14 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019
“When people want to be mean, they’ll
just make fun of my appearance because
that’s the petty default that people have,”
she said of the population of trolls that dis-
covered her on social media after she
appeared on CNN to weigh in on the gov-
ernment shutdown earlier this year. “They
usually tend to complain about my femi-
nine anatomy.” She added, “The Demo-
crats started attacking my breasts, and the
Republicans were defending them, and
then I thought to myself, I didn’t realize
that my breasts were so partisan.”
Recently, all of this has resulted in more
attention. Earlier this month, the New York
Post’s Jon Levine called Catsimatidis, a prin-
cipal of her family’s company who studied
business as an NYU undergrad, “a rising
GOP star.” In the photos that ran alongside
the item, she wore a red bikini and wedges
on a rooftop, a red bodycon dress and
Louboutins perched near the window of a
conference room, and a flag-printed bikini
standing in front of a large grill cooking
hunks of meat. Never passing up an oppor-
tunity to run half-naked photos of a poten-
tially controversial woman, the Daily Mail
aggregated the item along with a slideshow
of 17 images.
But the publicity is a reintroduction to the
tabloidosphere for Catsimatidis. In 2011, she
first gained curiosity status after her mar-
riage to Richard Nixon’s grandson, Christo-
pher Nixon Cox. Or, to be precise, after the
New York Times “Vows” column about the
wedding, which disclosed that the couple
had met in 2008, when the bride was a
17-year-old senior (“five days shy of her 18th
birthday,” as the article put it) at the Hewitt
School, on the Upper East Side, and the
bridegroom was a 29-year-old staffer on
John McCain’s presidential campaign visit-
ing the high school to appear on a debate
panel. Catsimatidis filed for divorce a fewyears later, in 2014, but she doesn’t regret
the flashy event and says she and Cox remain
good friends. “We had so many people to
celebrate with us. Hillary Clinton was at my
wedding. We had Henry Kissinger, we had
Rudy Giuliani, we had Chuck Schumer. It
was a beautiful, bipartisan wedding—every-
one had an amazing time.” (Trump once told
the couple he persuaded her father to pay for
the expensive affair.)
Obviously, America is not a beautiful,
bipartisan place. The fact that Catsimati-
dis goes to Mar-a-Lago or the White
House Christmas party is likely enough to
make her seem unacceptable to many crit-
ics of the president. But it’s a selling point
to the people who like him and who view
people of his same (alleged) socioeconomic
class aspirationally. Catsimatidis might be
what happens when an Ivanka Trump
merges with a Sarah Palin—off-putting to
you, perhaps, but irresistible to a certain
type of Fox News devotee.
Whether she becomes a political celeb-
rity nationwide may depend on how well
she can boost the Republican Party in
overwhelmingly Democratic Manhattan.
Catsimatidis said the borough’s eight-to-
one ratio against her interests doesn’t
bother her too much, but she was fright-
ened when party headquarters was van-
dalized by antifa. “They threw bricks at
the windows and spray-painted our
doors.” She’s soldiered on, going about the
business of attending the odd fund-raiser,
finding people willing to run, and getting
them on the ballot.
Overall, she doesn’t think the city is
entirely unwelcoming to her worldview,
and she sees her job, in part, as reflecting
what her constituents want as much as
what she personally believes. She openly
supports LGBTQ rights and—with some
trepidation—the right to an abortion.
“Do I have to answer that?” she said
when I asked if she’s pro-choice. “My
belief is, I’m pro-life, but at the same
time, as Manhattan GOP chair, I’m doing
my best to fulfill the role that represents
our Manhattan Republican Party, and
our Manhattan Republican Party is
pro-choice, all of our candidates are pro-
choice, all of our candidates are pro–gay
marriage, all of our candidates are very
socially liberal. So I feel like I’m acting in
the interest of what our constituency is.
That’s what I’m going to do.”
Still, some parts of the city—like the
room at Avra Madison—feel safer than
others. “The Upper East Side is very wel-
coming and Republican,” Catsimatidis
said. “But if you go downtown, say, where
the registration is seven-to-one, then
people get a little bit more hostile.” ■“ I looked up
what it meant to
be a Republican,
and I was like,
‘Of course I’m
a Republican!’ ”
intelligencer
the Cheers-ian universe of the Establish-
ment. At one point during our dinner, she
looked up from her lobster to squint across
the football field of a dining room. “I think
that’s my brother!” she said, gesturing
toward a table in the distance. It was.
Catsimatidis, who is 29, said she became
a Republican as soon as she learned what it
meant. In 2009, her father, supermarket
billionaire–slash–bipartisan megadonor
John Catsimatidis, first explored running
for the party’s nomination for mayor of New
York City. (He ultimately withdrew.) She’d
been under the impression, all her life, that
he was a Democrat because of the close rela-
tionship the Catsimatidis family had with
the Clintons. “I still have great admiration
for them, just ’cause I’ve known them since
I was 2 years old,” she told me. So his deci-
sion left her “confused,” she said. “I looked
up what it meant to be a Republican, and I
saw that being a Republican stood for free-
dom and opportunity for all, and I was like,
Of course I’m a Republican!” This definition
struck me as simplistic to the point of being
meaningless. Nevertheless, she said the
message appealed to her enough to make
her a convert. “To me it just made more
sense,” said Catsimatidis, who went on to
lead the NYU College Republicans. “It’s just
your definition of what you believe is
inequality: Do you believe in equal opportu-
nity or equal outcomes? And to me, I believe
in equal opportunity.”
When we sat down, I realized that I’d
half-expected the chair of the Manhattan
Republican Party to show up for dinner at
Avra Madison wearing an American-flag-
printed string bikini and maga hat. The
bikini is to A.J., as she calls herself, what the
extra-long necktie is to Donald Trump or
the oversize flip phone was to Barbie—an
essential accessory to an artifice she has dili-
gently perfected. On Instagram, where she’s
accumulated close to 50,000 followers,
she’s often posed in South Beach or the
Hamptons or Mykonos, displaying a kind of
camp, bro-friendly, self-aware sexuality:
part Betty Boop, part Paris Hilton, with the
mind-set of the comments section on the
blog Barstool Sports or male-centric web-
site the Chive.
In the photo that perhaps best captures
her essence, she holds a small American flag
and is wearing a maga hat and fire-engine-
red bikini. “Happy #independenceday
everyone,” reads the caption. “Today I am
feeling grateful that I get to live in America,
the greatest country in the world, and
thankful for those who fought to defend my
country and my freedom! .” I n
another, she’s on her knees, playing in sand.
“I’m just going to build the wall myself,” she
wrote. “ .”