Yet another member of Congress has been accused of mistreating women: Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio. With so many stories of politicians behaving badly oozing up of late — don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Chuck Edwards! — it can be hard to keep track.
But Mr. Miller deserves his own heap of scrutiny. The allegations against him are of domestic violence, rather than of sexual abuse or creepiness, and he is trying to wriggle out of what should be the scandal’s natural consequences. The congressman has requested that the House Ethics Committee open an investigation into the accusations. The inquiry is unlikely to provide clarity anytime soon, certainly not before November’s elections, but it will enable other House Republicans to say, “Not my problem.”
It is their problem, given the pattern of behavior Mr. Miller’s accusers describe — and Congress’s broader pattern of downplaying or ignoring ugly accusations against its members. If Republican leaders fail to push him out of the race, voters have every reason to feel that much more disgusted.
A former Trump administration staff member, Mr. Miller has been publicly accused by three women of violent behavior. The most recent is his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, with whom he is locked in a fierce custody dispute for their 2-year-old daughter. Ms. Moreno’s father is the Ohio Republican senator Bernie Moreno, who this week broke his silence to speak of Mr. Miller’s “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior.” The senator claimed, “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.”
The two other accusers come from earlier periods in Mr. Miller’s life. One, whose identity has not been made public, said that when she and Mr. Miller were in high school, he shoved her against a wall, sending her tumbling down some stairs, after she spurned his advances. Multiple witnesses have confirmed her story to reporters over the years.
The second is Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary who dated Mr. Miller during President Trump’s first term. The relationship went south after Mr. Miller reportedly slapped her in the face and shoved her into a wall of his apartment after she accused him of cheating on her. (In 2021 he sued her for defamation. The case was eventually dropped when both parties agreed to sign nondisparagement agreements, though new legal conflicts have emerged this summer.)
The Republican response so far has been uneven and largely underwhelming. A smattering of G.O.P. senators have said that Mr. Miller should withdraw from his race or resign, with some expressing solidarity with Mr. Moreno. (Montana’s Tim Sheehy got extra-spicy, calling Mr. Miller “a degenerate sociopath.”) Things have been much quieter on the House side, including among its Republican leaders. The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has called the charges against Mr. Miller “serious” but said he would let the Ethics Committee’s investigation play out. Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday, “I’m going to let the families figure that out.”
Mr. Miller has denied all wrongdoing, proclaiming himself the victim. He has insisted all three women are lying. He has made much of the fact that, despite multiple investigations into his behavior toward Ms. Moreno and their daughter, he has never been charged with a crime. His legal team conducted a document drop in his defense (which, awkwardly, for a time included a naked photo of his child). He has said that Ms. Moreno has psychological problems.
It’s as though the congressman looked at the Graham Platner meltdown in Maine and said, “Hold my beer.”
Let us acknowledge that this is a painful and sticky situation. Personal relationships can be messy, divorce even more so. (There is a reason Mr. Miller, in an unsettling CNN interview on Tuesday, appealed to divorced men everywhere to feel his pain.) I have little doubt that he has experienced some horrible moments along the way. Who among us wants to be judged by the worst moments of our private lives? The temptation to avert one’s eyes is strong.
But the dark pattern in the accusations is there, one that fits with Mr. Miller’s longstanding reputation as a guy with a bad temper and a thick streak of misogyny. Public questions about his behavior and temperament have been out there since well before he ran for office. In 2018, when he was a special assistant to the president, The Washington Post spotlighted Mr. Miller’s youthful run-ins with the law and past instances of violence. In 2021, during his first House run, Politico ran an article full of people talking about how scary he could be.
Mr. Miller has, in true Trumpian fashion, vowed to fight to the bitter end, and if that costs his party a seat, so be it. “I am never going to give up,” he told CNN. He said he would show “the same resilience” that Mr. Trump did “when people told him that he was going to struggle in 2016, and he became the 45th president of the United States.”
This “I’m just like Trump” defense is similar to what you hear from Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Republican Senate candidate in Texas. And it points to a core reason that some politicians assume they can brazen out even multiple accusations of very bad behavior. Because many voters — Republicans and MAGA voters, in particular, more than Democrats — are willing to overlook a multitude of sins in their candidates.
In a Politico poll from mid-July, 72 percent of self-identified MAGA Trump voters said they would stick by a Republican candidate facing allegations of domestic abuse, compared with 61 percent of all Trump voters from 2024. Only 39 percent of voters who backed Kamala Harris would stick by a Democrat accused of the same. Likewise, two-thirds of MAGA voters would excuse a Republican accused of sexual assault, 13 percentage points more than all Trump voters, while only 40 percent of Harris voters would stick by an accused Democrat.
It’s hard to know how much of this stems from MAGA voters assuming accusations are false and how much from the belief that the political stakes are too high to worry about such things as abusing women. Either way, Republican politicians would be mistaken to believe that most Americans are as lenient as MAGA die-hards.
Serving in public office is a privilege, not a right. Elected leaders should be held to a higher standard than: I have never been convicted of anything. Ohio voters gave Mr. Miller the benefit of the doubt in his first House run, based in part on Mr. Trump’s seal of approval. From what the congressman has shown us since then, he does not merit the continued faith of his president, his fellow lawmakers or his voters.
Mr. Miller has until Aug. 10 to withdraw and be replaced on the ballot. The congressman needs to go, for everyone’s sake.
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