Who Is Stephen Miller's Wife, Katie?

In January 2016, Stephen Miller joined Donald Trump's campaign as a senior policy advisor, and he wasted no time getting in his new boss' good graces. When Trump won the election later that year, Stephen was named Senior Advisor to the President as well as White House Director of Speechwriting. Before the end of Trump's first term, however, Stephen had secured another new title: husband. 

Katie Rose Waldman Miller had been working within the U.S. government since her early 20s, but it wasn't until joining the Department of Homeland Security in 2017 as deputy press secretary that she found herself in a position to meet her future husband, Stephen Miller. During the course of their courtship, Katie left the Department of Homeland Security to become press secretary for Congresswoman Martha McSally, after which she became press secretary for Trump's first running mate, former Vice President Mike Pence. Katie and Stephen's relationship continued unabated, and the couple were married in 2020. 

Although Katie Miller's profile was raised considerably when she joined the staff of DOGE in early 2025 after President Trump was elected to a second term, many people don't really know her backstory. Here's a further look into who Katie Miller is and how she got where she is today.

Born on October 4, 1991 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Katie Miller (née Waldman) was — like her future husband, Stephen Miller — born into an affluent Jewish family. Katie is the daughter of attorney Glenn Waldman and his wife, Sheryl Waldman. Specializing in business arbitration and mediation services, not to mention serving as an expert witness, Glenn has been named one of the Florida Legal Elite by Florida Trend Magazine since 2004 and has been Fort Lauderdale Illustrated's "Top Lawyer" for professional research services since 2020.

One can reasonably presume that the relationship between Stephen Miller and his father-in-law is relatively solid. After all, it appears Stephen and Glenn have worked together. In Stephen's most recent public financial disclosure report, he revealed that he is receiving $202,000 annually from Rushmore Ventures — a business entity tied directly to Glenn — for his services as a consultant.

Katie Miller attended Cypress Bay High School, a public school in Westland, Florida, where she was on the staff of the school newspaper, The Circuit. Alas, she apparently didn't make much of a name for herself during her tenure. "I never saw her take any initiative to do anything that would benefit the newspaper program," fellow Circuit staff member Cassia Laham told Vanity Fair in 2020. 

However, it sounds she did have the initiative to create petitions against staff members. During her senior year, Miller took issue with AP English teacher Simone Waite's teaching of the Toni Morrison's classic "Beloved." The themes of the book, which takes place after the Civil War, include the lasting trauma of slavery, but apparently, Miller believed this was not appropriate for class. Miller subsequently started a petition in which she described her teacher's curriculum as "psychologically damaging" and "sickening." 

After meeting with Waite, Glenn Waldman more or less determined his daughter should just switch into another class and move on. Waite, who is Black, sensed her former student believed she could challenge her without pushback. "I hesitate to say this, but it was about race. 'Here is a Black woman teaching me this novel by another Black woman, and saying things that I definitely do not agree with politically,'" she told Vanity Fair. "She did whatever was in her power to show something. It just didn't work."

When Katie Miller was a student at the University of Florida, she was involved in a student government scandal. In February 2012, 268 copies of the college newspaper, The Independent Florida Alligator, were thrown into the garbage before anyone could read them. While in the middle doing their dump, however, two students were spotted and identified: student senate president Jason Tiemeier and Katie Miller, then Waldman. The disposal was an apparent attempt to limit the number of people who would see a popular football coach's endorsement of a rival student politician.

"When Katie Waldman and I were walking around campus, I let my sense of competition get in the way of the integrity and everything I believe I have always striven for in my time at UF," Tiemeier wrote in The Alligator the following month. "I sincerely apologize to the members and staff of the Alligator, the university students and the members of SG."

In the wake of Tiemeier's confession, Miller claimed that she'd told Tiemeier at the time not to steal the newspapers, but that wasn't enough for The Alligator's Max Stein. So, he penned his own piece for The Alligator, blasting Miller's belated remarks. "I do not question her qualifications, passion or work ethic," wrote Stein. "I question her ethical and moral fiber. If she is telling the truth, then her hands are clean and she would have had nothing to fear by stepping forward when said events occurred. However, Miller did not step forward, and her silence speaks volumes about her and her involvement." Whatever the case may have been, Miller ultimately suffered no repercussions as a result of her apparent involvement.

Of all the factoids that have emerged about Katie Miller since she found her way into the public eye, the one that has caused the most curiosity is the claim that she has the acronym "YOLO" ("You only live once") tattooed on the inside of her lower lip. This information first reared its head in Evgenia Peretz's aforementioned Vanity Fair feature, "Stephen Miller and His Life Found Love in a Hateful Place," and it's a tidbit that's thrown out casually in the middle of a sentence: "Accounts from [Katie's] high school and college years bring into focus a woman with charm and energy—she had YOLO tattooed inside her lower lip—but it was always trained toward power."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no photographs of this tattoo have ever surfaced. That said, even though the claim has appeared in publications as far up the credibility ladder as The New York Times, Katie has never stepped forward to say that it isn't true. And so, the whispers of its purported existence live on.

Katie Miller didn't waste a moment in trying to make headway in Washington, DC, From November 2013 until February 2014, she interned for Rep. Paul Cook of California, after which she became a press assistant for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. By the beginning of the following year, however, she had secured a position as press secretary for Senator Steve Daines of Montana, which she held until February 2017.

As early as March 2014, however, Miller was proving that she could be counted on to do even the most ridiculous tasks, as evidenced by a 2014 BuzzFeed story which detailed how the aforementioned National Republican Senatorial Committee called upon Miller to play a joke on Senator Mark Begich of Alaska by delivering a birthday cake to his office. The large sheet cake was decorated with a photo of Begich shaking hands with President Barack Obama, along with the message, "Happy Birthday to the Senator who votes with Obama 97% of the time." 

