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If you look carefully at news stories about Donald Trump, or flick on the archconservative network Newsmax, you might see the name Jason Miller appear. Here, being accused of trying to shut down ABC News’s real-time fact-checks during the presidential debate. There, falsely claiming that fifty-five ISIS terrorists “are running around the United States” as part of a “migrant invasion.”
He is not the campaign’s main spokesperson. Nor is he its most prominent strategist. But Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving media aides. He has not been dislodged by scandals, by international intrigue, by the attrition of working for a man whose greatest defenders would not call him a warm and cuddly employer, or even by January 6 and its fallout. He is, in some ways, an emblem of Trump’s orbit, and the kind of character required to survive as a conduit between the press and a candidate for whom an animating principle—and a key source of appeal to his voters—is a hatred for the press.
As Miller, who will turn fifty next year, told the Jewish magazine Ami three years ago, Jared Kushner told him in 2016 he was being hired because he’d proved he could “adapt and work with larger-than-life principals,” and that his job was simply to “amplify what [Trump] wanted to say…and fight back against the media.” The Seattle-born strategist has done just that faithfully through insurrection, indictments, trials, whatever trouble came Trump’s way and whatever message he was tasked to relay.
Miller has a long history working for scandal-plagued Republicans. At twenty-five, he worked for Jack Ryan, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Illinois opposite an upstart Democrat in Barack Obama. Ryan would withdraw from that 2004 race after his ex-wife alleged in divorce papers he’d taken her to “bizarre” clubs where he tried to get her to have sex with him in front of strangers. The end of Ryan’s campaign effectively cleared the way for Obama’s rise to the White House.
Just two years later, Miller was running the Senate reelection campaign of George Allen in Virginia when the candidate referred to an Indian American as a “macaca,” the Portuguese word for monkey and historically a racial slur. After Allen lost, Miller joined Rudy Giuliani’s ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign before moving on to become an aide to South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, whose political career was destroyed after he was caught in Argentina with a woman who was not his wife while he publicly claimed to be solo-hiking the Appalachian Trail.
In 2016 he worked on the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, where he used the “SleazyTrump” hashtag. Trump attacked Cruz’s family in return. Trump implied the Texas senator’s wife, Heidi, was physically unattractive and, with the help of a complicit National Enquirer, accused Cruz’s father, Rafael, of having been involved in the assassination of JFK. After Cruz’s campaign ended, Miller joined Trump.
“Jason is an incredibly talented and savvy operator; in a lot of ways his skill set is tailored for the Game of Thrones–like [atmosphere that] working in Trumpworld can be at times,” says Kurt Bardella, a former Republican political operative and current NewsNation contributor who knows Miller personally. “He’s maintained the balance of keeping total loyalty to Trump and also not overtly flying too close to the sun.”
Perhaps most importantly, Miller has shown that no matter how low his boss may go, he will follow. Bardella describes January 6, which prompted the resignation of numerous Trump administration officials, as a kind of loyalty acid test—one Miller passed with flying colors.
“If after January 6 you still sign up to work for Donald Trump,” Bardella says, “it’s very clear that you have no reservations about doing whatever is asked of you.”
Miller was in fact often in the room with Trump during that dark post-2020 election time. In sworn testimony before the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, he admitted he never believed the election was stolen by fraud and recoiled when Trump told the country that the election was “rigged.” He very quietly complained about it with Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, and even told the president himself that he didn’t believe there was substantial fraud.
Miller and Stepien were members of what became known as Team Normal, while the group led by Giuliani and Sidney Powell was known as Team Crazy. But Miller played both sides. It was Miller, for instance, who came up with the idea for the infamous November 19 press conference during which Giuliani, Powell, and Jenna Ellis spread baseless conspiracy theories (and Giuliani’s hair dye began leaking down his face).
