Katie Miller, wife of anti-immigrant firebrand and Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has been quietly running a podcast widely mocked as a sleepy effort to polish her husband’s and other Trump officials’ reputations. The show paints her as the dutiful, polished spouse of power—but a new Slate profile exposes a far more ruthless, cutthroat past.
Before she was a podcaster, Katie Miller, née Waldman, was a driven student with her own political ambitions — ambitions that came crashing down in a scandal that still haunts her reputation among former classmates.
“Back then, Florida’s student government had a reputation of operating a little like an autocracy,” Tess Owen writes. “The governing party — which has changed its name over the years but was known as the Unite Party at the time Miller joined — was ruled by the iron fists of privileged frat boys and sorority girls, who controlled the school’s spending and were tapped for access to the exclusive Florida Blue Key society. After graduation, they were funneled into elected office and law clerkships.” The Unite Party was also notorious for bullying Black and Hispanic student groups, cutting off funding when they refused to support their candidates.
In that high-stakes environment, Miller quickly proved herself. She “quickly established herself as a power player in this world and operated like a ‘henchman’ for the ruling party, said one former student.” Unlike most student government members, who worked across party lines, Miller didn’t play nice. Opposition party senator Jordan Ball recalled, “Most people in student government would be cordial and nice and would try to work together. I feel like it was Katie’s whole life. She took it all very personally.”
Her defining moment came in 2012, her sophomore year. “While serving on the rules and ethics committee of student government, Miller was embroiled in a scandal,” the report says. When the head football coach endorsed a candidate from the opposition Students Party, The Independent Florida Alligator ran a front-page story. Miller and former Student Government President Pro Tempore Jason Tiemeier were later spotted dumping 268 copies of the paper on the eve of the student elections.
The backlash was immediate. Editorials demanded her removal from the committee, and even the Unite Party turned away from her, refusing to let her run for office again. In her farewell address, Miller let her bitterness show.
“She was bitter about not being asked to run again and felt betrayed. She delivered a glowering, chaotic speech that was full of tacit threats,” Owen writes. Ford Dwyer, an opposition senator, recalled: “The sense that everyone got was that they’d better all be careful or else, because she had information on them, and she better be respected because she had secrets that she might or might not reveal … I think she felt like a victim.”
Fast forward a decade, and the once-feared “henchman” is now a podcaster trying to portray herself as approachable and supportive. But former classmates remember a different Katie Miller: ambitious, strategic, and willing to bend the rules to maintain power. The carefully curated image on her podcast may be polished, but the ruthless operative from Gainesville never really went away.
