I’m betting there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Max Miller. Just another take-a-number MAGA Congressman. Except that he’s not. He’s a personal favorite of Donald Trump, having worked in the Trump 1.0 White House; he accompanied Trump on that cynical June 2020 stroll to St. John’s Church so he could hold a Bible in front of the cameras. He’s the soon-to-be-former son-in-law of Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno, another MAGA dead-ender. That “soon-to-be-former” should have told you that there’s trouble in Trumpy paradise: Miller and the senator’s daughter, Emily, are in some extremely ugly divorce proceedings, apparently still ongoing. And oddly, he’s the nephew of the respected foreign policy analyst Aaron David Miller (our sympathies to him).
And now, he’s something else: in trouble in Ohio’s 7th congressional district, which leans Republican and which Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Stories have been popping lately that have detailed Emily Moreno’s allegations that Miller has gotten physically abusive with her—and even that Miller injured their then-two-year-old daughter, who, according to a recent Mother Jones report, returned to her mother from a night at dad’s place with a broken collarbone.
Miller denies all these charges vehemently. But they sure have roiled a race to which no one was paying a lick of attention. Indeed, the needle has nudged close enough to the red zone that Miller felt compelled on Sunday morning to release, via X, some documents that he claimed exculpated him entirely. He followed it up with a nearly 20-minute video he posted Sunday (“I have never abused our daughter,” he said, even alleging that day care workers may have harmed her).
Not to be outdone, just after Miller posted his material, Senator Moreno posted a statement on X that … well, what did he say, exactly? He didn’t explicitly call on Miller to resign. But he did say this: “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter. If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
Umm, by the way, lest you think the good senator is holding some sort of moral trump card here, I beseech you to think again. He’s a sleazeball too. He’s an immigrant from Colombia who made a fortune in car dealerships; so far, so fine—the American dream and all that. And the pre-MAGA Moreno, while no doubt conservative, used to do things like write op-eds back in 2014, when Cleveland was awarded the Gay Games, urging businesses and philanthropic groups to support the LGBTQ community and get behind the games.
But fast forward to MAGA Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown in 2024. How did he win? He owes his success in some part to the fact that he was running in red Ohio in a presidential year, sure. But Moreno was also the beneficiary of a barrage of innuendo-rich and often outright false ads accusing Brown wanting boys to compete in girls’ sports and men to invade women’s locker rooms. It was the only issue he had, and his campaign and affiliated groups spent millions on it.
Oh—I almost forgot. Moreno might have a more interesting private life of his own than is standard in MAGA land. During that 2024 race, the Associated Press reported that a user profile that appeared to match Moreno’s was found on a website called Adult Friend Finder “looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling.”
As you might imagine, this was concerning to party honchos (the story hit shortly before the GOP primary), some of whom, as the AP put it, “sought a review of data to determine his potential involvement. That review, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, linked the profile to Moreno’s work email address. The AP’s independent review reached the same conclusion.” Moreno, of course, denied it was his doing. His campaign told the AP that it was a “juvenile prank” pulled by a former intern, and they even produced the intern in question, who told the AP he was sorry about it. And, since he had Trump’s endorsement, he managed to skate his way through the primary.
So that’s who Bernie Moreno is. Gay, or whatever? (He’s married with four kids.) Fine, who cares? But if he’s gay and wins races with hateful anti-trans advertising and now opposes all things LGBTQ, which he does, well, people should care about that quite a lot.
One last thing to note on this topic. In a text message that became public during all the legal proceedings, Max Miller wrote to Moreno: “Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does. Enjoy the ride brother, I wouldn’t have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.” Better than your wife does. Hmm…I’d like to think that if my son-in-law had threatened to blackmail me, I’d have the guts to call on him to resign.
But enough! Let us depart this depraved world of Republican hypocrisy and get to know Miller’s Democratic opponent, Brian Poindexter. He’s a city council member in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, but much more interestingly than that, he’s a union ironworker. He’s been endorsed by nearly every major union and political figures from Bernie Sanders to Tim Ryan.
I watched his two-and-a-half minute intro video, and you should too. It’s impressive. When he utters the sentence “working people like you and me,” he isn’t pretending. And when he says “we’re working harder and harder, and we’re getting less and less,” it’s clear that he is a totally legit part of that “we.”
He’s the son of a union machinist and grandson of a union auto worker. Education? No Hotchkiss School for this guy (Graham Platner’s fancy private school). He went to a normal high school and has an associate degree from Cuyahoga Community College. I have some friends in Ohio who are involved in Democratic politics, and they say that Poindexter and his campaign manager, his old best friend, are the real deal.
Ohio’s 7th is an R+5 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That’s not ruby red by a long shot. In a wave election, it’s very gettable. I should stipulate that I know little about Poindexter; maybe there’s some stuff clanking around in his closet, too. But he’s an actual working-class person who talks plainly and relentlessly about how working people are getting screwed. He’s exactly the kind of person the Democrats need to send to the House—I wish there were 200 Brian Poindexters.
And Max Miller is exactly the kind of person who should not be in Congress. Even if he’s innocent on all the physical abuse allegations, he’s clearly an out-of-control person who, to put it mildly, can’t devote his full energy to serving the people of the 7th district. Given what appears to be his lack of moral compass, they, and we, should be thankful for that. Meanwhile, here’s hoping the Democrats have the sense to throw money at a man who appears to be a stellar candidate in a suddenly-winnable seat.
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