This was a reference to Republican challenger Dan Sullivan's campaign, which claimed that Begich, who is a Democrat, almost always agreed with Obama — which was an unpopular stance in Alaska. (Though Begich voted for Obama, he did not align with the former president on a number of issues.) Evidently, Miller hauled the sizable cake through the building, brought it to Begich's desk, and bolted before his team realized he'd been pranked.

Katie Miller had experienced a few moments in the spotlight during the course of her first few years in Washington, DC, but they were nothing compared to what she experienced after joining Donald Trump's first administration as deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. 

This new position found Katie making regular appearances in front of the camera, including an October 2018 guest spot on Fox News where she claimed to Brian Kilmeade that a migrant caravan was some sort of ploy. "This caravan is being put together by NGOs and others mainly for media attention," she said. "You know, we've heard reports of these folks getting on buses and then getting off and walking for the cameras." The following year, Katie addressed reports of Border Patrol using tear gas on migrants at the border and defended the agents' actions. "Once again we have had a violent mob of migrants attempt to enter the United States illegally by attacking our agents with projectiles," she said, per CNN.

Katie also made it clear that she had no problem with children being separated from their parents. "My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I'll think about family separation differently," she told MSNBC journalist Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book "Separated" (via The Guardian). "But I don't think so." It was also during her tenure with DHS that Katie began her relationship with her now-husband, Stephen Miller. As she said on an episode of "The Alex Marlow Show," "Where does all true love happen? Over border security."

Katie Miller (née Waldman) first met Stephen Miller in 2018 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, when he was a senior adviser and speechwriter at the White House and she was on the Department of Homeland Security's public affairs team. They were introduced by mutual acquaintances, but between their shared political philosophies and ambitions, it didn't take long for them to forge a relationship. On February 16, 2020, Katie and Stephen had their dream wedding at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, officiated by Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone. 

Described as the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith of MAGA" in the 2020 Vanity Fair piece "Super Bad True Love Story," the Millers now have three children and, by most accounts, seem to still be thriving as a couple. "He is an incredibly inspiring man who gets me going in the morning with his speeches being like, 'Let's start the day. I am going to defeat the left and we are going to win.'" Katie said on "Jesse Watters Primetime" in September 2025. "He wakes up the day ready to carry out the mission that President Trump was elected to do." (In a particularly cringeworthy moment, Katie also praised Stephen as a "sexual matador," but the less said about that, the better. And don't worry, that wasn't Katie's only TMI comment about her marriage to Stephen.)

Before he'd even begun his second term as the President of the United States, Donald Trump had already publicly indicated where Katie Miller's place would be in his new administration. In December 2024, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, and announced, "Katie Miller will soon be joining DOGE! She has been a loyal supporter of mine for many years, and will bring her professional experience to Government Efficiency." What Trump did not offer — not then, nor ever — was Katie's title, but in an interview with Scott Jennings on his radio show, she referred to herself as "chief Elon [Musk] wrangler."

During the course of her time at DOGE, Katie and Musk apparently got along swimmingly, even if the same couldn't necessarily be said for Musk and Stephen Miller. What's more, when Musk decided that the time had come for him to step away from DOGE in favor of returning to run his own company SpaceX, Katie made the surprising decision to follow Musk, albeit in a nonspecific capacity. As with DOGE, Katie's title remained decidedly nebulous, and she wouldn't confirm if she officially worked for Musk or one of his companies. As she told Reuters in July 2025, "My paycheck still comes from him." 

After spending only a brief period of time working for Elon Musk outside of DOGE, Katie Miller decided that it was time to step away and do something on her own. That something was "The Katie Miller Podcast," which Miller introduced via a YouTube video that explained her reasons behind opting to go in this particular direction.

"For years I've seen that there isn't a place for conservative women to gather online," Miller explained in the video. "There isn't a place for a mom like me, a mom of three young kids — 4, 3, and almost 2 — and a wife, and trying to do a career, eat healthy, work out... There isn't a place for a mom like me. And so I wanted to create that space, where we have real, honest conversations with people across the political spectrum and across the world, to get lifestyle information, news, laugh with our friends, gossip about what's going on in the world from our perspective."

The claim that the conversations will be "with people across the political spectrum" seems dubious at best, at least as of this writing. So far, the guest list on the podcast has consisted solely of individuals who either have a direct connection to the Trump administration — Vice President J.D. Vance, Sen. Katie Britt, and Atty. General Pam Bondi, for example — or at the very least lean conservative. It's still early days, though, so perhaps things will change as the podcast progresses.

While making an appearance on Piers Morgan's "Uncensored" YouTube program on October 29, 2025, Katie Miller found herself in conversation with Cenk Uygur, co-host and co-creator of "The Young Turks," a progressive talk program that has been airing in one incarnation or another since 2002. On the episode of "Uncensored," Miller and Uygur participated in a panel which also consisted of former "The Biggest Loser" star Gillian Michaels and political analyst Omar Baddar, and it didn't take long for things to grow testy. While talking about Zohran Mamdani and Islamophobia, Miller accused Uygur of antisemitism, and Uygur pushed back. "It's very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying," Uygur said. "You and your husband are supposed to be working for America. Not for Israel. I think you're betraying this country." 

This set Miller off, and she told Morgan that she would stop appearing on the show if he didn't stop Uygur from making remarks that she deemed offensive. And then, then Miller took things even further, snapping at Uygur, "You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct." Uygur was born in Turkey and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

"It's deeply ironic that the people who claimed to champion free speech are now trying to deport people who speak out against them," Uygur told HuffPost after the war of words. "If Princess Snowflake tries to deport everyone she loses a debate to, then we're going to start to run out of people."