Experts in the News | Miller Center

Trump’s Cabinet has become severe headache for his White House

Miller Center Senior Fellow Chris Lu, a former White House official under President Barack Obama who managed the Cabinet, said the situation “dispels this idea that Trump—who came in without any experience in government and who ran on the theory of being [a] businessman—could run things better. Clearly, this is not the case.”

Chris Lu

How Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders heralded American empire

Scholars and journalists have pored over Theodore Roosevelt for so long, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary author revealing anything novel about his life and times. Clay Risen’s “The Crowded Hour” takes on the challenge.

Sidney Milkis

How Joe Biden won friends in Hollywood by helping studios get their movies into China

That perception is not unreasonable, said Aynne Kokas, author of the book “Hollywood Made in China” and a film industry scholar at University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. Katzenberg’s presence at events with Xi reflected “the access Katzenberg had to the Obama administration,” she said, adding that raising millions of dollars for the Obama-Biden ticket surely helped.

Aynne Kokas

Once Trump Talked About ‘American Carnage.’ Now He Says Critics Should Leave.

“As president, he now sees America as an avatar for himself — it must be great because he’s great,” said Nicole Hemmer, a scholar of conservatism who is taking a position at Columbia University to work on its oral history of Barack Obama’s presidency. “From this perspective, to allow that America has faults would be to allow that Trump himself has them, something he has never been willing to do.”

Nicole Hemmer

Answering the Call: Leaving the Bench to Serve the President—James F. Byrnes and Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932–1945

A senator and then Supreme Court Justice, Byrnes formed a relationship with Roosevelt that is of immense importance for understanding the scope of New Deal reform at home and the eventual triumph of American liberalism abroad.

Sidney M. Milkis and Nicholas F. Jacobs

The Score: Bitter Wheat, Chappaquiddick Anniversary, Firearms Session, WWII Surveys

Fifty years ago this month, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and setting off a domino effect on his own career and American politics. To look back on this anniversary, I spoke with Dr. Barbara Perry, a historian and presidential scholar at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Barbara Perry