MAGA Family Values. Max Miller Is A Violent Abuser...and MAGA Is Fine With That.

by Rick Wilson - Aug 5

The Ohio Republican Party must decide by four o’clock this afternoon whether or not it has a bottom.

That is the entire story of Max Miller when you get rid of the livestreams and the Dropbox weirdness, and the horror of a man who, by multiple accounts, has a violent and unstable personality disorder that put his wife and child in danger.

According to Ohio law, Miller has to remove his name from the November ballot by 4 p.m. today if his party is to initiate the procedure to replace him; there is a second, more limited option available on the 10th, but, in practice, today is the day.

He has, of course, taken the MAGA lesson of “never apologize, never admit wrongdoing, and blame the victim” to its logical end and declined to step down.

While any man of honor would withdraw, he is clearly not one.

He refused when asked by Jake Tapper on Tuesday, and he refused again to the Rapist In Chief when Trump asked him to withdraw.

Here’s what Miller told Tapper:

“People have asked me, what are you going to do? Are you going to drop out of this race? Are you going to resign? You know, are you going to get out before the deadline? And my answer to you, Jake, is no…No one has told me to get off the ballot, and that’s because they know I can win this seat.”

Well, that settles it then, right?

For a party that for forty years has positioned itself as the last refuge of the family for churchgoing, nuclear-family Americans, it’s going to have to sit and watch that clock run down, since the other option involves Max Miller admitting he’s a sick domestic abuser who has no place in Washington.

In filings connected to a custody fight, Miller’s ex-wife Emily Moreno has alleged that he threw scalding water on her, shoved her into a wall, and once held a gun to her head, and that their daughter, who is two years old, suffered a fractured collarbone.

Miller, in a quite epic display of gaslighting, denies all of it.

On Tuesday, he asked the House Ethics Committee to open an investigation into himself, and the committee obliged, announcing a review of whether he engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use. He’s not trying to find the truth; he’s trying to run out the clock.

A sitting member of Congress had requested a domestic violence inquiry into his own actions as a campaign strategy, and his party interpreted it as a sign of confidence rather than as a warning signal that he was a domestic abuser and whackjob.

Miller’s reputation isn’t entirely new around Washington and in Ohio. Washington, a town that excuses and hides every damn perversion and deviance as long as the person involved is a team player, has its usual Potomac Omerta as a general rule.

But not always.

In the fall of 2021, Stephanie Grisham published a Washington Post op-ed describing a relationship that turned violent. She never named the man. Miller sued her for defamation within hours, which rather efficiently answered the question of who she meant. He later dropped the suit, and both signed a nondisclosure agreement. She is back in court against him this summer, arguing he broke it. Yesterday, she filed for a restraining order against Miller.

But the story behind the op-ed was never about Miller. Grisham wrote that she told Trump and Melania what had happened. They did not seem to care. She wrote that the First Lady asked if she had called the police. Grisham said no, because with an election that close, another domestic abuse story hanging over the administration would not have been good.

There it is. The entire MAGA party operating system was revealed in that article.

Despite those warning signs, Trump endorsed Max Miller for Congress anyway, and then endorsed him again in May.

This week, observe how the machine operates.

In public, Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office that Miller is “a very good person”, that the situation is sad, and that he would “let the families work it out”.

Jim Jordan (R-Boy’s Locker Room) stated that Miller is a good man. As for Mike Johnson, his silence speaks volumes.

Privately, as reported by CNN, CBS, and Semafor, Trump has been telling his allies that Miller can’t win, and House Republicans have been phoning the White House to ask Trump to get Miller removed from the ballot before the deadline.

Hold those two positions next to each other, and you have the actual moral architecture of the Republican Party in 2026.

The allegations and evidence of Miller’s violence are not the problem for them.

The polling is the problem. Holding the office in a year where they’re clinging to every seat is the problem.

Nobody in the Republican Caucus, much less the White House, is asking whether a two-year-old girl is safe tonight. No one is asking if Emily Moreno lives in fear of her life from a violent abuser.

They are asking whether a likely R district is safe in November, and whether a union ironworker named Brian Poindexter is about to walk off with a seat Miller carried by fifteen points.

There is only one exception, and it is serious.

Bernie Moreno is a Republican senator from Ohio; he is also Emily’s father and the grandfather of that little girl. He has stated that Miller requires serious psychological assistance, that he holds his breath each minute that Miller has custody, and that if elected office entails any standard of character, then Miller fails to meet it.

I’m no fan of Moreno, but the dynamic of abuse and danger would put any man in a position where silence was a choice. Moreno, who has sexual skeletons Miller regularly threatens to expose, finally stood up in public for his daughter and grandchild.

The correct answer is Max Miller taking a long ride to the pig farm, but in this fallen era, Moreno finally, almost reluctantly, did the right thing.

I wrote many, many family values ads over the decades.

You know the type: the adoring wife looks up at her handsome Congressman husband, adorable moppets frolicking nearby with the family Labrador in a sunny meadow. I’d say 40% were real, loving partnerships.

I’ve seen those smiles end when the camera cuts.

I’ve seen the candidate’s wife fucking a sound man three hours later in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant after a boozy lunch following a shoot, and seen the candidate’s boyfriend hustle him away from the screaming kids.

And I didn’t care.

No one knows the secrets of the human heart or the secret interior terrain of a marriage, and while they weren’t hurting anyone but themselves, it’s not my business.

These stories exist in both parties. Before any Democrat reading this starts feeling smug, lavender marriages and sexual secrets are equally distributed in the parties, and in Washington are much more common than the norm. The pervy demimonde of Washington is a reality show in the making, all the more so because so many of its players work overtime to appear as paragons of normality. The vast, vast majority of them are just preference or kink or taste, not violence and abuse.

But when violence enters the picture, it most certainly is our business.

It was only a poor poll, not a child with a broken collarbone or a wife terrified by a gun to the head, that ultimately brought about this discussion. No one in the MAGA party really cares about the ex-wife or the child. They only care about one more seat.

The clock runs out at 4pm today.

I expect nothing from Max Miller.

He is an honorless, violent degenerate.

I expect even less of Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, the MAGA party, and its media allies. For them, Miller’s brutality and domestic violence are an inconvenience, not a dealbreaker.