Far-right White House adviser Stephen Miller's wife, Katie Miller, has started up her own podcast — and the ambition at play here is obvious, wrote Salon's Amanda Marcotte.
"The Katie Miller Podcast," which is devoted to putting a softer spin on MAGA, has been panned from the moment it began. But not for the same reasons that Stephen Miller himself, who has been the brains of most of Trump's harshest anti-immigrant policies, is so notorious.
"The main reason Miller is memorable is because he is petulant," wrote Marcotte. "Miller started off as Trump’s infamously terrible speechwriter, but he mostly made a name for himself by being such a creep that he stood out even by MAGA standards. He loves going on cable news shows and throwing comically over-the-top tantrums. Whether he is spilling racist lies or insisting his boss has unlimited power, Miller always adopts the same posture of maximum outrage. He clearly thinks he’s a terrifying villain in the Darth Vader tradition, but he actually reads more like Veruca Salt screaming 'I want a golden goose' at Willy Wonka."
Katie Miller's show, on the other hand, might as well be called “The Banality of Evil” because it seems tailored entirely to "lull viewers to sleep," wrote Marcotte.
But despite the fact that it barely pulls in any views, there's a clear plan behind it all, she wrote.
"The premise of every interview seems to be that just because the guests are far-right authoritarians, it doesn’t mean they’re interesting," she wrote. "Each episode is roughly an hour of scintillating content like which sorority Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., pledged in college, or how former ESPN host Sage Steele feels about wedding planning. Even her much-discussed premiere episode, which featured a 45-minute interview with Vice President JD Vance, was a big nothingburger. The biggest news that came out of it was that Stephen Miller eats a lot of mayonnaise."
Miller himself, Marcotte noted, "could never be on her show. His screeching bigotry would feel out of place in her pastel-colored dreamland, where nothing interesting ever happens."
And that seems to be the point: the show's purpose is to present a softer side of the Millers, make them seem more harmless, potentially setting Stephen Miller up for a higher political position — even the presidency.
"The unsubtle goal of 'The Katie Miller Podcast' is to 'humanize' its subjects with 'they’re just like you!' interviews. The underlying message is that fascists can’t be so bad, if they also tell dad jokes or feel bad about eating too much chocolate," wrote Marcotte.
This, she said, probably ties into all the recent health scares and death rumors Trump has faced: "Stephen Miller is closer to Trump than anyone, including Melania Trump. He probably has an even better idea of how weak his boss is, and how the odds rise daily that there will soon be a power struggle to be the next king of MAGA."
"This all reads very much as what fascist freaks think looks 'human' to the normies," Marcotte concluded. "The anesthetizing effect, in that case, feels quite deliberate, coming from people who very much want Americans to sleepwalk into an authoritarian state."