MILWAUKEE — U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, who is leading the Illinois’ 64-member delegation at the GOP’s national presidential nominating convention, on Tuesday blamed former President Donald Trump’s low standing in Illinois on the news media and said that if gun owners in the solidly blue state showed up to vote Republicans could “flip the state red.”
Miller, 64, symbolizes the new leadership of an Illinois Republican Party moving ever rightward in deference to Trump. Voted by her fellow state delegates to take the lead role in Milwaukee, her unwavering support of the former president, including a visit to his “hush money” trial in New York, puts her in politically good stead If he wins the presidency and the GOP maintains control of the House.
All three Republicans in Illinois 17-member congressional delegation are backing Trump but Miller has worked hard to court his support and he has called her a hard worker and an “America First Conservative” in backing her for Congress.
Miller’s comments on Tuesday came during a rare appearance before a group of mostly Chicago-area reporters following a delegation breakfast at a hotel outside of Milwaukee. The two-term downstate congresswoman, a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, has gained a reputation for refusing to respond to media requests for comment.
“I’m happy to talk to people. But we would like fair coverage from the media. The media has demonized President Trump. Name-calling. That’s what my little kids did. Name calling,” said Miller, of Hindsboro, about 40 miles south of Champaign, “I always told them when you use bad language and you name call, that shows that you’re of low intellect or you don’t have anything positive to say.”
Miller didn’t address the fact that Trump has made name calling a hallmark of his political career, from his successful 2016 run for the White House, through his term as president, and in his presidential bids in 2020 and this year.
He has referred to President Joe Biden as “Crooked Joe,” 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton as “Lyin’ Hillary,” and unsuccessful 2024 GOP presidential rivals Nikki Haley as “Birdbrain” and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.”
For her part, Miller has used social media and conservative news outlets to attack President Joe Biden as “anti-American,” question his “cognitive decline” and urge the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, saying Biden’s tenure has made the U.S. a “banana republic.” She has labeled Democrats as “radical Marxists” and called New York Attorney General Letitia James a “communist” for successfully prosecuting Trump and his business organization for civil fraud.
Miller’s anti-abortion rhetoric also has been inflammatory.
“The message from Democrats to women in our country is ‘kill your baby,’” she posted in March on the social media platform X.” “They are not ‘pro-women’ because half of the babies they work to kill are baby girls. They are not ‘pro-choice’ because they tried to force you to get the COVID shot or you would be fired from your job.”
Miller on Tuesday accused Biden and his administration of “treasonous” actions regarding the nation’s border crisis.
Biden and some Republicans have called for the rhetorical heat to be lowered in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania. But politicians from both sides seem unwilling to drop the vitriol.
On Tuesday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated that there’s no place for violence in politics but doubled down on his criticism of Trump, again calling him “a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist” and a “congenital liar” who is “unfit for the office of president of the United States.” He also accused some Republicans of calling for retaliation for the assassination attempt on Trump.
“Having said that, I am very pleased that he (Trump) remains relatively unharmed,” Pritzker said, a day after Trump appeared at the RNC with a bandage on his right ear as a result of Saturday’s attack.
Asked on Tuesday what Republicans needed to do to sell Trump in once solidly Republican suburban areas that have become more Democratic over the years, Miller, who grew up in Naperville, put the onus on the media to “accurately report who President Trump is and what he’s done for the American people, what the America First agenda is.”
Miller, an unabashed supporter of the Second Amendment, also said more Illinois gun owners need to cast a ballot.
“We need to get people out to vote. If just gun owners would come out and vote in Illinois, we could flip the state red. So, get people out to vote. Everybody has a realm of influence. Get busy, people,” Miller said.
That might be a stretch in a state where Trump has twice lost by 17 percentage points.
Miller was elected to the House in 2020, winning a four-way GOP primary with more than 57% of the vote before collecting nearly 74% of the vote in the general election to succeed Republican U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, who retired in 2021 after 24 years in Congress.
Only days after taking office in 2021, Miller faced calls for her resignation after saying in a speech that “Hitler was right on one thing,” the importance of winning “the hearts and minds of our children” to determine the future. She subsequently offered an apology while also accusing critics of “trying to intentionally twist my words to mean something antithetical to my beliefs.”
Miller made the comment at an event hosted by Moms for America, a conservative group attempting to influence school board elections and policy, a day before Trump supporters trying to block the Electoral College vote count that made Biden president rioted at the Capitol.
