The First Ugly Married Guy

Katie Miller's defense of her husband is about proving what white dudes deserve.

Thank you for your patience with me as the Substacks have been few and far between—paid subscribers, you are sustaining my ability to work on longer-term projects that are currently unfunded, and I appreciate you endlessly! I am cautiously optimistic that at least some of these will find their way to you in the coming months.

Few, if any, pieces of writing have stayed with me more than Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2017 essay The First White President.

Coates argues Donald Trump’s election and governing style embodies white America’s desire to prove that any white person can be President. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible. Trump exists in part to remind Black Americans that no matter their individual successes, the current of American white supremacy is strong enough to sweep obviously unqualified, evil white people ahead of them. He is the first President to truly demonstrate the power of whiteness, because he is the first white President to follow a Black one.

This article returned to me last month as I awoke to a round of discourse triggered by Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife, doxxing the woman who runs @TheDemocrats Twitter account. Forgive me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, political analysis has become so fucking stupid, and I must explain the Twitter beef before returning to the underlying argument. Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you’re up to date.

On May 26, MAGA acolyte Ken Paxton, who aligns with the President not just politically but also in terms of infidelity, friendliness to child sex abusers, and indictments for financial crimes, became the Republican nominee in Texas’ 2026 Senate race. Paxton ousted incumbent Senator John Cornyn and will face James Talarico in the general, who is running a progressive populist campaign. This match-up makes the Texas Senate race more competitive, and many Democrats are cautiously excited about it.

Stephen Miller quote-tweeted a post about Talarico from the Democrats’ official account, writing The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate. Talarico is not trans. This is just politics now, I guess. The Democrats responded shut up you ugly fuck. Katie Miller logged on to dox the staffer who runs the Twitter account, tweeted a picture of her, and made sure to note she was 30, single, and childless.

JUMP SCARE

Katie Miller has become a pretty high-profile surrogate for MAGA, particularly when it comes to talking about her family and her husband. It’s led to some head-scratching for me. Why are they pushing Katie forward on this, knowing she’s married to perhaps the ugliest, most reviled member of the Trump administration?¹ A hypothesis: MAGA is making Katie Miller the face of the it’s-great-to-be-married line for the same reason Trump’s vileness and unprofessionalism was a boon and not a burden to them. Stephen Miller is the first ugly married guy, because he can only be understood in the context of growing women’s independence and general rejection of marriage to inadequate partners.

Rising panics about declining marriage rates and nonstop coverage of the faux male loneliness epidemic (we’re all lonely! it’s capitalism!) are reactions to the degradation of structures that forced women into marriage. When you can have your own credit card and own your own home, there’s far less need to be trapped in a marriage that doesn’t excite you. There’s plenty of discourse about how the best way to address declining marriage and birth rates would be to build structures that actually support families, and for men to work on themselves such that they are desirable to women. MAGA doesn’t want that to be the solution. They want the current structures to hold.

I’m growing ever more convinced MAGA’s willingness to put forth the wives of objectively miserable, undesirable men to speak about the beauty of marriage is an intentional reaction to that. Any white guy can be President; any white guy can get married. That’s just what white guys do. That’s what they deserve.

This is also why dunking on Stephen Miller’s appearance never quite sticks the way it feels like it should.

In general, I do not often engage in looks-based commentary about the Republicans. This is for the same reason that I almost never bring up Donald Trump’s felony convictions when I talk about him, except to contrast his treatment post-conviction with pretty much any poor person’s. Name-calling rooted in existing prejudices I want our society to leave behind reinforces those prejudices. It is not a they-go-low-we-go-high thing. Frankly, I’d like us to be going lower. But go low as in harassing Brett Kavanaugh as he walks to The Inn at Little Washington and abusing procedural rules right back at the GOP, not as in pointing out that Stephen Miller, white supremacist extraordinaire, is, as @TheDemocrats said, an ugly fuck. (Truly, though, I’ve never seen someone who so desperately needs to believe his race makes him genetically superior, because Lord knows he has no other options.) (Forgive me, we cannot live in accordance with our values perfectly all of the time.)

Beyond these structural concerns, though, name-calling feels increasingly futile. Twitter sniping of the variety that everyone claimed would “get to” Trump² does not seem to “get to” anyone, except the various Bluesky accounts that gleefully repost and proclaim Trump “gotten to.” It’s because these people not only do not care if you find them ugly, it makes their victory that much more meaningful. Oh yeah? You think nobody wants me because I’ve looked like I’m 65 since I hit puberty? You think I can’t be President because I’m a sex abuser? You still underestimate the power of white maleness in our society. Watch me.

Many on the left and center-left mistake this discourse—and the MAGA movement broadly—as something that can be dealt with by tearing down the individual figureheads, and then remain shocked when a decade-plus of pointing out their obvious flaws leads to no degradation of their power. The discourse isn’t really about Miller at all. It’s about whiteness, and maleness. It’s about the life that people imagine they deserve, that they think this country has promised them. There is no perfect solution to persuade all of those disgruntled white men that they haven’t been cheated. I do think we could persuade plenty of them, though, by building a different kind of imagined life, one that seems both feasible and full, and making it predicated not on subjugation, but on genuine community.

As a major bonus, building this kind of imagined future doesn’t require centering the needs of white dudes. We could just build it, for everyone, and see if they come. Perhaps we should focus more energy there, and less on the ugliness of these truly ugly individuals.

1. I have very mixed feelings about commenting on physical appearance, which I’ll discuss a bit more a bit later. I think it does matter here that Stephen Miller is extremely ugly, with the caveat that white American beauty standards are fundamentally Eurocentric and fatphobic and generally harmful.

2. Gavin Newsom for President, amiright?