Miles Bruner, a former Republican operative, says he resigned from a Washington digital fundraising firm and is trying to make amends after years of writing inflammatory, misleading pitches. In an NPR interview, he described the personal and political moments that led him to walk away.
Miles Bruner, a Californian who says he became politically active in high school by arguing against liberals on his debate team, told NPR he recently left his job in Republican politics and wants to make amends for work he believes “severely damaged our democracy.” He first shared his story in an essay for The Bulwark and then spoke with NPR’s Steve Inskeep in an interview published November 13, 2025.
According to his Bulwark essay, Bruner began his career working for California state Sen. Janet Nguyen before moving to Washington to join Campaign Solutions, a GOP digital fundraising firm. He praised the company as a supportive employer that helped him start a family, but said the day-to-day work involved producing inflammatory appeals. As NPR noted, Bruner wrote that “it was routine to publish content that pushed election fraud conspiracies, stoked anti-immigrant sentiment and sowed distrust in our institutions.”
Bruner recounted one pattern from the weeks after the 2020 election: sending appeals for candidates who had no evidence of fraud in their races while still warning supporters that results could change “because of potential fraud” and urging donations. He said such messages were driven by what generated engagement and by feedback loops between social media and email strategy.
Bruner’s misgivings predated his move to Washington. He told NPR that while working for the Republican state senator in 2017, his office posted on Facebook calling Heather Heyer—the woman killed during the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.—a hero. After backlash, the office deleted or revised the post. “I literally went home, and I cried,” he said. His Bulwark essay describes similar internal conflicts during that period.
The personal turning point, he said, came after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In 2023, Bruner and his wife experienced a miscarriage. That experience, he told NPR, made the consequences of restricted reproductive care concrete: “What if we had needed it? What if something had been slightly different?”
Even then, he stayed on “a couple more years,” clinging to the comfort and stability of a job he knew. He ultimately decided to quit after, in his words, seeing “masked federal agents in our streets,” saying he could not justify his work to his daughter in the future.
Bruner said the reaction to his public break included “explosive rants” and people “targeting [his] family,” prompting him to pause interviews before hearing from supporters and resuming conversations. He also told NPR that, in his experience, Republicans’ election denialism, anti-immigrant tirades and anti-democratic policies were not mirrored on the Democratic side at the same level.
NPR reported that it reached out to Campaign Solutions, Bruner’s former employer, but had not heard back.
Bruner’s Bulwark essay frames his decision in broader terms, describing the GOP as having devolved into a “cult of personality” since 2015 and urging other Republican consultants and staff to follow their consciences and leave.