Katie Miller, who is married to one of the president’s most powerful aides, sat cross-legged in a tank top and bluejeans, facing her new YouTube audience.
“Welcome to my living room,” Ms. Miller said, as though doing her best imitation of an “MTV Cribs” guest star. “You may be wondering what I’m doing here, hosting a podcast.”
What Ms. Miller was doing here is a tale that goes back to early June, when Elon Musk, who was then her boss, began publicly feuding with her husband’s boss, President Trump. Immediately, Ms. Miller’s position seemed to many observers awkward and potentially untenable. How would she serve Mr. Musk while being married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff?
She would not. Last week, Ms. Miller announced she had left Mr. Musk’s orbit to follow in the great American tradition of starting a new show.
“This podcast is meant to be in my own words,” Ms. Miller told The New York Times, adding that she had “no thoughts on monetization yet,” meaning advertising or paid subscriptions. Her target audience is conservative women, she said in her introductory video, particularly working mothers interested in healthy living.
“There isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online,” Ms. Miller argued. Except there is — and it’s booming.
Though the election set off alarm bells on the left about the ballooning “manosphere,” the web of male-focused shows offering tips on weight lifting and jokes about wokeness, there is a growing set of similar female-targeted and female-hosted podcasts, too.
These shows do not focus on electoral politics first, but rather on pop culture or health and wellness — through a conservative lens. What unites them is a spotlight on lifestyle, and a steady drumbeat of emphasizing the merits of traditional family life over feminism.
There’s “The Brett Cooper Show,” hosted by a 23-year-old influencer who uses celebrity headlines to monologue against left-wing causes to more than 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. There’s “Culture Apothecary,” a Turning Point USA wellness podcast hosted by Alex Clark, who urges her followers to have more babies, eat more protein and swear off seed oils. There’s “Relatable,” hosted by Allie Beth Stuckey, whose focus is Christian faith.
On Substack, Jessica Reed Kraus, a vocal supporter of “Make America Healthy Again,” the platform of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publishes conspiracy theories and royal gossip in between visits to the White House, Mar-a-Lago and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. Like a MAGA version of Glamour magazine, The Conservateur offers fashion advice; like Cosmo, Evie Magazine shares sex tips (for wives). These creators believe their market is growing.
“It could be difficult to be sold this bill of goods that if you pursue your career and singleness and girlbossness until you’re 35-years-old, then you’ll be able to find your fairy-tale romance and satisfaction — and then to realize it’s actually more difficult than that,” Ms. Stuckey said of her conservatism-curious audience in a phone interview on Tuesday with The Times.
“It’s not necessarily that they’re looking into Donald Trump or they’re looking into conservative policy to fill that void,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But they might start wondering about their philosophy and their ideology.”
Advertisers in this world include companies that sell grass-fed beef, colostrum and supplements to “detox” from birth control. Larger podcasting networks are warming to the genre’s earning potential; Ms. Cooper recently signed a deal with Red Seat Ventures, which sells advertising for podcasts from Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, among others.
So far, however, Ms. Miller has amassed about 3,000 subscribers on YouTube; “I just found out about her yesterday!” said Kate Salerno, 27, a devoted fan of Ms. Clark’s, who discovered Ms. Miller after another conservative influencer reposted the podcast’s introductory video. Ms. Salerno watched half of the roughly two-minute clip before being interrupted by her baby.
Podcasting is something of a pivot for Ms. Miller, 33, who has spent most of her career as a behind-the-scenes operator for various Washington figures, including Vice President Mike Pence. “For years, I’ve watched from the sidelines as people I know, people I respect, have hosted TV shows, radio shows,” Ms. Miller explained in her launch video. “I thought, ‘Hey, I can do that too.’”
This trajectory is just an updated version of a longtime White House tradition: When prominent officials leave their jobs, they often jump into paid contributor gigs on cable news.
Yet Ms. Miller, whose show will be weekly, offers a new variable to the growing “womanosphere”: White House access. Her first guest, in an episode posted on Monday evening, was Vice President JD Vance. True to her pitch, she focused on his personal life rather than his policies.
It is a roughly 45-minute segment tailor-made for any American who has wondered about the ingredients in Mr. Vance’s signature peanut butter and chocolate cheesecake (“mascarpone instead of cream cheese”) or which member of the president’s cabinet he thinks would “totally get rolled” by his children (Kelly Loeffler or Sean Duffy). He talks about guilty-pleasure television (“Emily in Paris”), classic rock (he is a fan of the 1990s group Mazzy Star) and whether a hot dog is a sandwich (“definitely not”).
“Maybe that’s what’s been missing in this space: You’re interviewing people like JD Vance, you’re asking, ‘How are you handling a toddler tantrum?’” said CJ Pearson, a 22-year-old creator and the co-chairman of the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council. “Those aren’t questions Theo Von is going to ask him. They’re not questions that Andrew Schulz is going to ask him.”
Ms. Miller has positioned her show as the right-wing answer to Alex Cooper’s popular podcast, “Call Her Daddy.” She said she would focus on lifestyle — fitness, food, parenting — instead of politics. But that focus may be a touchy two-step for someone who can call in the vice president for an interview on Day 1.
“You don’t want to just be a podcast that sticks happy faces on complicated people,” said David Axelrod, who went from being a senior adviser to President Obama to later starting the podcast “The Axe Files.” Mr. Axelrod said his own conversations with politicians often looked at intimate parts of their lives, but the questions he chose were “probing.”
“Certainly if you score an interview with the vice president, there are a few things that he’s involved in that might be of interest to people,” Mr. Axelrod said.
To Sean Spicer, who jumped from being Mr. Trump’s press secretary to a host of a daily podcast — making stops to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” and anchor a nightly politics show on Newsmax — this is all a question of branding.
“Do you want to be the person saying, ‘Hey, I can bring you inside of JD Vance in a way no one else can, I can show you what his morning routine is’? Or do you want to have a discussion about policy?” Mr. Spicer said. (Mr. Vance said he wakes up before Usha and his children; if he gets up early enough he works out, if not he walks the dog.)
Ms. Miller’s first episode steered clear of the news of the day, but she did engage Mr. Vance in a game of “Cabinet Confidential.” “Who is sitting next to you on a long haul international flight as your seatmate?” she asked him.
Mr. Vance chuckled, pondered and replied, “Maybe your husband, actually.”
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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