Political combat is taking its cues from a seventh-grade cafeteria. The deputy White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has spent recent weeks demonstrating that he no longer even attempts to mask juvenility. Whatever wins, and in this instance, whatever deflects.
The political strategy of mirroring back the citizenry’s worst private impulses isn’t new. Miller clearly believes that if he performs the same childish, gossipy cruelty people indulge in their own private conversations — and does it openly, from the podium — he’ll be shielded forever by a flock who are more frightened of being held to that same standard themselves than of demanding better from their leaders. The fear does the work for him: hold him accountable, and you become the target, so you stay quiet.
The most recent target was James Talarico, a four-term Texas state legislator running for U.S. Senate. The substance was nonexistent. What Miller offered instead was a string of taunts about Talarico’s masculinity and meaningless attacks on his fabled, irrelevant diet. He claimed that when Talarico bleeds soy milk. He declared the candidate had “less testosterone than Jasmine Crockett.” He said Talarico looked like he belonged not “in the Senate but in a cabaret show.” He had already, days earlier, posted that Talarico was a “transgender Senate candidate” who was “transitioning into a female” — none of which is true; Talarico is neither transgender nor a vegan, the premise of the soy gag, and testosterone levels do not predict sound leadership acumen.
Read that back and try to locate the policy. There isn’t any. This is a man with, in the words of one observer, more raw governmental authority than almost any deputy chief of staff in modern history, choosing to spend a primetime segment on locker-room jokes about a state legislator’s hormones. The official who runs daily 10 a.m. calls bending federal agencies to his will is the same official workshopping “soy milk” material for a cable host’s amusement.
The tell is the giggling
What makes the episode more than a one-off is the company and the register. Watters “laughed hysterically,” by one account; “giggling,” by another. He honestly looked like he was being polite, like his personal reckoning with unjust pain and suffering at the hands of an immature maniac gone rogue is enough to demand seriousness from Washington.
The Republican National Committee chair was running the parallel track, calling Talarico “Tala-freako” and a “creep.” Miller’s own wife, a former Pence press secretary, reportedly melted down over the vulgarity of a reply to her husband’s transphobic jab — the lack of self-awareness being its own punchline. This is a peer group that has collectively decided the way to beat an opponent is to question whether he is man enough, and to do it on television, and to enjoy it visibly.
There is a name for an environment where the powerful single out a target, invent humiliating rumors about his body, recruit a laughing audience, and escalate when someone pushes back. It is not a name we usually associate with the building behind the North Lawn. The New Republic, naming Miller its 2025 “Scoundrel of the Year,” described his “ever-present unctuous smirk” as the look of a man “relishing the violent hatreds” his work unleashes. You can disagree with the magazine’s politics and still recognize the expression.
Why it matters more than it looks
It would be easy to file all this under “rude” and move on. The reason not to is that conduct is downstream of contempt, and contempt for norms in the small things tends to predict it in the large ones. The same official mocking a candidate’s testosterone count is the one who called a federal judge a “Marxist” pretending to be “President of El Salvador” when she ruled against him, and who has framed an independent judiciary as a “rogue, radical left” enemy to be overcome. The cafeteria voice and the contempt for the courts voice are the same. Let’s see what Miller has to say after judges smacked down several Trump-era actions and policies yesterday, including ordering the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and halting the $1.776 billion “Weaponization Fund.”
His defenders will say this is how you win now — that the insults land, that the audience eats it up, that decorum is a loser’s game. They may even be right about the tactics in the short run. But there used to be a baseline expectation that the people running the United States government would, at minimum, talk like adults in public. Miller has decided that expectation is optional. The soy milk joke is funny, in the way the loudest kid at the lunch table is funny to the kid who is smaller than him, right up until you remember he controls a meaningful slice of the federal government and is using the microphone to do this. Used to be that the kid targeted by the lunchroom bully grew into the most interesting adult at his class reunion. Now, adolescence insists on menacing well into middle age.
