PEACEMAKER
Will society queen Hilary Ross bridge fractious gap in Trump’s D.C.?
Every presidential administration needs a grande dame to smooth relations between rival factions and serve as a bridge to society. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sally Quinn, then married to Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, was known for the high-IQ salons held at their Georgetown townhouse. Roughly a decade later, Georgette Mosbacher, a cosmetics executive and philanthropist, became Washington’s hostess supreme as a result of the round-table dinner parties she hosted with her thenhusband, the oil tycoon turned commerce secretary Robert A. Mosbacher.
Who will take on that important but unofficial role under President Donald Trump? A strong candidate is Hilary Geary Ross, 66, a fixture of Palm Beach and New York societ y and wife of the 79-year-old multibillionaire investor and industrialist Wilbur L. Ross Jr., who is Trump’s pick for commerce secretary.
C-SPAN cameras captured Ross as she sat behind her husband when he testified before Congress on Jan. 18. At one point she had a laugh with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. On Jan. 27, Daily Mail photographers on a stakeout caught the arrival of Ross and her husband as they made their way into a Shabbat dinner held at the Washington home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
As Ross prepares to become a significant social presence in the capital, she is overseeing the remodeling of a 10,000-squarefoot mansion, complete with a movie theater and staff quarters, on a portion of Woodland Avenue known as “billionaires’ row” in the city’s Massachusetts Heights enclave. The couple purchased the home not long after the election, for a reported $10 million.
Given Trump’s bumpy start in the Oval Office and his unpopularity even among certain Republicans, Ross will face the challenge of bringing together the president’s ardent supporters, the Never Trump-ers and the pragmatic insiders who oil the machinery of government.
A case in point: S. Christopher Meigher III, the publisher of Quest
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