The Devil’s Advocates

There’s a scene in the classic 1997 horror film “The Devil’s Advocate” where Charlize Theron finds herself in a changing room with the other wives at the high-powered law firm that just hired her husband. A darkness lurks behind all of the luxury and hospitality since the founding partner of the company is actually Satan in the form of Al Pacino. As the women try on couture and sip champagne, they reveal themselves as demon hellspawn when their faces begin to morph and twist into distorted grimaces. 

It’s truly a fantastic movie, and I have thought of the shopping scene many times over the years when attending various Trumpworld parties in Washington and New York. There is, of course, a darkness lurking among the very ‘90s rococo, dated, black tie fetes popular with President Donald Trump and his cronies. It is beyond disturbing to find yourself clinking glasses and sharing hors d’oeuvres with the people who are dropping bombs, disappearing families, persecuting their political enemies, and looting the public coffers on a daily basis. The prevalence of “Mar-a-Lago face” and garish pancake makeup among the women (and men) at these ghastly events only makes the resemblance to Pacino’s demonic hordes hit harder. 

In today’s Washington, these types of hellish scenes seem to be playing out at one of the capital’s most terrifying places: the home of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie. 

Earlier this month, Vanity Fair published a fascinating look into how Katie is “becoming MAGA DC’s premier hostess” at the couple’s home. The story noted their parties have featured Cabinet secretaries, law enforcement officers, and other White House staffers. Recent bashes included a celebration of the confirmation of ethically challenged Attorney General Todd Blanche and a birthday-slash-farewell party for outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before she dipped out through the administration’s revolving door into Fox News. Leavitt’s grand goodbye at the Miller manse featured cookies decorated in icing that spelled out MAGAworld’s aversion to transparency, reading “No More Questions.” 

Katie Miller has refashioned herself as a podcast momfluencer after stints working for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security — which oversees ICE — and for race-obsessed billionaire Elon Musk. She has also seemingly used her party-planning cachet to land guests and distribution for her show despite its middling traffic numbers. The spectacle of all the dealmaking and schmoozing against the backdrop of rampant corruption and cruelty that has defined Trump’s second term is made all the more grotesque since the Millers are two of the most extreme figures in the president’s orbit. 

Stephen Miller has long been known as the mastermind of many of the sickest aspects of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. He is also one of the White House advisers who most frequently and openly engages in borderline white nationalist rhetoric with bromides about the supposed cultural supremacy of native-born Americans. Just this week on X, Miller posted that low school test scores in the Golden State were due to children who were not “California kids.” That type of comment suggesting there is some population inside America that is inferior and un-American is something of a MAGA and Miller specialty. It is almost certainly an attack on minorities and immigrants that’s stated just indirectly enough to offer the thinnest degree of plausible deniability. 

Since stepping into her new role as an influencer, Katie Miller has  gotten far more explicitly racist. Along with dabbling in the debunked New Age conspiracies that have become a staple of the MAHA wing of the Trumpian right (Vanity Fair pointed out the Millers’ parties have featured chefs that cater to the pro-raw milk and anti-seed oil preferences of the RFK Jr. set), Katie has used her platform to espouse blatantly white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric.

“In America, foreign-born women … they’re having 25% of the births in the United States. Foreign born have more children than that of native born,” Miller said in one appearance this week where she railed against the “rape of Europe” and “unfettered migration” both here and abroad. 

“That is what happens when you have this replacement of civilization,” Miller added. “For societies to grow and societies to flourish and for there to be bonds to be between you and I … it has to have this common culture and, unfortunately we’ve lost that.”

The accounts of the festivities at the Millers’ home shows how common and accepted these racist views are  in the upper echelons of the Trump administration. 

To add to the dystopian vibe, Vanity Fair noted the Millers are among the Trump officials who have taken to living on military bases around Washington, D.C. These moves have been made to avoid public anger, protests, and the threats that come along with them. As a result, all of the crudites, Hibachi chefs and pizza trucks being enjoyed at Katie and Stephen’s parties are being shared behind barbed wire. 

In the article about the scene, Vanity Fair noted Trumpworld has operated under a sense of victimization and siege mentality, particularly in the diverse and largely liberal confines of Washington. These are people who see one of their own being turned away at a fancy restaurant as an outrage far worse than inhumane immigration detention camps. 

“It’s hard for anyone in the Trump administration,” Leavitt somehow told the magazine with a straight face. “So why not just create our own parties with our own friends?”

