Experts in the News | Miller Center

The broken promise that changed the Republican Party

Presidents give hundreds of speeches, but, for better or worse, Americans tend to remember just a few one-liners. For George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st US president, that line was his pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention when he accepted the party’s nomination. “Read my lips: No. New. Taxes.”

Barbara Perry

Implications of Warmbier lawsuit against North Korea considered amid peace talks

Miller Center Senior Fellow Todd Sechser says the Warmbier case is particularly timely in the current international climate: “North Korea is in the process of trying to mend its international image."

Todd Sechser

White House Mum About Trump’s Unprecedented Call for Senator’s Resignation

“All presidents campaign against the opposite party’s members of Congress in midterm elections. But they rarely, if ever, call on them to resign and/or say that they have negative information about them,” said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Barbara Perry

White House Mum About Trump’s Unprecedented Call for Senator’s Resignation

Such attacks by a party’s main political arm are nothing new. But from a sitting president? “The closest I can come is FDR and the ‘Southern purge’ in 1938,” said Riley Russell, also of UVA. “I don’t recall anything similar … on presidents since Jimmy Carter.”

Russell Riley

Kelly Denies Calling Trump an Idiot, Says It’s ‘Total BS

Ken Hughes, a historian with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center weighed in Monday night, telling Courthouse News it wouldn’t be the last time one of Trump’s top advisers would question the president’s intelligence. “Although Trump probably has a pretty high IQ, he has brought this on himself in a number of ways. He has set a disrespectful tone with his own rhetoric – by routinely disparaging the intelligence of people who disagree with him, for example – and the people who work for him in the White House naturally adopt the same tone when talking about him.”

Ken Hughes

Chris Lu on Kelly Remarks

Chris Lu is interviewed on MSNBC about reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump "an idiot."

Chris Lu