Katie Miller, Maga podcaster and flag-toting chaos queen

Illustration by Andy Bunday

Katie Miller, the former spokesperson for the Elon Musk-led US Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, is a prolific and outspoken presence on her one-time boss’s X platform. Rarely does a day pass without her sharing a mix of anti-vaccination, pro-ICE and anti-feminist opinions with her 187,000 followers.

Earlier this month, however, one post gained global attention and 33m views. It was the day that US special forces captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an audacious attack on his Caracas compound. Miller responded by posting an image of the map of Greenland overlaid with the Stars and Stripes, accompanied by a single word: “SOON.”

Given that Miller holds no formal role in the Trump administration, and her current profession is “podcaster”, it might have been dismissed as just another of the graphic provocations she revels in. Instead, the implied threat of invasion triggered a series of responses and counter-responses that led to what is arguably the greatest crisis within Nato in its 77-year history.

Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, called the image “disrespectful” and insisted that his country was “not for sale”. Denmark’s ambassador to the US reiterated that his country expects “full respect for the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark”, while Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, issued a strong statement reaffirming sovereignty.

The reason Miller’s post prompted such elevated reactions lay less in its content than in her proximity to power. She happens to be married to Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s closest and most trusted advisers and something of a Maga attack dog. It has been pointed out that it’s hard to imagine Miller had posted such an incendiary message without her husband’s backing, and equally hard to believe that he would have given that backing without Trump’s tacit or explicit approval.

In an age of politics and diplomacy conducted by social media, the post seemed to be a prima facie case of testing the waters. Trump duly reaffirmed that the US “needs Greenland from the standpoint of national security”, while Miller’s husband asserted that “no one is going to fight the US militarily over the future of Greenland”. When European leaders, including Keir Starmer, voiced objections, Trump responded with threats of increased tariffs. Last week, the president demanded “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland before sounding a slightly less immoderate note at Davos.

If Miller feels any personal responsibility for the ensuing diplomatic fallout, she conceals it well. She has been busy appearing on Fox News to defend ICE operations in Minneapolis and promoting the latest episode of the Katie Miller Podcast, featuring Dan Scavino – the former golf club manager turned Trump aide – and his fiancée, Erin Elmore, an ex-contestant on The Apprentice who now serves as the state department’s director of art in embassies.

The podcast offers listeners an escorted tour of the wonderful world of Maga – it features celebratory interviews with figures such as Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, and his wife; Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, and his wife; Kash Patel, director of the FBI, and his girlfriend. There are a lot of glowing testaments to God and Trump, not always in that order, while the women occupy a conspicuously supportive, tradwife-adjacent role.

With her vocal fry, softball questions and ready giggles, Miller can appear a lifestyle lightweight, as if a Valley Girl had accidentally wandered into the halls of power. This is misleading on two counts. First, the 34-year-old has been working in Republican politics for more than a decade. She began as a press assistant at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and has since served several senators, worked at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and  went on to become press secretary and later communications director for the former vice-president, Mike Pence.

Second, the halls of power are now thronged with Trump cronies with scarcely any political experience – not just Scavino, but the likes of Hegseth, who went from Fox News host to defence secretary (before the symbolic rebranding to secretary of war) without any recognised expertise in the field. By comparison Miller is a seasoned operator.

Born Katie Waldman, she grew up in an affluent Jewish family in Weston, Florida, a liberal enclave in an increasingly conservative state. She cut her teeth on political campaigning with the student Unite Party at the University of Florida, where she drove around campus in a Lexus SUV sporting “Yolo” (You only live once) tattooed inside her lip. One former college classmate told Vanity Fair: “The only thing she loves or values in this world is power. Anyone she attaches to … in her life is simply a pawn to feed her addiction to it.”

This seems a severe assessment for someone whose most ruthless act was to remove copies of the college newspaper from a stand because it interviewed a popular football coach who had endorsed a political rival. But it’s an observation that gained retrospective authority after she began dating Stephen Miller in 2018.

With his dead-eyed glabrous looks – somewhere between Mr Burns from The Simpsons and an early career Vladimir Putin – Stephen Miller is the kind of man who strikes fear in both enemies and admirers. Steve Bannon once dubbed him, approvingly, an “evil robot”. Investigative journalist Jean Guerrero, who wrote a book about him titled Hatemonger, concluded that unlike Bannon he is “a true ideologue, a true fanatic”.

The Millers’ romance developed against the backdrop of the controversy of family separations at the southern border, where migrant children were taken from their parents and placed in harsh conditions of confinement. Waldman, as she then was, was working in the DHS, and was a fierce defender of the policy that Stephen Miller, largely, had drafted.

On Instagram she posted a photo of herself in sunglasses with the caption “living my best life at the border wall”. Empathy for the huddled masses was not her strong suit. As she later put it, the DHS sent her to the border “to try to make me more compassionate. It didn’t work.” In Trump’s Washington, however, that kind of steeliness paid dividends. It certainly melted Stephen Miller’s heart. “It’s very on brand, the relationship,” he told Lara Trump.

“There’s not two tougher people I think I’ve ever met,” Bannon later said of the couple. Their intimidating reputation may explain why so many former colleagues preferred to maintain their silence.

The couple of toughs married at the Trump International Hotel in February 2020, with Trump, the US ambassador to Israel and an Elvis impersonator among the guests. The mood soured later that year when Trump lost the election and fell out with Pence over his refusal to overturn the electoral college result. Miller was on maternity leave during the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, but later made her allegiances clear when she said that Pence was “a footnote of American history”.

After Trump’s 2024 victory, he announced Miller’s return to Washington at Doge, praising her as “a loyal supporter of mine for many years”. Tasked with liaising between Musk and Trump’s circle, she thrived amid the friction. Some White House staff felt she traded on Musk’s power for access beyond her remit – there were stories of her being discreetly escorted from the Oval Office.

Trump’s orbit, however, is famously unforgiving. When Musk departed the administration, accusing Trump of covering up the Jeffrey Epstein files, Miller left with him as a private adviser. That arrangement ended quietly last summer. She maintained cordial relations with Musk, who appeared on her podcast last month to lament ever having taken the Doge role.

Through ideological commitment, tireless energy and sycophancy, Miller, like her husband, is the great survivor in Maga world. But she has made plenty of enemies along the way. To the notion that she, too, may yet fall foul of Trump’s capricious ego, many observers inside and outside the White House will be hoping for a familiar reply: “SOON.”

Katie Miller

Born Florida, USA

Alma mater University of Florida

Work Press secretary to former vice-president Mike Pence turned podcaster

Family Married