Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, lashed out at a young Democratic operative on Thursday, after the Democratic Party’s official account called her husband an “ugly f–k.” The aggrieved wife of the top White House adviser posted the operative’s picture on X and ridiculed her personal life, declaring, “She’s 30, unmarried with no kids,” and adding: “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like.”
That liberal is Paulina Mangubat, 30, who writes many of the Democratic National Committee’s tweets as its deputy chief mobilization officer. After Katie Miller named her and posted her picture, the MAGA fury started rolling in.
I spoke with Mangubat Friday morning. The MAGA backlash has been swift, with people circulating images of her engagement photo shoot and insulting her and her fiance’s appearance. People are posting decade-old pictures of her while commenting on her appearance, weight, and even her happiness in life.
But in our interview, Mangubat stressed emphatically that this dust-up should refocus everyone on the real victims of the moment.
“Ultimately, this is not really about me,” Mangubat told me. “It’s about the people who are really being attacked by the Trump administration.”
This saga all started after MAGA extremist Ken Paxton won the Texas GOP Senate primary, after which the DNC posted a fairly conventional tweet that included a picture of the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, adding: “It’s time to take back Texas.”
That prompted Stephen Miller to tweet: “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” It’s a strange claim—Talarico is not transgender, though he’s spoken up for trans rights—but it’s obviously in keeping with the GOP strategy, which is to portray Talarico as woke and effeminate. Regardless, that’s the tweet that the DNC feed—Mangubat—responded to with “shut up you ugly f–k.”
Mangubat’s tweet was approved by the DNC. She says that the effort to make the Democratic Party’s social media presence more nimble and responsive is the much more important story here, especially given how well Trump and the GOP prosecuted the information wars in 2024. The DNC says its program has grown, pointing to an additional 6.3 million followers across all its social media platforms. It claims the programs have produced over 9 billion impressions since Trump took office.
Mangubat says that when Democrats did research into how to reach more people, “overwhelmingly what we heard is people want us to be more direct, speak more like real people, and be faster.”
Speaking like real people also means let them react in real time with real feeling—which is what happened here with Stephen Miller, Mangubat says.
“All we did was say what everyone else is thinking, which is, ‘Shut up—that’s not what people care about right now,’” Mangubat says. She added that there’s no reason to regret using the “ugly” moniker to describe Miller.
“What he’s doing is ugly—siccing federal agents on civilians, applauding when families are separated. It is ugly behavior,” Mangubat said. “The reason this happened is because Stephen Miller, who is one of the most powerful men in the country, decided that it would be a good use of his time to go on Twitter and hurl an untrue and transphobic attack against James Talarico.”
It’s worth stressing that the roots of this saga lie in the depiction of Talarico as transgender—and that this was intended as a vicious insult. Indeed, Stephen Miller went on a tear after this exchange, going on Fox News and ripping Talarico as soft and effeminate in every way he could. Miller derided Talarico as “transitioning to female,” mocking his testosterone count, and claiming Talarico’s blood is made of “soy milk.”
It’s also worth dwelling on the vision of masculinity that Paxton presents. His wife divorced him on biblical grounds, he’s been impeached and indicted while in office, and he has subjected LGBTQ people to relentless abuse.
But this is very much the MAGA vision of masculinity in action, according to Stephen Miller. During that Fox News hit, he described Paxton as a “real conservative” and “patriotic” and “God fearing,” while claiming that Talarico will be roundly rejected by red-blooded Texans, given their manly “pioneer heritage” and “frontier history.”
The roots of this saga, then, really lie in the MAGA-approved view that Talarico doesn’t count as a Real Man, while Paxton somehow does.
Mangubat, the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, tells me she was born in Louisiana and raised in Arizona. She said Katie Miller’s claims about her being an unhappy liberal are false.
“I feel very blessed in my life,” Mangubat said. “I love this country. It has given me every single blessing and opportunity in my life.”
The darker story underneath all this is that these days, going viral is the coin of the realm in our politics, and succeeding at this often requires what’s known as “dunking.” The question that all many Democratic operatives are trying to crack right now is: How to achieve virality? Does it really require dunks like calling Stephen Miller “ugly”?
One answer to that question can be found in this fact: That tweet about Miller now has more than 40 million views.