Former Will County Board member Debbie Kraulidis of Plainfield, who attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and later said she was “making sure that only legal votes were counted,” is a vice president of Moms for America and on Monday delivered the Pledge of Allegiance for the RNC’s opening session.
Miller won reelection in 2022 over veteran U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville, who served in Congress for more than a decade. She opted to challenge him in the GOP primary after the Illinois General Assembly’s Democratic supermajority redrew congressional district maps.
The backward “C”-shaped district now covers a swath of central and southern Illinois from the Indiana border westward to the Mississippi River, and is split in the middle by a new Democratic district.
Crucial to Miller’s victory was an endorsement from Trump, who joined her days before the primary election at a rally in western Illinois. It was there where Miller stirred more controversy when she took the stage and called the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade a “historic victory for white life.”
A Miller representative sought to clarify her remarks later that evening by saying the then-freshman congresswoman misspoke and meant to say “Right to Life” instead.
A Sunday school and vacation Bible teacher, the former Mary Meyer was raised in Naperville. In her senior year at Naperville Central High School, she was co-captain of the girl’s track team and a member of the school’s senior class council in 1977, according to a high school yearbook. She later graduated from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, according to her House biography.
Her husband of more than 40 years, state Rep. Chris Miller, chairs the Illinois General Assembly’s House Freedom Caucus and is part of a group of Republicans known as the Eastern Bloc, a group of lawmakers mainly from southern or southeastern Illinois considered to be the most conservative members of the legislature. The group has championed an evangelical populist agenda that has included separating Chicago from the rest of the state and opposition to abortion, taxes and COVID-19 mitigations.
In an interview with the Tribune from his office in Springfield earlier this year, Chris Miller, who owns a farm in mostly rural Coles County, explained what appeals to voters in his wife’s district and in swaths of southern Illinois. Miller said “truth, logic and common sense” carry more weight “than maybe a Ph.D., or anything like that.”
Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, said one reason for the rightward political shift in rural Illinois is the lack of white collar jobs, such as those in the tech industry, which entice less conservative younger voters to move elsewhere.
“Both parties are polarized,” said Burge. “But the Republicans have moved much further to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left.”
One example of the divide between the parties is their differing positions on the war in Ukraine. Early in the conflict, Mary Miller was the only member of Illinois’ congressional delegation to vote against a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s-led invasion.
During her campaign for reelection in 2022, she explained her vote to a group of Menard County paramedics during a tour of an emergency medical services facility in Petersburg, about 20 miles north of Springfield.
“We’re diminishing the value of our dollar, number one, and we’re not taking care of the immediate needs, the things that Americans care about like funding our EMT or our police or our schools,” Miller said.
She was the only lawmaker from Illinois in 2021 to vote against the more than $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act, the annual legislation that decides the country’s defense budget. In a statement, Miller said she voted against the act partly because of Biden’s “disastrous” withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Miller has also been a close ally of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who, among other controversial positions, has sought to perpetuate Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Miller and U.S. Rep. Mike Bost of Murphysboro both voted to object to the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments by the House over her bigoted rhetoric, was the keynote speaker at a Miller fundraiser in Effingham in July 2021, where she said she and Miller “aren’t the popular girls in Washington” and are “not considered nice girls in the swamp.”
Miller, Greene and 19 other Republicans voted against legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
When House Republicans gained control of the chamber last year, their infighting brought much of its business to a halt when they sought to oust Kevin McCarthy of California as House speaker. Miller voted against McCarthy several times before voting in October to retain him as speaker to avoid any kind of power-sharing compromise with Democrats. But McCarthy was ultimately ousted by a vote of 216-210.
“I agree with President Trump that right now, we should be focused on stopping the radical Democrats,” Miller said in a statement after her October vote. “I voted against Kevin McCarthy 15 times in January, but no one else has stepped forward to run for Speaker and I will NOT surrender the majority to a ‘coalition government’ with the Democrats through a power-sharing agreement with extreme liberals (former Speaker) Nancy Pelosi and (Minority Leader) Hakeem Jeffries.”
Burge, the political science professor, said Miller’s unwillingness to compromise has become a hallmark for today’s Republicans.
“The kind of Republicans that are being elected in rural Illinois and Iowa and Indiana and the Midwest are burn-it-down Republicans. No-compromise Republicans,” Burge said. “And I think that portends a really difficult future for a country that relies on compromise.”
Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Olander contributed.
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