Experts in the News | Miller Center

Wake-Up Call: USA Relations with North Korea

Sunday Morning Wake-up Call host Rick Moore talks with University of Virginia Associate Professor of Politics Todd Sechser about current United States relations with North Korea. Topics include: The Madman Myth.

Todd Sechser

Trump sticking to economic script in his first State of the Union address

Trump must sell the plan Tuesday not only to his skeptical base — the conservative Breitbart News mocked him as “Amnesty Don” for offering a pathway to the Dreamers — but to dubious Democrats, who find the rest of the plan unpalatable. Directly selling a top legislative priority like this to voters is “something he didn’t do when Republicans were trying to repeal and replace Obamacare,” said Mary Kate Cary, a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush. “He’s got to use the bully pulpit.”

Mary Kate Cary

Trump sticking to economic script in his first State of the Union address

The state of the presidency, however, “is at a crossroads,” said Barbara Perry, a director of the Miller Center of public policy at the University of Virginia and a longtime presidential scholar. And it’s going to take a different type of presidential performance Tuesday to hush concerns about which direction his presidency is headed. He’s going to have to downshift into a controlled teleprompter Trump mode and stay away from his much more common off-script mode. “Can he do it?” Perry asked. “Who can predict anything he does?”

Barbara Perry

Historian Melvyn Leffler's assessment of Trump's foreign policy in his first year

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center has spent more than two years analyzing how American presidents have performed during their first year in office. On Thursday, scholars focused that analysis on President Donald Trump.Trump’s first year in office has come with its own milieu of crises and challenges, some of them unique to Trump; others stemming from debates that have long echoed through the halls of American government. The Miller Center’s First Year Project, launched in October 2015, provides historical context and analysis of the challenges facing current and previous administrations, based upon research from numerous scholars and the center’s own remarkable archives, which include oral histories for every administration since Jimmy Carter and more than 4,000 hours of Oval Office recordings.

Melvyn Leffler