Katie Miller: Clean Up on Aisle MAGA
She’s giving the Trump administration a friendly face
Scott here. 👋 Following up on our piece about Evie Magazine, this week I dove into Katie Miller’s podcast and was surprised by what I found. I expected rage bait. What I got was something worse.
More on that below, but first…
Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.2 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Topping this week’s list is American Sovereignty – a mysterious conservative group that launched in January. They followed up their pro-ICE Super Bowl ad with new ads encouraging people to “let ICE do their jobs.” Though the message feels like it could be straight from the White House, there’s no public connection. Putting the capital D in Dark money!
Also, for the second week, Facebook found itself in the top 10 spenders on *checks notes* Facebook. They’ve been running this ad highlighting how Facebook Marketplace can be effective for selling vehicles (and presumably other large ticket items). This ad blitz comes amid ongoing problems with Facebook profiting from the millions of scams within its marketplace.
Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $7.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
This upcoming Tuesday, March 17 is the Illinois primary, so it’s not surprising that Raja Krishnamoorthi’s Senate campaign cracked the top ten list. Less recognizable is The Impact Fund – a PAC spending against Krishnamoorthi’s opponent Juliana Stratton.
Also, with the primary to succeed Gavin Newsom less than 3 months away, the independent expenditure California Back To Basics is spending big to promote San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s bid for governor.
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.5 million on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $422,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:
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Katie Miller: Clean Up on Aisle MAGA
In the 2024 presidential election, there was a notable gender divide: young men broke for Trump by 14 points, while young women broke for Harris by 17 points. Since then, the conservative machine has come to life pushing right-leaning women-led media properties such as podcasts hosted by Zoomer Brett Cooper, MAHA mom Alex Clark, and Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey. My last piece on the womansphere focused on the right’s “conservative Cosmo” Evie Magazine. Around the time we published that piece, Katie Miller (wife of Stephen Miller) launched her own podcast with Vice President JD Vance as her first guest.
Now that it’s been 7 months, let’s take a look at what’s been happening with Katie Miller’s show, how it subverted my expectations, and what it says about the future of media.
Let’s start with the basics. The first episode launched on August 11, 2025. New episodes are published on Tuesdays and around 30 have come out so far. Guests have included Republican power players like Speaker Mike Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth. Miller has also hosted cultural figures such as Elon Musk, Nicki Minaj, Sean Hannity, Chamath Palihapitiya, and MAHA actress Jenny McCarthy. In many episodes, guests’ wives also join the conversation.
By my count, the show has around 120k cross-platform followers, with Youtube leading at 50k. The Musk and Minaj episodes were the furthest reaching, with 919k & 242k Youtube views respectively. The show’s best performing short-form clips cover lighter topics: Elon Musk’s favorite food (“a cheeseburger”), JD Vance’s current favorite music genre (“classic rock”), and whether Nicki Minaj would consider entering politics (“she already has”).
To be honest, this surprised me. Going in, I expected way more right-wing rage bait. Where was the MAGA cheerleading?! Instead, the show spends most of its time on commonplace lifestyle topics – morning routines, funny stories, and meet-cutes. Occasionally, Miller jokes about topics relating to current events (like whether Kash Patel’s girlfriend is an Israeli Mossad agent), but for the most part, the show leans into its self-assigned podcast category: “Culture.”
Confused, I went digging for more on Miller’s background.
Miller describes herself as a mom of three trying to juggle a career, eat healthy, and work out. Before starting the show, she worked in communications for senators, a vice president (Mike Pence), and Elon Musk’s DOGE. She grew up in a wealthy suburb in South Florida and attended the University of Florida. There, she served as an operative for the dominant student political party and developed an unethical reputation by doing things like dumping over 250 copies of a school newspaper that published an opposing candidate’s endorsement.
Scrolling through Youtube clips from other appearances, I found her proudly calling AOC a “sad, petty, childless adult” on Fox News. She denounced antisemitism and complained about a former guest on Abby Phillip’s show. And on Piers Morgan Uncensored, she managed to both play the victim of antisemitism and threaten to have Cenk Uygur deported. Now, these were the grievances I expected!
It’s clear that Miller is comfortable playing different roles in different contexts, which explains why her podcast topics are so innocuous. Many of this administration’s moves have been insane (to say the least). Her job, in part, seems to be to clean that perception up. Plus, given the podcast’s access to Trump administration officials, it basically feels like an arm of the White House communications department.
Zooming out, what should strategists take away from this? What does this reveal to us about how our media ecosystem is changing?
First, monoculture is dead. Gone are the days of a single Walter Cronkite delivering the news to a mass audience. Instead, millions of niche-focused mini-Cronkites share information across every digital platform. That means if you want to reach a specific group of people, you need to meet them in their digital space. Miller understands this. So, she can confidently play the conservative culture warrior on Fox News while projecting trad-wife energy on her own show, without worrying too much about the audiences overlapping. You can do that too.
Second, the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger is just the latest example of prominent conservatives buying the tracks upon which information flows. Politics is downstream of culture, and we need to recognize that the currents will flow harder against the Left in the future. That means messengers must be able to persuade people in unfriendly territory. Miller claimed that she wants to have people on her show from both sides of the aisle. Will a courageous Democrat, liberal, or leftist take her up on that?
Finally, we must remember that voting identities are “sticky.” Only about 10% of people switch which party they support in a given year. 2024 renewed the Left’s focus on winning back young men’s votes, but this should not be done at the expense of young women. Kamala Harris’s interview with prominent podcaster Alex Cooper undoubtedly helped her win some young women’s votes. The Left must keep making those kinds of investments.
If they don’t… well, the Katie Miller Podcast will be ready to pick up the slack.
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Thrilled to see the Breitbart Doctrine coming into this, but it's not the full version. Yes, "politics is downstream of culture." But based on Breitbart's career as an air-quotes "journalist" and how right-wing propaganda operates now, you can tell that he knew that "politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of reality: If you change someone's perception of reality, their culture changes, and their politics change." We're not politically polarized in America; we are factually polarized. The right-wing propaganda machine has created a fantasy land where their policies fix problems that don't actually exist in the real world.
Miller, like Don Jr's daughter, are trying to appear very mainstream. It's a common propaganda trick. The good thing is that there are so many outlets to get information, that a lot of voices can get out. The bad thing, is that platforms like You Tube and Meta tend to silo people with their algorithms. Wish those platforms would dangle more variety to their users. I personally have never randomly followed an account due to a suggestion from a platform. I found people to follow via my own search based on my interests, reading newspapers, journals, etc, friends' suggestions and through the suggestions of people I already follow. I have unfollowed people after discovering the content wasn't for me. I wish platforms allowed for more organic discovery. Twitter in the early days did this and I found a number of opposing opinion people to follow because of it. I'd see someone I respected comment on a page, go to the account, then decide to follow them based on their different perspective and life experience than mine. I found it to be enriching in many ways. Now, it's become X and it's a cesspool.