The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 17NEWS
a flight of stairs from the
street with bare brick walls, a
low ceiling and little booths
screened with bead curtains.
Meaghan Dorman, who
runs the bar and several
others in New York, thinks
the martini craze is another
side-effect of the pandemic
when “everything was
happening at home and there
is no real break in your day.
Your office goes into your
kitchen and you are
answering calls at 9pm”. If
you drink a martini —
classically an ice-cold blend
of gin (or vodka), dry
vermouth and perhaps a flick
of bitters — it’s all over, she
says.
Don Spiro, 53, who works
in film and television and
organises jazz age-style nights
at a bar on the Lower East
Side, agrees that the
pandemic played its part.
“Some people got into baking
bread, but there were a lot of
cocktail people. One of the
simplest is a martini. People
got really into making
martinis,” he says.
Then they were allowedof the great characters of the
city’s cocktail scene, a chap
with a flat cap and a coiled
moustache who builds pop-
up speakeasies in building
sites and water towers and
the turrets of bridges. He goes
by ND Austin, and he’s
waiting at the bar of an Italian
restaurant in Gramercy,
drinking a martini with gin,
vodka and a basil wine. “It’s
like you are in an Italian herb
garden,” he says.
He gestures at his martini
glass. “It’s a triangle of liquid
balanced on its point. It’s a
naturally unstable shape, it’s
the opposite of a beer stein,”
he says. “As a consequence of
that, it forces you to be
present... And that
togetherness is one of the
biggest things we are missing
after the pandemic.”
He adds: “I don’t think it’s
necessarily any better than
any other drink, but martinis
are an especially focused
drink.
“The first sip of a really
good martini makes you
forget everything that came
before that moment.”At the end of a bar in lower
Manhattan an actress and
singer named Amber Hurst
Martin is puzzling over a new
phenomenon in the social life
of the city.
“The martini wave,” she
says. “It’s hard to explain it.”
For a moment I think she
means a hand signal that you
flash to other martini
drinkers, like a gang sign. Or a
wobbling of the palm,
indicating that you’ve had
one too many.
But she means a wave of
martini drinking, crashing
over New York. The drink of
business lunches, the drink of
Mad Men, the drink that put
Dorothy Parker under the
table: it is back.
Martin has always been a
martini drinker. It marked
her out. Now “everyone has a
martini,” she says. “When I’m
chatting with other actresses
in the dressing room, I’m like,
‘Oh, I need a martini’. They
are like, ‘Girl, me too.’”
We’re at a place called
Dear Irving, a cocktail bar upWill Pavia New YorkOn the afternoon of Good Friday, just as
he was packing up for the weekend, the
writer JD Vance finally received the good
news he’d been waiting on for months:
Donald Trump would endorse his
campaign to become Ohio’s Republican
candidate for Senate.
Winning Trump’s approval set the seal
on the resurrection of Vance, the author
of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy,
from also-ran to his party’s hot favourite
to contest the prized seat.
“Everybody counted the hillbilly out
when they really shouldn’t have done,”
said one person close to the Vance cam-
paign. “They thought we were dead.”
In March, Vance was languishing in
third place on a meagre 11 per cent. But a
recent Fox News poll put him five points
clear, on 23 per cent, and the nomination
is now his to lose come election day on
Tuesday. A win would catapult him into
the November midterm elections.
“The endorsement was rocket fuel,”
said the person close to the campaign. “We
noticed an immediate uptick in donations,
polling numbers and enthusiasm. The
crowds at our town halls started explod-
ing. It’s clear to us that Trump’s is the most
powerful endorsement in politics.”
For Vance, the endorsement set the
seal on a journey from strident Trump
critic to committed “Save America” can-
didate. Back in 2016, the 37-year-old
former marine turned venture capitalist
called Trump an “idiot”, “noxious” and
“reprehensible” and considered “that he
might be America’s Hitler”. Now he is
firmly in Trump’s corner, his conversion
yet more evidence of the transformation
Trump has wrought in Republican poli-
tics.
The Vance endorsement is a promi-
nent part of the former president’s
unprecedented intervention in the pri-
mary elections. The king has become a
kingmaker, intervening in races all over
the country like no president or former
president before. If it works, he is set fair
to run for president again. If it flops, the
limits of his influence will be exposed and
his power may start to wane.