He testified to House committee investigators that Powell’s wild—and patently false—claims about Dominion Voting Systems weren’t scrutinized by the administration until after the disastrous press conference. “[S]he didn’t have any facts, and then she was asked to produce them, and then I think she disappeared,” Miller told the January 6 committee.
When asked if the president was upset by the press conference, Miller indicated he was more rankled by the poor media coverage than the conveyance of wildly false information to the public.
“I know the president communicated that he thought the press coverage of the press conference was not good,” Miller said.
“Meaning how it would be perceived?”
“Meaning the post-press-conference coverage was not positive, even by Fox News,” Miller answered.
A.J. Delgado, now a single mother in Miami, worked with Miller in 2016 as a key Trump campaign aide. She was with Trump when he won the election (“He turned white. It was like, ‘Holy shit, this is happening,’” she recalls), and there was public talk of Delgado, a lawyer by trade, either taking a role in the new administration or getting a show on Fox. And she saw that Miller and Trump had developed a bond even back then.
“He would call Trump at the end of every day,” she recalls. “He’s very much a yes-man—there was never any pushback given. But I don’t think that explains what keeps him around, because everybody around Trump is like that.”
She was a rising star herself, and no one was more supportive of her than Miller, who was slated to become White House communications director. Then came trouble. The unmarried Delgado became pregnant with the married Miller’s baby.
When the scandal hit the news, a bitter six-year legal battle ensued in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over Miller’s child support payments for their special-needs son. Delgado says she was frozen out by Fox News and the Republican Party. And Miller lost his White House post.
But while Delgado has not yet regained her footing in GOP politics, Miller was soon hired by Teneo, a consultancy firm that Axios reported at the time was “adapting to a Trump-run world.” He took a job with CNN as a contributor for an additional stipend of $75,000 a year, according to financial disclosures contained in the child support court battle. CNN bumped his pay to $140,000 in 2018.
Miller stepped down from his job at Teneo after he called Representative Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, a “fat fuck,” among other pejoratives, on Twitter, over a perceived slight against then–Trump White House aide Hope Hicks.
In December 2019, Miller found a new employer in ex-Trump aide and currently jailed MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon, who paid him $20,000 a month to join in his War Room podcasts. (Eight months later, Bannon was arrested on a yacht on money-laundering accusations. He is currently in prison for contempt of Congress.) In July 2020, Miller returned to the Trump campaign with a stipend of $35,000 a month.
After the White House eviction, he remained on the Trump payroll. In March 2021 Miller joined Newsmax as a contributor at $120,000 per year, according to court documents. Then, in June 2021, he exited Trump’s employ with a new ambition: to become a media mogul.
The job was chief executive of a new social media website called Gettr, billed as a “free speech” alternative to Trump-deplatforming Twitter. His compensation package for the first year was a million dollars.
Gettr’s ownership was a matter of public dispute. It “had existed for nearly a year as a Chinese-language social media network” linked to a Chinese exile named Guo Wengui, reported Politico at the time. The yacht on which Bannon was arrested belonged to Guo, a property developer who has also gone by the name Miles Kwok, among others. Guo was a thriving member of the Chinese establishment until 2014, when he fled the country after being swept up in a massive corruption investigation.
Interpol issued a “red notice” for Guo’s arrest on related bribery, money-laundering, and fraud charges. As Beijing applied pressure on the US government to extradite him, Guo bought a membership at Mar-a-Lago and made Bannon chairman of his media company, GTV. Bannon hailed Guo as an anti–Chinese Communist Party hero.
Miller publicly said Guo was merely part of a “consortium of international investors” and had no influence whatsoever over operations. Gettr, he said, was his to run. He promoted the app eagerly on right-wing TV networks and YouTube channels, including a contest called the Get Truckin’ with Gettr Sweepstakes. “You have won yourself a brand-new F-150, fully loaded, for your support for free speech,” Miller told one contest winner after surprising him with a truck in his driveway. “This is what we do at Gettr: we’re making social media fun again, we’re making dreams come true.… Why don’t you sit behind the wheel? Let’s get a picture.”