This article exposed the sick world of extremist parties taking place under high security in America’s center of power. Even some of the old elite seem turned off by the scene. Whenever there is a discussion of Washington society, reporters tend to seek out a quote from the quintessential Georgetown doyenne Sally Quinn. In this story, the famed hostess once again espoused the perhaps mythical idea of a bygone bipartisan party scene in the city. 

“When the five o’clock bell rang on the Hill, in the old days, that’s when they’d get out the bottles of bourbon and start drinking together,” Quinn said. 

Even Quinn, whose desire to paint the ancient political class as a bastion of civility has always seemed out of touch, recognizes things have changed now. 

“When Trump got elected the first time, that’s when the whole thing fell apart,” Quinn told Vanity Fair. “That’s when people stopped talking to each other.”

Things are different at the Miller home. It’s spooky season. The people sipping champagne are demons. Their faces are morphing and distorting before our eyes. 

The Rise of Rationalist Media

The day after federal agents raided Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence, I received an email from the prediction market Polymarket with the subject line: “World War Eleven.” If your brain hasn’t been fizzled by X fumes, “World War Eleven” is a reference to Omar’s misreading of the roman numeral in World War II while promoting the “Neighbors Not Enemies Act.” Naturally, it became a right-wing meme and then, of course, the Trump admin’s nickname for its operation targeting Omar’s immigration status. That Polymarket would use provocative right-wing framing for its daily newsletter was hardly surprising. The previous day, their newsletter’s subject line was: “The Texas Flu” — a reference to the MAGA conspiracy that Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail because he was in a mental hospital in Ohio after a nervous breakdown (in fact, he had the flu). The body of the email featured a post from a user named Gaetan Dugas (not even going to attempt to unpack that one) who claims to be a top 1% trader on the prediction market Kalshi and whose tweet jokingly promoted the mental hospital conspiracy. To the extent that Polymarket editorialized the issue, it was to explain that regardless of whether Talarico had the flu or had suffered a mental breakdown, the big news was that a few points had been shaved off his lead in the Texas Senate race.

For months now I have been receiving Polymarket’s newsletter, Polygraph, and the examples above are far from outliers. Likewise, on X, Polymarket has been semi-secretly running accounts like NewsWire which often features headlines designed to excite a right-leaning audience. While it’s tempting to dismiss Polymarket as part of the online right’s milieu of gambling apps, crypto schemes, conspiracy culture, and try-hard transgressive politics, it might not be that simple.

As with gambling and crypto, prediction markets depend on a certain amount of what writer Max Read calls “suckerification,” where young men who hang out in right-wing spaces like X aren’t just the target audience, but the mark. What makes prediction markets, and particularly Polymarket, different from gambling and crypto is that they appear to have an objective beyond merely separating (primarily) young men from their money. As many before me have noted, and Katie Knibbs reported recently in Wired, Polymarket has clear ambitions to expand into a media company. And although they regularly post right-coded headlines to drive engagement to their markets, the push into media isn’t about promoting right-wing ideology, but rather the new ideological bogeyman on the block: rationalism.

By now you’re probably tired of hearing about the rationalists — the Silicon Valley pseudo cult best known for its embrace of polyamory, furry conventions, and believing that AI is a sentient God that may end humanity yet spending billions of dollars to be the first to build it anyway. That much of the recent discourse has focused on their weirdness (an understandable impulse when a group of people keep telling you they are building a doomsday machine) unfortunately misses the more salient point that a large and growing part of the population has already adopted the rationalists’ core concept of making decisions based on probabilities. While few of us are likely to think that software could have a soul or that effective altruism is the best way to deliver live-saving aid, many of us are comfortable making choices probabilistically. This may seem natural, and in some cases, it is. Statistical analysis has obvious social benefits, and plenty of industries and services couldn’t function without it. But we also need to draw a line between acting instinctively or according to internal values and/or judgement and opting to outsource our decisions to applied mathematics. Rationalists want us to keep blurring that line, and that’s where the prediction markets come in. 

It’s not a coincidence that prediction markets align with rationalists’ values. While the rationalists didn’t invent them, they’ve played a central role in building and popularizing modern iterations. Each year, the rationalists hold the Manifest conference at their Lighthaven headquarters in Berkeley, where they discuss the state of prediction markets and debate things like whether sports should have any place in them. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has deep ties to the rationalist community and describes the prediction market as a “truth machine” that uses a wisdom-of-the-crowd mentality to overcome personal or media biases (a big no-no among rationalists). He has also cited as inspiration the rationalist-endorsed concept of “futarchy,” in which the government essentially operates on the precepts of prediction markets. But in order for prediction markets to be useful at the scale necessary to run something as big as the government, you need considerable engagement from the populace.  

