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How to describe this year … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.
If you’re wondering who Katie Miller is and why high-level officials keep going on her podcast: She made a name for herself during the first Trump administration by denying that the Department of Homeland Security was separating families. This year, she was an adviser to the Department of Government Efficiency, a brilliant effort that did not in fact save money but certainly did destroy a lot of goods and services! She is also Stephen Miller’s wife. Yes, that Stephen Miller—the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, an exercise in wanton cruelty that has demanded 3,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants daily and has taken a wrecking ball to thousands of lives.
Since August, Katie has hosted a soft-focus podcast in which she interviews administration-adjacent figures and people who I guess must be, by some definition, celebrities? (A large potted plant is there also.) At the end of almost every episode, she poses the question: “If you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who’s at the table, and what are you eating?” So far, the guests, and their varied answers, have offered what I think is the perfect encapsulation of this very strange year. Forget your top 10 movies and top 11 news stories—“The Top 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Guests on The Katie Miller Podcast” is the year-end ranking that 2025 deserves.
I have taken the liberty of organizing these dinners into a list, from most to least likely to go well. Let’s begin.
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Guests: Jesus, her grandmother
This is Jesus’s first cameo at one of these dinners! It will not be his last. Kellyanne Conway has a lot to ask him, and she anticipates that he would also have a lot to ask her. (Speaking of people trying to go directly to the Roman-Catholic source, we got a new Chicago-style pope this year! Note that he is not invited to this dinner.) This is the first episode to introduce what will become a persistent problem: the debate over whether Jesus counts as a dinner guest who’s dead or alive. Theologically this is a rich question, I feel! I am Episcopalian, though.
9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer
Guests: the entire Miracle on Ice men’s hockey team from 1980
“Who are you?” I picture the men’s hockey team asking. “I’m Kash Patel, children’s-book author and director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, through a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of choice). “Recently I’ve been in the news because the FBI keeps detaining the wrong people of interest in high-profile cases, and I keep making agents provide security to my country-singer girlfriend.” I feel that the conversation would trail off quickly after this point.
8. Cheryl Hines, actor and wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Guests: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett, and Maya Angelou
I am arriving at the theory that if your grandma is going to your imaginary dinner, it should just be all family. I’d love to have my grandma at such an event, but I think if Carol Burnett were also at the dinner, she might clam up.
In case you’re wondering why Cheryl Hines is getting interviewed—her husband is the current health secretary, who is diligently working to reintroduce the measles virus to its original habitat (inside of people’s respiratory systems), where it had been hunted almost to extinction. It is rare to have a measles conservationist in this sort of position, but that’s the Trump administration for you: trying things that have never been tried before. What if the conspiracy theorists were inside the FBI instead of outside it? What if we didn’t have an East Wing?
7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq president and CEO
Guests: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Ride
I’m getting worried about the stock market! It kept going up this year, largely because we keep spending more on AI in hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will lift all boats and eventually result in profits. The architects of AI even got to be Time magazine’s Person(s) of the Year. STOP PUTTING AI INTO ALL OF MY THINGS! I don’t want it there. It’s like the letter u that British people are always dropping into words: It adds nothing and leaves me unsettled.
Friedman’s dinner features three “trailblazers” who would be eating a Thanksgiving dinner. She said these might be very different conversations, but I can actually see this meal going well! As long as they don’t discuss the stock market—having led the country through the Great Depression, FDR might bring up some questions that could kill the mood.
6. J. D. Vance, vice president
Guests: Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, and Abraham Lincoln (a popular pick)
Given that Trump described Abraham Lincoln as someone who “did something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time,” I think it is likely that Trump does not know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the possibility of a dinner party where Trump is forced to reveal this in real time is intriguing to me. My sense is that he would try to bring up that his uncle was a professor at MIT and then compliment Lincoln on his height. He might be disappointed to hear that Lincoln spent so much time fighting against the Confederacy. I don’t know what Isaac Newton would do; maybe drop an apple.
Including Trump in this dinner when that seat could go to literally any human being living or dead is the kind of pandering we have come to expect from the vice president, whose other 2025 highlights include complaining to Europe about the “enemy within,” being one of the last to see Pope Francis alive, and suggesting that he hopes his Hindu wife will awaken to Jesus one day.
