Between Tear Gas and Trump Loyalty – The Bizarre Untouchability of Cory Mills

There are investigations that make you want to put your head in your hands. Cory Mills is one of them. In a republic that once prided itself on moral leadership, the dossier of a politician with this mix of allegations and absurdities would have been a political death sentence. Today it is at most another point on the long list of the unthinkable that has long since become normal. There is the allegation of violence from an ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Langston, beauty queen and Republican official. She lived with Mills in Florida until she learned that he was already on the radar of another woman in Washington: Sarah Raviani, a pro-Trump activist, had called 911 and reported being assaulted by Mills in a penthouse. When we inquired: police noted “obvious injuries” - an arrest warrant was requested. Then came the reversal: Raviani recanted, and the US Department of Justice under Trump loyalist Ed Martin pulled the plug. End of story. At least in Washington.

Langston says Mills threatened, at the end of their relationship, to release intimate photos and videos of her, and presented messages in which he promised to intimidate or injure any future partner. Mills denies everything. But even if half of it were true, in a world with intact political standards it would mean the end of a career.

Instead, Mills’s trail runs like a red thread through a Republican success story of another kind: elected to the House of Representatives in 2022, he boasted of a company that supplied tear gas to security forces - the very gas used at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. His image as a war hero took deep cracks in May, when five comrades, including two men he supposedly saved, said they had no memory whatsoever of his heroic presence. Mills’s explanation: “fog of war.”

And then there is his almost demonstrative loyalty to Donald Trump. In April 2023 he showed up at Mar-a-Lago with his son, posed with the former president, and posted the photo with the caption “PRESIDENT Donald J Trump yesterday at Mar-a-Lago!” Speaking to journalists - and we honestly almost fell out of our chairs laughing - he declared that the indictment against Trump in New York was “a very unifying event.” It was now necessary “to end the internal squabbling and rally behind President Trump.” Mills went “all in” on Trump early - at a time when many Republicans in Florida were still maneuvering between Trump and Ron DeSantis. That Trump had supported him in the 2022 campaign gave this loyalty a particularly self-serving shine. Remarkably, what happened next was nothing. No public distancing by party leadership, no media outcry from conservative commentators. Instead, the usual silence, garnished with the phrase “ongoing investigations” and the presumption of innocence - which in this political climate has long since become a rhetorical fig leaf.

The result is a portrait of contemporary mores: scandals are no longer punished but absorbed. Even the gravest accusations bounce off as long as they remain within one’s own camp. Mills is thus not simply a congressman with a long list of allegations. He is a symptom - of the fact that political Washington today perceives scandals only as background noise. In the past, such a case would have destroyed careers, today it ends up in the footnote archives of a capital where moral bankruptcies are filed under “miscellaneous” in the daily business.

Investigative journalism requires courage, conviction – and your support.