Max Miller

Max Miller is unrepentant. The Republican congressman from Ohio demands that we believe him, not his ex-wife Emily Moreno. He did not throw boiling water at her in order to injure her; it was “horseplay” that she enjoyed. He did not hold a gun to her head. He did not fracture his 2-year-old daughter’s collarbone or withhold her favorite bunny toy while she cried. All the other women are lying too. He did not assault Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary, by pushing her against a wall and slapping her in the face, and he never threw a dog toy at her. He did not push a girl out of his room and down the stairs while he was in high school.

Not only has the congressman denied Moreno’s claims, detailed in police reports and court records, and past allegations, but he has made it clear he’s not going to drop out of his race for reelection because the president of the United States has his back. As Miller declared in a video on X, “I’ll win in November.”

He might, actually. Although Miller has been sliding in recent polls, his district is solidly Republican. Plus, he is right about Trump, who called him “a good person” on Monday and said he’ll let “the families” figure out if he should resign. Miller’s colleague, Ohio representative Jim Jordan, similarly called him “a good man” and said he hopes he “wins reelection.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, the man of God, stressed allowing the “process to play out,” while asserting that “all sorts of domestic events” occur involving members of Congress and it’s not his “business to get engaged.” Miller does have some Republican detractors, namely his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who broke weeks of silence on Sunday to say that Miller is not fit for public office. John Thune, the Senate majority leader, said “it’s a family matter,” though implied that Miller could drop out of his race “to probably end all the speculation.”

But Miller carries on. In a chaotic CNN interview, he suggested that he has dirt on Senator Moreno, which he may choose to unleash, and said he follows the president’s example by dismissing the allegations. The logic makes sense. Republicans aren’t holding Miller to a consistent moral standard because they can’t. A decade into the Trump era, the party is rife with men who stand accused of domestic abuse, sexual misconduct, or another profound ethical failure. The party’s response to each case varies wildly, depending on the identity of the alleged perpetrators and their proximity to the president. This week, as the Miller case grabbed national headlines, Representative Chuck Edwards announced he would not run for reelection after the House Ethics Committee recommended he face censure for sexually harassing his staff.

Other men facing accusations either kept their jobs or rose to higher positions. Jordan, the Ohio congressman, allegedly ignored the sexual abuse of Ohio State’s men’s wrestling team. Multiple women have accused Representative Cory Mills of Florida of physical abuse and sexual misconduct. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has been accused of rape and domestic abuse. And the former wife of Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said during divorce and custody proceedings that he choked her until she bit him in self-defense. (Jordan, Hegseth, Mills, and Parnell have each denied the allegations.) On Wednesday, a Republican state lawmaker in Arkansas, Austin McCollum, resigned after he was arrested for allegedly pressing his knee into his wife’s neck until she struggled to breathe; he’s scheduled to be arraigned next month.

The GOP does not have a monopoly on abusive men. On the Democratic side, sexual-misconduct allegations ended the political careers of Eric Swalwell and Graham Platner, both of whom have denied the claims against them. Generally, though, one party is more likely to draw a line on misogynist abuse. Prominent Democrats quickly withdrew support for Swalwell and Platner when the most serious claims surfaced and they exited high-profile races.

But Republican men, like Miller, look to Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 a known chauvinist who boasted of grabbing women by the pussy. Republicans nominated Trump in 2024 even after a jury found him guilty of sexual abuse, which, like other misconduct allegations, he has denied. In that sense, it’s predictable to see the GOP largely dismiss a credible story of abuse But the situation is more complex than a cult of personality. Although Trump does share much of the blame for his party’s aversion to accountability, he is more like a catalyst than source. Most Republicans lacked the courage — and the ideological commitments — to reject Trump then or condemn Miller now, but the party’s moral collapse was underway before 2016.

Like Trump, Miller is the beneficiary of a party that prioritizes ideological conformity over character and has never shied away from cruelty or the dehumanization of its foes. McCarthyism destroyed lives on the basis of rumors and a disregard for the constitutional rights of the American left. The southern strategy was designed to disenfranchise Black Americans in order to elevate and protect the power of white conservatives. In the 1970s and ’80s, right-wing Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell made common cause with the party, which shared their anti-communist convictions if not their views on issues like abortion. The Christian right offered a loyal voting bloc in exchange for cultural transformation, including a hierarchy with men at the top. Michael Sean Winters observed in a 2012 essay for The New Republic that “the most profound impact” that Falwell “had on the modern GOP was that he promoted the language and the logic of orthodoxy in conservative politics.” To Winters, Falwell, a co-founder of the Moral Majority, “paved the way for the emergence of a Republican Party that is incapable of compromise, in which moderate Republicans are seen as betrayers” and the fringe rises inexorably to power.

The gender traditionalism of the Christian right has helped ingrain misogyny in the party. Few have argued openly that women are inferior to men. Instead, activists focus on banning abortion, which can unbind women from the home and their place under the authority of men. In fact, arguments against the right to abortion are couched, often, in the language of protection or chivalry, as activists and legislators swear to guard women from making a murderous and personally disastrous choice. As the scholar Mary Ziegler argued in 2013, “women-protective arguments” by conservatives in the legal realm tend to promote “abortion restrictions on the basis of the physical or psychological harms supposedly produced by the procedure.” In practice, of course, women suffer enormously under abortion bans; sometimes they even die. Without access to reproductive choice, they lose autonomy in their personal and professional lives, and hierarchy lives another day.

Today, it’s difficult to find a Republican lawmaker at the local, state, or federal level who breaks with reactionary gender politics. Even Trump got in line on abortion, which he once said he supported, and the “Groyperfication” of Republican staffers may embed far-right views of gender along with racism and an intolerance for dissent in the next generation of the party. Back in 2012, Winters blamed Falwell, in part, for “a coarsening of discourse and increased ideological rigidity” designed to score victories at any cost, which transformed compromise into a secular version of heresy. Falwell and his allies also linked their interpretation of the Bible to a war on communism and the social safety net. Big government was a threat because it intruded on the natural order of the family and the authority of the church; Winters wrote that Grover Norquist was “as much Falwell’s heir as any preacher.” The activity of the Christian right offers the clearest through-line for the widespread and violent misogyny of the GOP today. Trump’s contribution is to make subtext explicit. He could not have become the Republican nominee in 2016, 2020, or 2024 without winning over conservative Christians, who saw something they liked in his abusive masculinity. Every household needs a strong father.