There Is No Bottom: Max Miller, Jim Jordan, and a Party That Chose Power Over a Child

There is a pattern here for MAGA, and it isn’t subtle: the accusation is never disqualifying.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

The Republican Party has never found an allegation it couldn’t rationalize its way past, so long as the man accused of it could still deliver votes. They heard the Access Hollywood tape and put Donald Trump in the White House anyway. Roy Moore, accused by multiple women of pursuing them as teenagers, came within a percentage point of winning a Senate seat in Alabama, of all places, before Doug Jones narrowly stopped him. Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh both sit on the Supreme Court today, lifetime appointments, having cleared confirmation hearings over sworn testimony the party decided it would rather not fully hear.

There is a pattern here, and it isn’t subtle: the accusation is never disqualifying. For a lot of these MAGA men, it is practically a badge of honor, proof that the deep state, the media, feminists, prosecutors, former girlfriends, current wives, teenage girls, or whoever else drew the short straw that week must be terrified of how effective they are. The allegation becomes campaign merchandise. The scandal becomes persecution. The victim becomes a Democratic operative with suspiciously good timing. It is never a moral emergency; it is an inconvenience to be managed, a news cycle to be outlasted, and a talking point to be handed to the guy with the microphone and the practiced shrug. This week, that guy was Jim Jordan, and the man he was shrugging for was Max Miller.

According to court filings, police records, and reporting from Rolling Stone, Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno — the daughter of sitting Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno — has accused him of scalding her chest and stomach with hot water from a skillet, holding a gun to her head, and shoving her into a wall hard enough to knock her to the floor. She has also alleged that their toddler daughter suffered a fractured collarbone and that a child-protection specialist observed bruising resembling a handprint. The county investigation into the injury did not produce a formal finding of abuse, and Miller has denied the allegations as false and politically motivated, because apparently even a toddler’s broken collarbone can be fed into the MAGA persecution machine.

But the child is not a footnote in this story or another exhibit for lawyers to slide across a table during a custody fight. She is the story. According to the same reporting, the little girl told her mother that “Daddy’s house is scary” and, more plainly, “Daddy kill you.” A two-year-old does not invent that sentence structure. She repeats what she has absorbed.

So when Jim Jordan sat down across from CNN’s Kasie Hunt this week and was asked directly whether Max Miller should resign, here was the full weight of his moral courage: “Look, this is a family matter. I know Max is a good man. I was up campaigning for him. I hope he wins re-election. He’s done a good job as a member of Congress, and we should all pray for his family.”

Read that answer again and notice who receives Jordan’s concern. Max is a “good man.” Max deserves reelection. Max has done a good job. Emily Moreno does not even get a name. Neither does the two-year-old girl who allegedly said that “Daddy’s house is scary” and “Daddy kill you.” Jordan folds both of them into the soft, politically convenient abstraction of “his family,” as though this were an awkward Thanksgiving argument and not a set of allegations involving a gun, scalding water, a fractured collarbone, and a terrified child.

Jordan is not praying for a two-year-old who told her mother that her father was going to kill her. He is praying for the containment of a political problem.