Max Miller

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Just after 10:30 a.m. on the last Monday in September, Max Miller, the 37-year-old Republican congressman from Ohio, representing the state’s Seventh District, took a seat at a table in a conference room at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel. He wore a white quarter-zip rugby sweatshirt — zip down, collar popped, sleeves rolled half up — and slouched, sometimes swiveling in his leather chair.

Until recently, Miller — a former Trump protégé, moderately effective in Congress — was little known outside Washington and Ohio. But over the past five months he’d entered the national stage through a series of alarming allegations. As he summarized in August: “I’ve been portrayed as an abusive husband, an abusive father, and a violent man.” His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Republican senator Bernie Moreno, had decided repeatedly not to press charges against him, but she’d accused Miller, in legal filings and police interviews, of throwing her against a wall, scalding her with boiling water, and holding a gun to her head. In the winter, Miller had been investigated after their 2-year-old daughter was discovered to have a broken collarbone. (The local prosecutor’s office found there was “insufficient admissible evidence” to support moving forward to a grand jury, and neither Miller nor anyone else was charged with a crime.)

Miller was at the Hilton to be deposed by his ex-wife’s lawyers, as a part of their ongoing dispute over their divorce settlement — Moreno was now fighting for full custody of their daughter. The accusations against him darkened the edges of the room.

Though on occasion he’d previously come across as a bit pompous and self-righteous when he talked about these matters in public, he’d always seemed to take the accusations as serious, denying them all, and to strive to project sincerity. But the Max Miller now, at the head of the long table of lawyers, three of his facing off against four of Moreno’s, presented as someone very different. At times he wore a contemptuous smirk. Flipping through court documents, he muttered, “There’s so much crap here.” Pressed to clarify a factual detail, he replied, “I don’t remember what I had for breakfast.” He often gave the impression he was above it all, as if this whole undertaking was ridiculous.

Whenever he chose, he would stonewall, sometimes finding five or six different ways of refusing to answer a direct question. Whenever he preferred to, he’d answer a “yes or no” question with a diatribe or an anecdote that he appeared to find satisfying or amusing. One that he seemed to particularly relish, overruling his lawyer’s efforts to quiet him, was his explanation for something he was alleged to have said while his wife was giving birth — that the experience was like “watching a playground being set on fire.” He insisted, grinning, that the words had come from a hospital nurse. Repeatedly, he insulted Moreno’s lawyers, referring to them as “savages” and “awful”; their line of questions, he said, half-smiling, was “so sadistic.”

At one point, he was asked a question that referred to something he’d allegedly said some weeks before in a courthouse hallway to one of Moreno’s lawyers. According to a filing, he’d told the man his fiancée was “not much of a looker” and “insinuated that she was a prostitute,” saying he could find women like her “on a street corner for $10.” At the Hilton, Miller was prompted to answer “yes or no” regarding the “not much of a looker” part, and leaped in with apparent glee: “That was in response to him saying … that my girlfriend was good at sucking cock.”

Miller had many times called his situation, and his ex-wife’s claims, “sad,” painting the experience as a painful ordeal. His recent legal filings had described the toll as “significant ongoing mental distress, fear, anxiety, emotional harm, and fear for safety, reputation, and parental rights.” But for much of that day in September, roughly a month from Election Day, Miller appeared to be having fun.

Miller is in many ways a middle-of-the-road Republican: He talks about minimizing taxes, increasing funding for law enforcement, and “securing” the southern border. He’s against Trump’s tariffs but defers to the president’s authority on the matter, has argued for guardrails on AI, and favors more legal immigration to combat population decline. In his next term, he’s said, he wants to push for a more diverse energy policy, including wind power, despite the president’s disdain for it.

His constituency is likewise red but moderate. Some of the biggest towns in his district — suburban and rural, from a swath of northeastern farmland up to Cleveland and the edge of Lake Erie — swung for Obama in his first presidential run. Miller won his seat comfortably in 2022 and 2024, and, according to the 2025 Cook Political Report’s partisan-voting index, the district currently leans Republican by five points. For Miller, the election on November 3 is most likely to hinge on what voters believe about his personal story.

Miller was born into a wealthy Ohio family whose fortune was made several generations before in forestry and real estate. After graduating from Cleveland State University in 2013, he joined the Marine Corps Reserves (he would serve for six years), and in 2015 he got his first foothold in politics after a cousin brokered an introduction to members of Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. Miller subsequently pivoted to the Trump campaign and, after Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, became one of the cadre of young operatives in the first-term White House, eventually becoming a key advance man.

Questions about Miller’s personal behavior first made it to the press in 2018, when a Washington Post story about inexperienced and poorly vetted staffers in the Trump administration detailed Miller’s history of “assault, disorderly conduct, fleeing an officer and underage drinking,” pointing to a number of incidents including one in 2010, when he, at the age of 21, was arrested for fighting outside a Cleveland Heights hookah bar at around two in the morning, punching through a glass door and leaving a trail of blood from his wrist. Miller told the paper: “Growing up, everyone makes mistakes. Who I was in the past is not who I am now.”

He moved through various positions in the first Trump White House and, in 2020, pivoted to working on the reelection, becoming a deputy campaign manager. After Trump lost that November, Miller was appointed senior White House adviser for the remainder of the term, and in that role, he helped to make practical arrangements for the January 6, 2021, rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. In his later testimony to the January 6 committee, he would call its investigation “an abuse of power,” but he was less combative than some. Miller had gone home 20 minutes into Trump’s speech on January 6, his job done, and he told the committee, “What happened on that day is horrific. People who broke the law and breached the Capitol should be held responsible and accountable … and unfortunately we will have to relive it every year and then teach our kids this day in history so they never forget it.”

Miller remained in Trump’s good graces, and in February 2021, Trump endorsed him in a primary challenge against Republican incumbent Anthony Gonzalez, who had voted to impeach the president. That June, when Trump reemerged from Mar-a-Largo seclusion to give his first Biden-era rally, he would do so in Wellington, Ohio, alongside Miller. There, Trump offered up a characteristically rambling elegy — “an incredible patriot … Max, great guy … a trusted aid of mine … he’s got a passion for this country like you wouldn’t believe” — and in return Miller told the crowd, “I have never had a greater role model than President Donald J. Trump.”

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