One way the prediction markets looked to drive engagement was to take a page out of the gambling industry’s capture of sports media and partner with legacy news outlets desperate for new funding to replace the ad revenue gobbled up by the tech industry. This may have worked to mainstream the prediction markets, but the portion of the population most likely to speculate on essentially a new form of gambling has mostly tuned out traditional news media. To reach this demographic, as John Herrman at New York mag explained, prediction markets filled the news and information vacuum created when traditional media left X. Using provocative right-coded headlines to garner attention, Polymarket then pushed the idea that prediction markets were a method of news consumption where you could have “skin in the game.” In practice, this meant that you could bet money on the outcome of a news event like whether the Strait of Hormuz would open by the end of the year. At a deeper level, it appealed to a desire prominent among young, alienated men on the internet not to be a passive observer or non-player character (NPC) in events they mostly engage with by scrolling on their phone. The darkest interpretation is that it teaches people to only care about news that can be understood, and bet on, through probabilities. And while consumers of traditional news media dwindle, adoption of prediction markets is increasing rapidly. 

As with most things coming out of the rationalist community, it’s hard to know how much true belief there is in the promise of prediction markets and how much is motivated by good old-fashioned profit motive. But considering that the primary obsession of the rationalists is aligning AI with human interests, it’s not crazy to think that if the rationalists can’t figure out a way to make the machines think like humans, they might try to get humans to think like the machines instead.

Kacey, 1. Kristi, 0.

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which Trump ambassador was forced to resign this week after a series of damning reports in the Wall Street Journal?
2. How many days did White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia last? a) 5 b) 4 c) 3
3. Which single individual has spent the most money on the 2026 midterms elections, and how much has this person spent?

Answers below

We’re Begging You to Stop Mainstreaming Christopher Rufo

From Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets to the Great Replacement theory, there’s hardly a far-right anti-immigrant talking point that conservative operative Christopher Rufo won’t contemplate. Yet he’s welcomed on New York Times podcasts and given Big Serious Profiles as a conservative thinker — someone whose ideas should be given real consideration. 

TPM’s Chris Mathias doesn’t see it that way. In an appearance on On the Media, Chris said, “I don’t believe that you can do a polite sitdown interview with someone like Rufo without him really advancing his agenda, and I would argue that that agenda is a white nationalist agenda — and that he is someone who deserves, I think, a lot more of our disdain and scorn than he does our respectability.” 

Listen to the full interview below and check out Chris’ recent coverage of Rufo’s fretting over the so-called “Indian question,” i.e. whether Indians can ever really assimilate to American society.

Beware the Witches of TikTok

I guess he’s hoping no one watches the clip. Ty Masterson, president of the Kansas State Senate and Republican nominee for Kansas governor, accused his Democratic opponent of engaging in “witchcraft” in her bid to win the election. “They’re doing witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship,” Masterson said of Sen. Cindy Holscher (D) at an event at Praise Chapel Wichita. “It’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing. Just in your face that way.” 

He was apparently referring to a TikTok video in which Holscher’s smiling 21-year-old daughter waves her hands around to a trending audio clip talking about “brujas” while her mom looks on indulgently. The text on the screen reads “Summoning a spell so my mom wins the governorship.” According to Masterson, this is evidence that the race is a “spiritual battle” in which “evil is maturing.” Think he’s onto something.

When Even Trump Thinks You’ve Gone Too Far

It’s hard to stand out as particularly ghoulish in the second Trump administration, but Pete Hegseth is doing his damndest. The defense secretary championed the idea of livestreaming the execution of the Army officer convicted for the 2009 Fort Hood shootings. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview promoting the broadcast of Maj. Nadal Halik Hasan’s execution. The proposal was met with bipartisan disgust, and even vice president JD Vance expressed skepticism. President Trump eventually intervened to cancel Hegseth’s gruesome Pentagon ceremony, saying, “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

A Hideous Precedent

Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case. TPM alum Matt Shuham returns to explain the Trump admin’s ghoulish mass detention policy, and how it goes beyond even the Japanese internment camps and 19th-century law requiring hard labor from Chinese immigrants found to be in the U.S. illegally.

Caption This…

This category is called No Words, but c’mon…what a rich visual! Weekender readers, send us your best caption ideas.

Trivia answers: 1) Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece 2) a. 5 days 3) Elon Musk, of course. He’s shelled out some $366 million so far.

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