Last night, as we were getting ready to put our daughter to bed, I got a notification.
Katie Miller, wife of White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, had posted a shock claim:
“Miles Taylor cheated on his wife with the Secretary’s Executive Assistant while he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security.”
Miller appeared to be referencing my previous marriage, and the fact that my now-wife Hannah is someone I once worked with at DHS. That’s as close to reality as she got.
The number of falsehoods packed into one sentence is almost comical. I wasn’t married for most of the time I was deputy chief of staff… Hannah was never the Secretary’s executive assistant (and I had to stop and think about who was)… and I had precisely zero romantic relationships with anyone inside the Department during my time there. That didn’t slowed down the claim as it traveled through X at tabloid speed.
I’m grateful Hannah has a sense of humor. I showed her the post, and almost without missing a beat she said, “Oh my gosh. What I would’ve given to be with you two years sooner.”
The sentiment is shared. Hannah and I began dating long after I left DHS, during the hell year of 2020. That year brought a pandemic, the turmoil of standing up to a president, and upheaval in my personal life, including the end of a relationship. I would’ve given an arm and a leg to have had her as my partner heading into all of that. Indeed, reconnecting with her saved my life.
That doesn’t make Miller’s post any less ugly.
Ostensibly, she was responding to a question I had posed about Trump’s ballroom. I asked whether the president would give back the $25 million that Nvidia put toward his dance hall, now that the company’s CEO has admitted to an affair and resigned amid reports that the woman involved is a suspected Chinese spy. Apparently that question bothered Miller enough that she answered it with a fabricated and tawdry story about my time at DHS, as if that might distract from the corruption in plain view.
I think there’s a more obvious explanation. Over the past week I’ve been quite hard on her husband, Stephen Miller, whom she began dating while they were both working in the first Trump administration. I see where she got the inspiration for her story. Stephen was just elevated to White House chief of staff last week, and I believe his appointment ranks high among the most self-defeating and dangerous decisions this president has made. He is a fanatical ideologue and a threat to the rule of law. I stand by that assessment.
His and Katie’s unusual personal courtship is of no concern or interest to me.
What interests me more is what Miller’s attack says about where we are. We seem to have entered a new stage of desperation.
First, they tried treason. In April 2025, the president signed an executive order directing the government to investigate me, and told reporters he thought I was guilty of treason. My offense was exercising my First Amendment rights. A White House official explained the thinking to Rolling Stone at the time: “Donald Trump needed to send a message.” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan later reported in their book Regime Change that Stephen Miller was one of the individuals behind the retaliation orders directed at me and Chris Krebs. (Notably, Katie Miller celebrated the night it was signed, calling me a “traitor” and writing that “bad people always have a day of reckoning.”)
Now they’ve moved on to personal smears. The apparent purpose of the attacks by Trump enablers is the same. All of it is designed to instill fear. They want people to censor themselves out of worry that they’ll be attacked, humiliated, and made an example of by the most powerful man in the world and his most loyal supplicants.
I hate to disappoint them, but it isn’t working. And it won’t. Whatever window they had — in the dark early days of 2025 when law firms and universities were flagellating themselves in front of the president to avoid his punishment — closed a long time ago. The country has turned against this president. People are furious about the corruption, and they’ve stopped being afraid to say it. Last week, they shouted it from the ballot boxes.
As for me, I think I know why they can’t figure out what to do. They don’t understand what it’s like not to be driven by profit, or power, or slavish loyalty to a cult of personality. I’m a pretty simple man. Why would I keep going when they’ve taken almost everything from me? The lost jobs and physical security and financial stability and personal relationships? The answer is one that many of them may never have the moral clarity to give: because it is right. I learned a long time ago that what is right and what is easy are almost never the same thing, and I’ve stopped lamenting the labor it takes to follow an ethical lodestar. I’ve come to rejoice in it.
So yes, they may try to do to me what they did to James Comey and bring a false charge. They may send the president out to attack me again. They may even cook up new fan fiction about my love life. None of it will shut me up.
The nice part is that I’m no longer alone. As my incredible wife said after election night last week: now we have an army.
Your friend, in defiance,
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