5. Jillian Michaels, fitness influencer
Guests: Maya Angelou (again!), Albert Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne
This one gets points subtracted for the menu, which is: French fries, red wine, peanut butter, hot sauce, and ice cream—I have to assume not together, but Michaels did say that this was all that they would need, so, who knows! “What is The Biggest Loser’s trainer doing on this podcast?” you ask. This year, she came out swinging in defense of Trump’s directive to the Smithsonian to say nicer things about America and stop harping on about slavery. “Do you realize that only less than 2 percent of white Americans owned slaves? You realize that slavery is thousands of years old?” she said on a CNN panel. “I’m surprised that you’re trying to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,” the CNN host Abby Phillip responded. Have fun at your dinner with Maya Angelou, Jillian.
4. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House
Guests: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington
Mike Johnson calls this dinner “very American-centric,” which raises some questions for me. Did I miss important information in the Bible about Jesus’s nationality, or, conversely, important information about the establishment of religion in the Constitution? Will Jesus bring a translator with him? In Johnson’s episode, he sounds stressed, as he should be—he’s had a busy year: passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and as few other bills as possible, shutting the government down, and blocking and then reluctantly allowing the release of the Epstein files. An ambitious brief for anyone! And that’s not all that he has to worry about: In the course of this interview, he agreed that his brain (and, perhaps, the brains of all men?) was like a waffle.
3. Pete Hegseth, defense secretary
Guests: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vladimir Putin
When he hasn’t been ordering the extrajudicial killings of people in boats or kicking the press out of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has spent most of 2025 lecturing people who have better things to do about how much he hates beards. I wonder if he will be able to restrain himself from doing so at this dinner. (Then again, the Ukrainian president is used to being lectured on his appearance in lieu of any progress on the war engulfing his country.) Knowing Vladimir Putin, he may skip the dinner entirely, forcing Trump and Hegseth to pursue him down the tarmac to his plane, with their steak (well-done) and Thousand Island dressing in hand. (That’s the menu Hegseth picked. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde put it.)
2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many companies to name, former DOGE honcho
Guests: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his guests would enjoy an epic 12-course meal of probably not cheeseburgers, but maybe little, tiny cheeseburgers, which never taste as good as the big ones, but if someone really tried, they could be made to. (He riffed, if that is the word I want, on this cheeseburger question for what felt like ages.) Having to hear from Musk and be subject to his whims has been, unfortunately, a feature of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don’t have USAID any more—resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, providing him with a new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla owners to buy a little disclaimer bumper sticker for their car.
I have put this dinner pretty high on the list because I think that if Nikola Tesla had the whole Musk situation properly explained to him, fisticuffs would almost certainly ensue. The idea of Tesla and Musk fighting each other over tiny cheeseburgers while William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is an ideal party.
1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire
Guests: Queen Victoria and ???
As far as I can tell, we never hear who is joining beyond the “Grandmother of Europe.” Katie Miller starts to tell Senator Katie Britt about her own dinner picks and never finishes! Tantalizingly incomplete. Who would the other guests be? Perhaps Stephen Miller, who, allegedly, “only eats mayonnaise.” (“With french fries, or, like, period?” J. D. Vance asked during his episode. “Period,” Miller said, later elaborating: “It’s whatever.”) The only dinner worse than one where Elon Musk fights Nikola Tesla while William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on is one where Katie Miller and Queen Victoria try to carry on a conversation while Stephen Miller sits silently next to them, eating mayonnaise.
Related:
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
The New Family Vacation
By Michael Waters
The next time you’re at the airport or checking into a hotel, you might notice a traveling group that looks, at least at first glance, a little unwieldy: young kids, their parents, and their grandparents, all vacationing together regardless of age or mobility limits.
A scene like this would have been rare a few decades ago, according to Susan Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University who wrote about the history of family travel in her book Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations. The classic 20th-century family vacation was typically a nuclear one, comprising a mom, a dad, and their young kids. Grandparents and other relatives seldom came along. But more and more, research shows, families tend to bring multiple generations with them. This, in turn, has changed people’s preferred travel destinations, and even the very purpose of travel: Multigenerational groups are much more likely to take simple, relaxed beach vacations than to embark on logistics-heavy city visits or road trips.
Read the full article.
Culture Break
Photo-illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
Read. In 2023, Ilana Masad recommended six books to read during a stressful family holiday.
Explore. Many grocery-store self-checkout lines are now longer than the staffed ones. Valerie Trapp explores the one line that Americans (weirdly) choose to wait in.
Play our daily crossword.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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