions. But it was a
provocation worth making, Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, later said. “I
was told that it was trashy, that it was beneath us, what was Vogue coming to?”
she recalled. “We were trying to respond to what we saw — a couple being [an]
undeniable force in our culture, and they were part of the conversation at that
time.” The same could be said about Ms. Sánchez and Mr. Bezos now.
Unsurprisingly, Vogue has reportedly been talking with the couple about an
exclusive.
Ms.
Sánchez brings to mind another unlikely Vogue subject: Ivana Trump. Ms. Wintour
gave her a cover in 1990, shortly before her divorce from Mr. Trump, after
worrying, as I reported in a biography of Ms. Wintour, that she was “too
tacky.” Around the time the cover came out, Ms. Trump was criticized for
“dressing like a Christmas tree.” The issue’s newsstand sales of 750,000 copies
easily justified Ms. Wintour’s decision.
As much
as those with more understated taste might turn up their noses at the crassness
of the Bezos-Sánchez wedding’s display, tacky is very clearly carrying the day.
Maybe hating on tacky oligarchs is itself just elitist. It’s doubtful anyone
attending the wedding cares very much what those of us who weren’t invited
think, anyway.
