She’s Married to the Architect of Trump’s Darkest Policies. She Wants America to Love Her. It’s Not Going Well.

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When I started to listen to the much-hyped new podcast from Katie Miller, I’d hoped to learn something, anything, to justify the many irreplaceable hours of my life I had already committed to it. I wanted a salacious tidbit or quote from one of the nearly 20 episodes that have dropped since August. I wanted moments that might help me understand the kind of person who would be married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of many of the Trump administration’s harshest and darkest policies.

I did not get any of these things. The podcast, I’m afraid, is eye-wateringly boring—void of a single revelatory moment. House Speaker Mike Johnson is asked why he recently changed his style of glasses. Vice President J.D. Vance is asked to settle a debate as to whether a hot dog can be considered a sandwich. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, appearing alongside his wife, is asked whether he prefers drumsticks, flats, or boneless wings. Sen. Katie Britt is asked how she passes time on airplanes. (Spoiler: she works.) And on it goes with Elon Musk, with “MAHA” influencer Vani Hari aka “Food Babe,” with actress Cheryl Hines, who is married to RFK Jr., and even with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Miller has access to a who’s who of high-profile MAGA figures, and she uses that time to ask them the most banal questions imaginable.

So that’s it? Skip the podcast and close this tab? Not so fast.

Yes, the podcast is dull in the extreme, and it seems to hinge in part on a bizarre assumption that the public is desperate for an inside glimpse of these people’s lives, in the vein of “Stars: They’re just like us.” But there’s something fascinating about it too: a bigger project with massive political and cultural ambitions, and one that we can’t afford to ignore. And the key to understanding that project is understanding Miller herself—where she came from and where she wants to go. In between listening to episodes of the show, I was talking to people who knew Miller growing up in Florida, and that’s when it all started to make more sense.

At a time when the military is bombing Venezuelan boats, National Guard troops are patrolling the streets of Washington, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are snatching parents off the streets in front of their children, Miller’s podcast—and her persona—is aimed at adding a patina of softness over a hard-right policy agenda. Surely the administration could not be as extreme or evil or fascist as its critics say if its members are chatting casually about raising their own children and picking new eyewear. The obvious audience for the podcast is white women, considered a swing demographic. (They favored Donald Trump by 4 points in 2024, according to Pew research, while white men went for Trump over Kamala Harris by a full 20 points. The divide is even larger among young women: Miller shared a graphic on her X account showing the widening partisan gulf between young men and women. “We aren’t talking to conservative women,” she wrote.)

So Miller announced her podcast in a video shared to X in August. In the video, Miller sits cross-legged in a gray armchair, wearing jeans and a white tank top, surrounded by soft lamps and plants, a copy of The Great Gatsby peeking out from a bookshelf behind her. “As a mom of three kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself,” Miller tells the camera. Bringing white women closer in line to their male counterparts would sharply reorient our politics and, if durable, could lead to something that looks like a permanent MAGA majority.

On some level, Miller is a strange choice for America’s trad-wife in chief. She married Stephen in 2020 at the Trump International Hotel, with the president himself in attendance. She too was a political player: She fell in love with Stephen over family-separation policies while she was working as a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security. (During her tenure at DHS, officials sent her to the southern border in the hopes that what she saw there might make her a little more compassionate. By her own telling, speaking to journalist Jacob Soboroff, “it didn’t work.”) Following her stint at DHS, she joined Vice President Mike Pence’s office as a spokesperson, later making it clear where her loyalties lay amid the bitter fallout between Pence and Trump over the Capitol riot. Earlier this year, she worked for DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, under Musk.

And so Miller’s new position—in which she emphasizes her role as a wife and mother to three young children—has entailed a bit of a rebrand, shedding the image of a government attack dog in favor of a softer archetype. “When society told women that our value was derived from our ability to make an income instead of derived from the joy of motherhood we all failed,” Miller wrote online in October. “Make babies. Raise those babies. It’s our highest and best value.”

When I started talking to people who knew Miller before she was a retrofitted, would-be MAGA icon—before she ever met Donald Trump—they described a person with some altogether different ambitions. Through their eyes, the entire public project of the Millers takes on added dimensions. And it all helps explain why, if you look closely, it’s clear something has gone awry with the fantasy Katie Miller is trying to sell.

Before she was the bride of Stephen Miller, Katie Miller was 15-year-old Katie Waldman, attending the first debate class for the 10th grade of Cypress Bay High School, in Broward County, Florida. During the class, which was held in a portable trailer due to overcrowding, students were tasked with a graded assignment to give a short speech about themselves.

Miller’s address was particularly memorable: “She got up and said, ‘My father is a litigator, and my mom is a MILF. She does nothing but drive up and down the highway in her SUV until it’s time to pick me up from school,’ ” one former classmate told me. “What she meant was, ‘My dad is a rich guy, and my mom’s hot. That’s who I am, and that’s where I come from.’ She was super proud.”

Miller was raised in Weston, a suburban fever dream spread across 10,500 acres of what, before being drained for development, was once Everglades wetland. Weston was built by Arvida, the same company that designed Disney World and Celebration, the Disney-owned planned community. It’s meticulously organized perfection: Its various neighborhoods, gated communities, parks, and street are pristine and feature shallow lagoons and golf courses, palm trees and hibiscus, blue skies and backyard swimming pools. One comparison kept coming up when I interviewed people for this story: It was like The Stepford Wives, a place where rich dads go to work and hot moms pick up the kids in nice cars.

Weston was developed all at once in the 1990s and quickly cemented a reputation as a haven for “white flight,” only instead of white people fleeing Black people in inner cities, they were escaping the influx of immigration from Latino and Caribbean countries into Miami. In an interview with the Washington Post in 1998, Weston’s developers described the new suburb as “Our Home Town.” “It’s more like America,” one of them said.

Glenn J. Waldman and his wife, Sheryl, left their 2,000-square-foot home in northern Miami in 1994, after their daughter Katie was born, and bought a property in the neighborhood of Weston Hills, one of the most prestigious gated communities in Weston, where homes are painted in mandatory hues such as Champagne Dance and Grandma’s Linen. The Waldmans, who are Jewish, had three children in total, and Katie was the middle. Glenn Waldman........

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