This is not Trump’s first attempt at
pulling the strings of party politics. Dur-
ing his presidency he had a mixed record
backing candidates. Successes included
Ron DeSantis, who won the governorship
of Florida in 2018 and has become popu-
lar enough to rival Trump. Less auspi-
ciously, in Alabama in 2017 he backed Roy
Moore, who was accused of molesting
teenage girls and lost in spectacular fash-
ion. “My endorsement means more than
any endorsement that has ever been
given by anybody,” Trump said that year.
This time around, from the splendour
of his Mar-a-Lago exile, Trump has
handed out more than 120 prized
endorsements — which come with a mes-
sage of support and a $5,000 cheque —
like a mafia don on the day of his daugh-
ter’s wedding. Hundreds of candidates
for offices great and small, from aspiring
state attorney generals to would-be sena-
tors, have made the pilgrimage to Palm
Beach to kiss the ring, allowing Trump to
reprise his role from The Apprentice,
giving an imperial thumbs-up or down.
Particular favour is often shown to
candidates who choose to hold fundrais-
ing events at Trump’s private Florida
club. “I don’t know that anybody has ever
tried to throw their weight around likeTrump has,” said Glen Bolger, a Republi-
can pollster. “He’s a looming presence in
almost every race.”
What is Trump’s game? Democrats
fear he is attempting to fill elected offices
with those who support — or at least pay
fealty to — his obsession with his 2020
election defeat being fraudulent. They
attribute this to his healthy appetite for
revenge, but also sense an attempt to
stack the party with politicians who will
support him if he tries to overturn
another election result in 2024.
In Georgia, Trump pushed former sen-
ator David Perdue to run in the primary
against the state’s Republican governor
Brian Kemp, who has earned his eternal
enmity for not backing Trump’s attempts
to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in- Perdue was reluctant but Trump
won him round on the golf course.
Josh GlancyIn Michigan, Trump-backed candi-
dates for secretary of state and attorney-
general have already prevailed in the pri-
maries. Kristina Karamo and Matt
DePerno have both been vocal support-
ers of Trump’s election fraud claims.
Another obsession is unseating his
most prominent critic in the Republican
Party, Liz Cheney, the daughter of the
former vice-president. A congress-
woman in Wyoming, she has been stri-
dent in her criticism of his fraud allega-
tions and the Capitol riots last January.
Trump has backed her primary chal-
lenger Harriet Hageman and limited poll-
ing suggests she now has a healthy lead.
In 2016, Hageman called Cheney a “cour-
ageous, constitutional conservative” and
labelled Trump “racist and xenophobic”.
Now she describes Trump as “the great-
est president of my lifetime” and claimsCheney “betrayed Wyoming, betrayed
this country and she betrayed me”.
Trump also enjoys the power — and
money — that his hold over Republican
voters provides. Because of his grassroots
support, Trump continues to outperform
his own party on fundraising: he began
2022 with $122 million in his political war
chest, more than double the amount held
by the Republican National Committee.
Perhaps most importantly, the indica-
tions are that he is planning to run for
president again, and is convinced that he
can comfortably defeat either Joe Biden
or vice-president Kamala Harris. Playing
kingmaker helps demonstrate his endur-
ing power, while also building a network
of supporters and supplicants.
“I think he very clearly wants to lay
down the marker that he is the power in
the Republican Party,” said one person in
Trump’s orbit.
As Biden struggles with rampant infla-
tion, illegal immigration and general
pandemic-era malaise, Trump has been
warming to his task. In an interview on
Piers Morgan’s new TalkTV show, Trump
was asked if he plans to run. He replied:
“For reasons of campaign finance and
everything, I’m not allowed to say, but let
me just say this: I think a lot of people are
going to be very happy. I love our coun-
try, our country is going to hell, but I
think people are going to be happy.”
With Elon Musk’s pro-free-speech
takeover of Twitter seemingly going
ahead, Trump also faces the happy
prospect of having his favourite mega-
phone restored in time to run in 2024.
But the kingmaker strategy is not with-
out its pitfalls. Some of his picks are fal-
tering, exposing the limits of his power.
So desperate is Trump to unseat Brian
Kemp in Georgia that he authorised a
$500,000 cheque from his political
action committee to help David Perdue.
But a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution
poll gave Kemp a 26-point lead.
