Katie Miller’s Washington Rise Takes a Musk Detour

It was the three-word gavel-bang heard across Washington — the conversation-ender meant to cow colleagues and cabinet secretaries, deployed daily by a slight woman with a big job:

“Elon wants this.”

For months, Katie Miller, the all-purpose operative for the world’s richest man, had been entrusted to help execute Elon Musk’s merry rampage through the federal government, conveying his priorities, his vision, his likes and dislikes with the tacit force of an executive order.

When she spoke, Ms. Miller implied to Trump acolytes high and low, they should proceed as if it were Mr. Musk’s mouth moving.

Where he walked, Ms. Miller invariably followed, sometimes trailing him straight into Oval Office meetings — and occasionally finding herself gently redirected back out of the room by White House staff, an administration official recalled.

Mr. Musk even held court regularly off the clock at the home Ms. Miller shares with Stephen Miller, President Trump’s most powerful policy aide, and their three young children, according to people familiar with the matter.

Now, Mr. Musk is gone — or out of Washington, anyway — in a spectacular, market-moving, mutually vicious fireball of a breakup with Mr. Trump.

And life in the home of Katie and Stephen Miller has gotten complicated.

Mr. Miller is the millennial avatar of all that MAGA loves and liberals loathe about the Trump agenda. His loyalty to the president is unquestioned. Ms. Miller, a 33-year-old veteran of the first Trump administration, is a top lieutenant for Mr. Trump’s friend-turned-enemy-turned-who-knows-what-now. How and whether the present arrangement can be sustained is uncertain — and widely buzzed about in Washington, especially among the many Trump allies who do not entirely miss her.