In a recent ruckus on Piers Morgan’s show, Katie Miller appeared to threaten a fellow guest with criminal investigation
There isn’t much Piers Morgan enjoys more than presiding over a televised ruck that goes viral online. Last week, Katie Miller, wife of the influential deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, obliged him.
In an astonishingly explosive moment, even by the already lurid standards of American political conversation, Katie appeared to threaten a possible Trump administration criminal investigation into one of her fellow guests on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Turkish-American political commentator Cenk Uygur – whose Young Turks webcast is itself no stranger to viral controversy – found himself on the receiving end of Katie’s fury after he accused her and her husband of being serial liars.
The talk had turned to New York’s mayoral election, and why Democratic Party upstart Zohran Mamdani has been on the receiving end of so many Islamophobic attacks during the campaign.
Katie, without substantiation, appeared to suggest that Mamdani’s many defenders were antisemitic, saying: “Why is it that every time someone wants to criticise Mamdani, it immediately comes back to the Jews and the anti-Israel movement instead of actually talking about his viewpoints?”
Uygur sought to point out that no one on the broadcast had voiced that claim. But quickly, all hell broke loose.
“It’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying,” Uygur shouted.
A furious Katie responded that Uygur’s comment was “racist, bigoted rhetoric … from people like you against my husband, against my family and my children”.
Threatening to storm off the set, she urged Morgan to intervene, adding: “He accused the Millers of lying … is that not coded language for, therefore we are Jewish?”
Uygur mused aloud that Katie was “a weirdo”. But as the conversation went even further off the tracks, he found himself being threatened.
“You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct,” Katie told Uygur, who was born in Istanbul but is believed to have become a US citizen in the early 2000s.
She also warned him that “you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar”, a reference to the Somali-born Democratic Party Congresswoman from Minnesota who is facing calls from Republicans for her deportation.
The threat comes at a time when Trump himself is engaged in a widespread campaign of retribution against people that he accuses of wronging him.
The traditional (but not constitutionally-guaranteed) independence of the Department of Justice has been eviscerated by his administration, with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel willingly engaged in bringing criminal charges against people considered traitors to the Make America Great Again movement.
Former FBI director James Comey, former national security adviser John Bolton and New York Attorney General Letitia James are already facing criminal charges, with many more possible targets reportedly still under investigation.
Like her husband, Katie is becoming one of the most prominent attack dogs of Trump’s second term.
Her background is 100 per cent Maga. During Trump’s first term, as deputy press secretary for disgraced former Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen, she insisted parents were not being separated from their children.
In fact, more than 5,000 children, some as young as four months old, were torn away from their immigrant parents.
“DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself, to try and make me more compassionate,” she told reporter Jacob Soboroff for his 2020 book Separated.
She told him that the move “didn’t work … family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently. But I don’t think so”.
However, commitment to strict immigration policies did help fuel the romance between the then 27-year-old Katie Waldman and Stephen Miller, Trump’s de facto chief ideologue and principal architect of the President’s programme of mass deportation.
Speaking about their relationship on a podcast in September, Katie said: “I was the chief spokesperson when we shut down the border to build the wall. And as luck would have it, Stephen and I ended up in a lot of meetings together, talking about securing the border.”
Last December, before Trump returned to office, the president-elect appointed Katie to join Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”.
“She has been a loyal supporter of mine for many years,” Trump enthused, calling her a “deeply experienced communications professional respected by all”.
Five months later, when Musk left the government after a spectacular falling-out with Trump, Katie briefly went with him, becoming a senior adviser to the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire.
But serving the richest man in the world while remaining loyal to the most powerful man in the world proved impossible; in August she returned to Washington and announced the launch of a new podcast project, which became the start of a trajectory that would lead to several appearances on on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
The Millers and their three children were Trump’s guests at the White House last Thursday for the President’s Halloween party.
Katie dressed a skeleton, while her husband went as himself, leading some Washington wags to conclude that he was conceding he could not be any more scary if he tried.
But by appearing to threaten the unleashing of Trump’s government on Uygur, Katie can certainly be accused of giving her husband a run for his money.
