A Portrait of MAGA Psychodrama
Or: On the political necessity of denouncing one’s friends.
With his Middle East crisis spiraling out of control, his domestic agenda totally stalled, and popularity in the sewer, Donald Trump is keeping his eye on the prize. “Almost every night in the White House,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update. Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much.”
The donations come in by the millions and tens of millions—for his presidential library, his ballroom project, his political action committees. Trump may be a president, but America’s CEO class knows it’s still much safer—and more profitable, in the long run—to treat him like a king. Happy Friday.
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Fauci’s Diary Made Katie Miller Look Human. She Can’t Have That.
by Andrew Egger
By now you’ve probably read plenty about congressional Republicans’ latest struggle session against Anthony Fauci—the mean-spirited publication of his COVID-era diary, the barrage of ridiculous and misleading questions at his Senate hearing, the crude spectacle of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeting a photoshopped image of himself clapping the doctor in handcuffs.
Yesterday, though, my attention was captured by a far smaller, sadder side plot in the Fauci affair spotlighted by NOTUS—one involving Katie Miller.
During Trump’s first term, Miller was a senior aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and therefore a close colleague of Fauci’s on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, which Pence chaired.
From his journal entries, it’s clear that Fauci quickly took a liking to Miller, whom he viewed as a bright young colleague and for whom he developed an almost grandfatherly affection. “Katie Miller is great (tough, smart, but great),” he wrote in March 2020. “Katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room,” he wrote two months later.
The work of grappling with a brand new, barely understood pandemic was stressful, both professionally and personally—after all, the task force could get the virus too. At several points, Miller leaned on Fauci for medical advice. “I am calling Katie frequently to check on her couple times per day,” Fauci wrote after Miller tested positive for COVID in May 2020. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone.”
This was still awfully early days in the pandemic, when little was yet known about the relative risks COVID presented to various groups. Think of how genuinely terror-stricken Miller must have been. Think of how reassuring it must have been to have America’s top infectious-disease expert on hand not just to advise her, but to show personal concern for her physical and mental health. Miller, NOTUS reports, went back to Fauci repeatedly for medical advice throughout the pandemic: later that year when her husband tested positive for COVID, and again when their newborn experienced an unrelated medical episode. In the latter instance, Fauci records, he called the baby’s doctors directly to ensure she was getting good care.
Miller purports to feel differently now. “Dr. Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself,” she wrote on X yesterday. “As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I can say with certainty after witnessing his con close up this man should be in prison. Justice for the American People.”
Miller’s claim here—that she was only relying on Fauci’s pro bono medical advice to “keep her enemies closer”—beggars belief. Nor does her explanation of his behavior make a bit of sense: Apparently, he “weaponized [her] pregnancy and child” to “aggrandize himself” by . . . showing concern for her well-being and going out of his way to help her out from time to time. And he kept it all private even as the Millers and the rest of the Trump movement turned him into a bogeyman.1 Sinister!
Still, it’s easy to see why Miller is twisting herself in these sorts of knots. Fauci has become one of the MAGAsphere’s chief villains, while she’s become one of its influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers and an odd soft-focus podcast aimed at MAGA moms. The ecosystem she’s chosen to live in is one dominated by political paranoia and intramural accusations of secret disloyalty. Fauci’s diary drop must have been a nasty shock. What if some clout-chasing rabble-rouser used it to try to expose her as some sort of Deep State plant? Better to get ahead of the accusations by cooking up some ridiculous “cover story” for associating with Fauci—and to call for his jailing too, just to be on the safe side.
Now, of course, Miller does a lot of things that I personally find a little difficult to wrap my head around. This, after all, is a woman who has tried to get the FBI to criminally investigate her neighbors. This is a woman who once lost her cool in a TV debate and started threatening her interlocutor with deportation. This is a woman who married Stephen Miller.
Still, it’s interesting to see a human side of Miller emerge in Fauci’s diary entries—and incredibly depressing to see her treat that human side as a four-alarm PR fire. What a bummer way to make a living, swimming in this revolting internet ecosystem. Hard to imagine she’s having a lot of fun.