In Pennsylvania, Trump is backing the
TV personality Dr Mehmet Oz against
David McCormick, but the pair are neck
and neck. In Alabama, Trump took the
outlandish step of withdrawing his
endorsement of Mo Brooks, slamming
the formerly loyal congressman as
“woke” after he expressed doubt about
the claims of election fraud.
“It’s undoubtedly a high-risk strategy,”
said Luke Thompson, a Republican con-
sultant who is working with a fundraising
committee backing Vance in Ohio. “It’s
high risk, but also high reward.”
Others point out that while Trump
may still be beloved by loyalists, voters in
the country at large are more ambivalent.
“Swing voters who decide elections are
looking forward, not looking to the past,”
said Bolger. “If Trump obsesses on 2020
and so-called election fraud, they’re
going to say ‘that’s old news’.”
There are also indications that some
might prefer a fresher face come 2024. In
a recent survey by the Associated Press,
44 per cent of Republicans said they
didn’t want Trump to run for president
again. Some are now looking to DeSantis
as a potential Trump 2.0 candidate.
“Trump still has a very strong image
with Republican voters,” said Bolger. “But
there is also a growing sense that it’s time
to fight the next battle. Presidential elec-
tions are about the future, not the past.”
Twitter Town’s new sheriff should be
worried, News Review, page 22Trump at a “Save America” rally in Ohio last week, and in an interview with
Piers Morgan on TalkTV, where he claimed his country was going to hellDAVID MAXWELL/EPAactress, at Dear Irving. “I love
an espresso martini, love it,”
she says. “But it’s a delicacy.
It’s one and done. I was at a
place the other day in the
West Village, and there were
ten finance industry bros in
there, and they were ordering
five or six rounds of espresso
martini, which is hard on the
bar tender.”
Eventually, the bar
announced, implausibly, that
they had run out. But she felt
the men were breaking
martini etiquette. “You have
one,” she says. “Not 12.”
At the next bar I’m let into,
a legal clerk named David
Kim, 36, is drinking a Gibson
martini (the onion one) with
Derek Mosher, 45, who works
in fashion, who is more of an
olive man, and Mosher’s
fiancée, Sophia, who never
got round to telling me her
preferred garnish.
Mosher says martinis fell
from favour as they were
served in ever more elaborate
and fruity flavours, until they
were, essentially, “a Slurpee
that gets you drunk”.
I’ve arranged to meet oneout again. New York
Magazine, which monitors
slight alterations in the
drinking habits of the city the
way the Weather Channel
covers hurricanes, quoted
Toby Cecchini, a Brooklyn
bar owner, who was
befuddled to see “these kids
hammering martinis”.
Suddenly “the martini was
wiping everything out. I was
like, ‘Oh my God, we did 71
martinis last night?... I
recently turned to my
business partner and was
like, ‘I guess we’re just a
martini bar now’.”
Before the pandemic
people were drinking hard
seltzer: fizzy water with
alcohol, getting drunk by
degrees, with no added sugar.
Perhaps they still are.
But after the pandemic,
the martini became almost a
declaration of freedom. In a
bar one recent evening on the
Hudson, “people were
ordering it by the pitcher,”
says Kevin C Fitzpatrick,
author of Under the Table: A
Dorothy Parker Cocktail
Guide. Parker didn’t actuallylike gin, he says. But she is
now firmly connected to the
martini thanks to her poem:
“I like to have a martini / Two
at the very most / Three, I’m
under the table / Four, I’m
under the host.”
Fitzpatrick, 55, thinks the
pitcher drinkers, a crowd of
twenty-somethings at the
next table, were after
something “that seems
subtle, that’s classy... and
it’s going to do the job very
fast.” Also, “it looks good
on Instagram. The
glass is such a
classic shape: it
screams at you
that I’m having a
good time”.
There are arguments over
the best kind of olives and for
or against a twist of lemon, or
a pickled onion, as a garnish.
There’s a separate
controversy over the espresso
martini, which is also in
vogue. “It’s making me so
mad,” says Martin, theEven one-time enemies bend the
knee before kingmaker Trump
Republicans hoping for election know that the endorsement of the former president can be ‘rocket fuel’ for their campaigns
New wave of martini drinkers putting the Mad Men back into Manhattan
The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 17WORLD NEWS
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