You should keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and Stephen and Katie Miller as far away from your general vicinity as humanly possible. Many people will not need to be told this. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, is famous for masterminding the first Trump administration’s family separation policy and Muslim ban. His wife, Katie, is similarly enthusiastic about mass deportation and has reportedly said she didn’t feel compassion for families separated at the border. Stephen met Katie when they were both working in government, but she has since left politics to start a podcast. Now she asks guests such as JD Vance important questions such as: is a hotdog a sandwich?
While I may not need to inform you that the Millers are bad news, it seems Dr Anthony Fauci is only just getting the memo. The former top US government science adviser, who helped guide the country’s Covid-19 response, was forced to appear at a US Senate committee hearing last week. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky framed the hearing as an investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Really, however, it was an opportunity for Republicans to harass Fauci, who is widely loathed among the Maga base. He has become such a target of vitriol that Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office in case he was prosecuted by the Trump administration.
While the Millers were not directly involved in the Fauci hearing, they did make an interesting cameo. Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s diary from 2019 to 2022, which revealed that Fauci regularly talked to Katie, then a communications aide to vice-president Mike Pence, about her health concerns.
“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day,” Fauci wrote in notes dated 9 May 2020. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone.”
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Fauci seemed to like Katie, who he described as “tough, smart, but great”, and she seemed on good terms with him. Fauci also sent the Millers a baby gift and, per his diary, the couple called him to say thank you. “We had a nice discussion about life after Trump,” he wrote in December 2020.
I don’t think any more gifts are going to be exchanged, however, because Katie has thrown Fauci under the bus. It’s very embarrassing for a Maga bigwig like her – someone who has amplified vaccine-sceptic views and publicly called for Fauci to be jailed – to be revealed as having privately asked him for medical advice. Katie has tried to explain away the relationship by insisting that she had simply been feigning friendship as part of a cunning plan. Katie told the political news website Notus that she’d been cordial with Fauci so that he “did not leak against me or my husband”. She added that she understood “how to manage somebody like him”. Some of the information about her seems to have been redacted. Notus reports that the original Fauci journal entries released “mentioned Katie Miller 56 times, while the redacted document mentioned her 37 times”.
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After the diary entries became public, Katie attacked Fauci on social media and accused him of being fame-hungry. “Every man who has a journal is a narcissist,” she wrote on X on Thursday. “Dr Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponised my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandise himself. As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer … this man should be in prison.”
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Katie isn’t entirely wrong about Fauci enjoying fame. His journal entries contain cringeworthy details about flattering press coverage and celebs fawning over him. Julia Roberts, he wrote, “said that every time she sees me her throat gets dry and she gets nervous”. Barbra Streisand apparently also chatted to Fauci about vaccines. “Had great call with Barbra Streisand,” he wrote in February 2021. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on Alexa. She really did not know what Alexa was. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening …”
Still, this was a private journal, and we’ve all been embarrassing in private haven’t we? Plus, if Roberts was gasping over me, you best believe I’d be telling dear diary. Fauci getting carried away by his sudden fame is understandable; there is no vaccine for being cringe. One day, however, I hope there will be a cure for the harm people like the Millers have inflicted on the body politic.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