Shoot the Puck
by William Kristol
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” This lesson comes to us courtesy of Wayne Gretzky, perhaps the greatest hockey player ever. Gretzky credits this sage advice to his father, Walter, who was driving him to practice one day and wanted to encourage young Wayne to shoot more.
It’s a good hockey lesson. It’s also a good politics lesson.
When Donald Trump announced his nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general almost two months ago, the prospect of blocking his confirmation in the Senate seemed grim. This Republican Senate has routinely confirmed almost all of President Trump’s nominees. Republican senators have expressed qualms and objections—and then routinely caved.
But as of now, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina haven’t folded. They may still, and Blanche may still become attorney general in a permanent capacity, as opposed to his current acting capacity, in which position he’s already done a great deal in service of the Trumpist corruption of the Department of Justice. That corruption will continue under Blanche or any Trump-appointed successor. So this victory may only be transient, and in any case will be limited in its practical effects.
Still. For now, Blanche is blocked. Even if he eventually makes it, he will have been weakened. And in any case the protracted and well-publicized fight over Blanche has been a setback for Trump and Trumpism. The public has been made more aware of Trump’s determination to transform the Department of Justice into a Department of Retribution, Weaponization, and Election Subversion. The disgraceful Epstein coverup, which Blanche coordinated, is back in the news.
And since Blanche is being blocked by two Republican senators who are lame ducks, and since the GOP conference in the Senate will be even more uniformly Trumpist in 2027 than it is now, the case for Democratic control of the Senate if voters want any check on Trump for the next two years has been reinforced.
The sequence of events that has so far blocked Blanche wasn’t inevitable. The key issue for Cornyn and Tillis has been the corrupt deal negotiated between Trump’s current personal lawyers and his former personal lawyer, one Todd Blanche. The deal resolved a meritless lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS by giving Trump, his family, and his businesses broad immunity against IRS audits, saving them perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
But a key moment that slowed down the momentum towards confirmation had to do with a different issue, Epstein.
In response to Epstein survivor Dani Bensky’s testimony against Blanche, Tillis made it a condition for his support that Blanche meet with the Epstein survivors. The meeting went badly, and Epstein survivors explained how dismissive and condescending Blanche was. Tillis, who’d said he wanted to “get to Yes” on Blanche, then joined Cornyn—who has been a longtime and sincere champion in the fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation, and who listened intently to Bensky’s testimony—in his objection to Blanche.
Trump then refused to allow Blanche to put the guarantees Cornyn wanted about the non-audit agreement in writing. Cornyn and Tillis dug in as Trump insulted them—including in a post just hours ago—and we’re now at an impasse.
It was all a somewhat unpredictable—and unexpected—course of events. It needn’t have happened as it did. But it did only because the Epstein survivors, along with other groups focused on other issues, all rallied to fight, even though the odds were against them.
In April 2025, Alex Ovechkin passed Wayne Gretzky as the leading all-time NHL goal scorer. But partly because Gretzky put so many shots on goal that created rebounds and scoring opportunities for teammates, he remains by far the all-time leader in assists and career points. And his teams won four Stanley Cups.
Politics is full of smart people who routinely overthink things. Overthinking tends to lead to caution. For me, the lesson of the Blanche fight is that of Gretzky père et fils: Take your shots. Some of them will be on goal. Maybe you’ll score. Maybe your teammate will score on a rebound. Maybe the goalie or the defense won’t clear the puck successfully, leading to another scoring opportunity. Or maybe you’ll just miss this time and have to try again later. But keep taking shots.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Was Never Funny… MONA CHAREN on the Stockholm syndrome of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
The Comey Prosecution Is Dead… But it’s no time to rejoice, argues PAUL ROSENZWEIG.
Trump’s Approval Has Collapsed… As SARAH MATTHEWS reports, new polling shows voters are increasingly unhappy with his handling of the issues that matter most: the Iran war and the economy.
