Who Is Katie Miller?
It seems like it was just yesterday Katie Miller had reportedly left her White House gig to work full-time for Elon Musk, putting her at the center of the big beautiful blowout between the president and his former “First Buddy.” Now, the wife of Stephen Miller appears to have made another career pivot, announcing on X on Thursday that she’s done working full-time for Musk and is launching The Katie Miller Show, a weekly podcast for conservative women who apparently don’t have enough online spaces to have “honest conversations” and “gossip about what’s going on in the world, from our perspective.” This probably leaves you with some questions like Wait, yet another podcast for conservative women? Also, Someone married Stephen Miller? And finally, Why? Well, she did, and now she appears to have gone from die-hard Trump devotee to full-time Musk staffer to the host of her own show. That’s just how the MAGA girlboss pipeline goes! Here’s her deal.
She’s been around since Trump 1.0.
A University of Florida graduate, Katie Miller got a master’s in public administration from George Washington University. During the first Trump administration, she served as the president’s special assistant as well as press secretary to then-Vice-President Mike Pence. Miller — née Waldman — also worked as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security under former secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who infamously justified separating children from their parents at the border as part of the Trump 1.0 “zero tolerance” immigration policy. At the time, Miller’s soon-to-be husband Stephen — then a senior White House adviser and immigration hardliner — served as a major proponent of the policy, which separated over 5,000 children from their families without so much as a tracking process or records to help them reunite. Stephen also pushed for more draconian policies that would have separated around 25,000 more, including families in the middle of civil court proceedings and those legally seeking asylum at ports of entry. I guess that really did it for Katie.
She married Stephen Miller at a Trump hotel.
In 2020, toward the end of her first White House stint, Katie and Stephen Miller got married. The couple apparently knew each other through their work but didn’t meet in person until friends introduced them in 2018. According to the New York Times, they got married at (where else?!) the Trump Hotel in Washington, where a senior adviser to David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, officiated.
DHS once sent her to the border to make her more compassionate to family separation, but she said it “didn’t work.”
When it comes to immigration policies, it seems Miller is just as cruel as her husband. In a conversation with journalist Jacob Soboroff, who documented the tragic system behind the separation of families at the U.S-Mexico border in his 2020 best seller Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Miller said her family and colleagues told her she’d “think about the separations differently” when she had kids. “But I don’t think so,” Miller is quoted as saying. By her own account, the Department of Homeland Security once sent her to the border “to see the separations for myself — to try to make me more compassionate — but it didn’t work.” Quite the flex.
She was one of Trump’s first picks for the DOGE panel, but left to work “full time” for Musk.
Last December, Trump named Miller as one of his first picks to join Musk’s DOGE advisory board, where she served as a “Special Government Employee,” a weird little designation that allows private-sector figures to also work for the federal government in a limited capacity. (While she did that, her husband was busy egging on ICE to amp up immigrant arrests.) Anyway, it sounds like Miller, who was a spokesperson for DOGE, got along pretty well with Musk — shortly after he confirmed that his own time as a special government employee has come to an end, CNN reported that she had left her White House gig to work “full time” with him as a communications adviser. Apparently, part of her job was arranging interviews for Musk “unrelated to his time in government.”
Wait, were Musk and the Millers a throuple?
Sorry to put the image in your head, but the internet briefly teemed with (unsubstantiated and unconfirmed) rumors that Musk and the Millers were part of a consensual throuple that apparently soured when Katie left her White House position and turned her X banner into a picture of a SpaceX rocket taking off into the ether. These days, it’s an ocean sunset with strong stock-photo undertones. Do with that what you will.
Musk, Trump, and Stephen Miller were all beefing on main.
Miller’s White House exodus seems to have added fuel to Trump and Musk’s Big Beautiful Breakup, which played out on X and Truth Social in early June, a rare treat for the masses. Musk’s exit came shortly after he took aim at Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — a tax-reform package designed to provide savings to the rich and allocate more money to military and immigration enforcement at the expense of health, nutrition, education, and clean-energy programs. Musk took issue with the legislation, which he saw as undermining DOGE and increasing the budget deficit.
While Trump and Musk’s chummy friendship unraveled, Stephen Miller inserted himself into the fray as a Trump stan. After Musk’s first swipe at the legislation, Stephen appeared to fire back on X, where he didn’t name Musk but asserted DOGE cuts weren’t related to the spending bill and maintained that One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law last month, will actually reduce the deficit. (Never mind the fact that it’s gutting health care for millions of vulnerable Americans and is likely to make the cost of living worse, all while dishing up handsome tax cuts to the wealthy).
The Millers put up a united front.
After reports of her departure broke, Katie left a conspicuous heart emoji on a screenshot of an X post that said, “Who else thinks Stephen Miller is awesome!!? Reply with a ❤️!!”
Stephen projected similar messaging — in a Fox News interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, earlier this summer, he broke his silence on his family life and doubled down on his and his wife’s love for the president. Recalling the first time he and Katie met when she was the communications director at the Department of Homeland Security, he said the relationship was “very on brand, because we were on conference calls every day on border security.” (Interesting pillow talk, for sure.) He also told Lara Trump that he has a photo of Donald Trump with his daughter as an infant and that she’s now “always desperate for any chance to get face time with the president,” who he called a “child whisperer” and a “kid magnet.” Does he think this sounds reassuring?
And now, apparently, Katie is podcasting from her living room.
On Thursday, Miller, dressed in jeans and a white tank, posted a video welcoming viewers to her weekly podcast and her living room. Her launch announcement sounds like a cross between a mommy blog and a ransom note: “There isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online. There isn’t a place for a mom like me, mom of three young kids, 4, 3, and almost 2, and a wife, and trying to do a career, eat healthy, work out— there isn’t a place for a mom like me,” says Miller, who then rattled off her CV and confirmed she’s recently concluded “my time working full-time for Elon Musk.”
Per Axios, the podcast launches Monday, and Miller hopes Musk will be a listener and even, maybe, a guest. I wish I could tell you more about what she’ll discuss, but even Miller doesn’t seem to have it all hashed out. “This is life, about women, for women — with men, too! — talking about what matters to women, and that isn’t just what everyone considers a woman’s issue,” she said. “Because what’s a woman’s issue? I have yet to find out.” Hmmm, I sure can think of a few.
This post has been updated.
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