Gettr struggled. Trump hadn’t joined, though Miller had publicly announced he’d created an account for him on the site. Bannon was the site’s main attraction, and it gained only three million users during its first six months.
In January 2022 Joe Rogan joined and was quickly followed to the site by a million of his followers. But he soon accused the app of “fuckery” and abandoned it. According to internal messages leaked to Mother Jones, Guo told Miller to try to win Rogan back “gentleman style.” “I was very humble when I spoke with [Rogan’s] producer yesterday,” Miller responded. Guo replied: “That’s why I love you, you’re a 100 percent gentleman.”
As the site foundered, Miller abruptly left it in February 2023 to rejoin his mainstay, Trump. “[S]eeing the current state of the country under Joe Biden I couldn’t remain sidelined any longer,” he announced in a statement to Politico.
Guo was federally indicted by the Southern District of New York a month later, accused of defrauding a billion dollars from investors in his media company and a pair of crypto firms. The Department of Justice accused Guo of “buying himself, and his close relatives, a 50,000 square foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and two $36,000 mattresses, and financing the $37 million luxury yacht” on which Bannon was arrested.
Prosecutors alleged that Guo, rather than Miller, was in charge of Gettr, and used “a series of shell companies” to control it. The site has since undergone wholesale layoffs, and though it’s still active, Miller, who’d said he would play an “emeritus” role for the app, hasn’t posted there since October of last year.
Receivers in Guo’s bankruptcy case are seeking to claw back some $21 million from Gettr that allegedly came from Guo. The trustee has also sued Miller personally to force the return of $353,269.23 in gains allegedly misappropriated by Guo that were transferred to him shortly before Guo filed for bankruptcy. Miller has said in media statements the money was part of his Gettr compensation package.
On July 16, Guo was convicted of nine of twelve felony fraud counts after a seven-week trial. His sentencing is scheduled for November 19.
Miller didn’t reply to two emails, including a list of detailed questions, seeking comment for this story. He doesn’t seem to much like reporters. Last October, he called Grant Stern, executive editor of Occupy Democrats—admittedly a partisan site, but still—a “worthless sack of blogger shit” and a loser (seven times) while telling him he looks like he lives “under a bridge and eat[s] goats.”
“You’re angry and think all of this unprofessional behavior phases me [sic],” Stern replied to Miller. “Really, I’m just here to see if you want to give a mature response to my reporting…. Whenever you’re ready to talk, you know where to have a discussion.” Stern, who has closely covered the court proceedings in Miami-Dade, said in an interview that he has come to feel that Miller’s skill is his nihilism.
After Harris surged in the polls, Miller amped up his own television appearances on behalf of his biggest client. While Trump has attacked his opponent’s racial identity, propagated QAnon conspiracy theories, and posted threats to jail his political opponents, Miller has stuck pretty squarely to the campaign’s focus on crime, immigration, and inflation.
In an appearance on CNN in August, Miller found himself being questioned about Trump’s having shared a vulgar post implying Harris made her career by providing sexual favors—and his defense was that the Republican nominee may not have known what it was he was posting. “I don’t know if the president even saw the comment that was on there,” Miller said of Trump.
When the campaign came under fire following a confrontation with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, Miller, on CNN, denied there was an altercation at all. Later the same day, the US Army, in a rare statement from the military regarding a political campaign, confirmed that a cemetery employee was “abruptly pushed aside” as the Trump team entered a restricted grave area to record a campaign promotion, directly contradicting Miller’s televised claim.
Bardella chalks up Miller’s flights from the truth to the candidate for whom he’s working, and he says Miller will continue to be a “vehicle of disinformation” as long as the public—and media—put up with it.
“Jason has lied, yes, but is that surprising when that’s what’s asked of him by his benefactors?” Bardella says. “Why would he not lie if it’s been instructed of him?”
Bob Norman has covered crime and corruption in southern Florida for nearly three decades.