Here Are the Republicans’ Biggest Lies From Their Fauci Show Trial… In Press Pass, WILL SALETAN writes: In their retelling of the COVID story, the doctor was the bad guy, the vaccines were deadly, and Trump did everything right.
Bulwark Goes to Hollywood: This week, SONNY BUNCH interviews showrunner SAM CATLIN on the second season of Apple TV’s Sugar, and reviews Spider-Noir. It’s Nicolas Cage playing a PI Spider-Man: What more could you want?
Quick Hits
INFIGHTING ON IRAN: As American prospects in Iran grow fainter, the war of words between the hawks and doves in the MAGA coalition over who’s to blame is heating up again.
Writing in the Washington Post yesterday, columnist Marc Thiessen—a former George W. Bush speechwriter who is among President Trump’s most hawkish supporters—sketched out a view of the war in which the powerful, muscular actions of the president and his advisers like Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and Pete Hegseth were annihilating Iran, only to be repeatedly let down by the quisling dovishness of Vice President JD Vance. “Like Lucy and the football, Trump keeps getting told that this time the Iranians are finally ready to make a deal—only to be set up for failure yet again,” Thiessen wrote. “Indeed, by elevating a deal as the definition of victory, Vance has given Iran a veto over America’s ability to declare victory. All it has to do is refuse to agree—which it is doing.”
This view is a self-serving hallucination, of course—Trump has been just as eager to get a deal as Vance, as he has told us over and over in public. Just as Thiessen is eager to make Vance a scapegoat for the failures of the war, so Vance fans have been eager to do the same with Thiessen himself. “Thiessen is smart enough to know he can’t attack Trump, so he’s pushing a lie that Vance is acting independently of the president,” tweeted GOP strategist Ryan Girdusky, an ally of the nationalist right. “He was also one of the people who lobbied Trump the hardest to get into the war and Trump is tired of his bullshit.”
WISCONSIN ON A WING: Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist representing Madison in the Wisconsin State Assembly, is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin. She also wants to “Cancel Thanksgiving.”
In a since-deleted tweet, Hong wrote in November 2020, “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it.”
This isn’t the first time Hong has handed the Republican Governors Association ready-made attack-ad material. Hong previously called to “Abolish the Senate.” CNN also found numerous tweets from Hong in which she called for things like “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”
She repeated these opinions on camera. In a July 2020 interview, Hong said she supports “eliminating” police funding entirely: “If eliminating the police budget is not on the table, divesting and reinvesting into community control is what I would push for.”
In another interview days later, Hong said, “More police training won’t work. Reforming the current system isn’t the answer. We need to be dismantling the current system. Police officers enforce the law with state-sanctioned violence . . . Defund the police.”
On Tuesday, Politico’s Jonathan Martin asked Hong if she still wants to abolish police in the long term. She dodged: “I believe that we have to be serious about public safety.”
In a Marquette poll released Wednesday, just before progressive Mandela Barnes suspended his campaign, Hong led the crowded Democratic field by a commanding 22 points—after the campaigns of multiple establishment-backed candidates imploded.
Hong won’t be the first Democratic Socialist with a history of insane comments to win a Democratic nomination, but unlike those who recently won primaries in deep-blue districts, she’s running in a state Trump carried just two years ago.
Perhaps Hong will pull it out in November over Rep. Tom Tiffany—himself an extremist who objected to certifying the 2020 election. But if she fails, an election denier will be tasked with signing the certificate of ascertainment for the 2028 presidential results in a pivotal swing state.
That’s a big risk with national implications.
—Brendan Hartnett
Cheap Shots
Remember, the only reason we know about any of this in the first place is because Republicans who hate Fauci published his diary online.
How does one "weaponize" a pregnancy? She is just as sick as her husband.
Holy holy shit! Katie Miller! What evil planet did these people arrive from? I’ve followed Fauci’s career since the 80s when he emerged as a shining star in the fight against AIDS. He is truly a great man in the purest sense — devoted to science, truth, and helping humanity.
Apparently that’s now a grave offense in itself. Is this also because he worked to cure AIDS, which the far right sees as God’s punishment for homosexuality?
There is no bottom to the evil we are seeing.