Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill.
Two weeks ago, ahead of a fund-raiser that Mike Johnson, the House speaker, was holding for Herrera, The Austin American-Statesman reached out to Herrera’s campaign about these resurfaced comments. Herrera’s team responded with a crude visual pun that, once again, is too vulgar for me to describe here.
I can, however, tell you about the Nazi and eugenics stuff. In a 2022 video, Herrera and a buddy in sunglasses and a balaclava tested a Nazi-era submachine gun, then goose-stepped to a Nazi marching song. Herrera called the weapon “the original ghetto blaster.” In a 2024 podcast, after calling for abolishing Social Security, he joked that we should also “abolish old people,” laughing along as his co-hosts riffed about killing them off as in the cult horror film “Midsommar.”
Herrera became the Republican nominee in his South Texas district in March after the sitting congressman, Tony Gonzales, withdrew due to a sexual harassment scandal. Somehow, unlike Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat, Herrera hasn’t become a household name. I haven’t seen much public hand-wringing about the decision of the pious Johnson to raise money for Herrera, nor debate about what his candidacy means for the Republican Party’s attitude toward women, Jews or seniors.
That Herrera has flown somewhat under the radar is a testament to a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, as well as in our discourse about them. Thanks to Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans has become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.
I regularly speak to people who follow politics closely but haven’t heard of Cory Mills, a Republican representative running for re-election in Florida. One ex-girlfriend of Mills won a restraining order against him after saying he threatened her with revenge porn. Another, whom he was seeing at the same time, told the police he’d assaulted her, though she later recanted. (He denies both charges.) Mills is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of both sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Yet it barely made a stir when Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary, which takes place next week; polls show him ahead in the four-way contest.
Max Miller, a Republican congressman from Ohio, has, in recent weeks, finally breached what we might call the bad-even-for-Republicans line, due to allegations of truly horrific abuse of his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and his young daughter. Moreno — whose father is Ohio’s sitting Republican senator Bernie Moreno — claimed that Miller held a gun to her head, threw scalding water at her, and broke their 2-year-old’s collarbone. Two other women have also accused him of abuse. (He denies all these allegations.)
In a statement this month, Bernie Moreno wrote that Miller “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.”
The key word there was “if.” Consciously or not, Trump often seems to be trying to show that, especially when it comes to the treatment of women and girls, there are no such standards. At this point it’s tedious to recount all the times he has faced allegations of sexual assault, or to note that his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, paid off a Republican woman who said he raped her, though he denied the assault.
As The Bulwark’s Tim Miller often points out, Trump is devoid of empathy toward almost everyone except those accused of abusing women. His grace even, at times, extends to Democrats. When a woman came forward to say that Platner had raped her — which Platner denies — Trump responded, “A lot of people say big falsehoods.” Trump endorsed the former football star Herschel Walker in the 2022 Republican Senate primary in Georgia even though his ex-wife, like Emily Moreno, said the candidate had put a gun to her head.
So it’s not surprising that while Trump reportedly called Max Miller to express concern about his candidacy, he never publicly urged him to drop out. Indeed, Politico reported that Trump’s team intervened to stop other Republicans from pressuring Miller to leave the race. Last month on CNN, a fellow Ohio Republican, Representative Jim Jordan, called Miller a “good man” enduring a “difficult” family situation.
On Saturday, a key deadline for Republicans to nominate a replacement for Miller passed without much effort to push him out. Despite the plaintive hopes of Bernie Moreno, Republicans have shown that they do not consider Miller beyond the pale. In such a party, someone like Brandon Herrera barely stands out. The Republican Party of Sarah Palin once pretended to revere mothers while fear-mongering about death panels. Now it stands, above all, for male impunity.
Democrats recently moved Herrera’s district, which voted for Trump by 15 points, onto their target list, convinced that his comments create an opportunity for Katy Padilla Stout, a lawyer and former teacher from San Antonio, to flip the seat. So far, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, no Republican has broken ranks to endorse her. This is predictable. In most ways that matter, Herrera is one of the party’s own.
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