Experts in the News | Miller Center

When CEOs sound more like the president than the actual president

Barbara Perry, presidential studies director at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, said Trump might have been seen as rising to that occasion of playing the calmer-in-chief role — one she says starts with Abraham Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg — had he left his remarks on Monday afternoon as they were. Instead, she says, “he tried to salve the wound on Monday but then ripped the band-aid off and at the same time poured salt in it" on Tuesday.

Barbara Perry

Trump: Removal of Confederate statues is sad

President Donald Trump denounced the removal of monuments to Confederate figures as "sad" and "so foolish," days after white supremacists and neo-Nazis took to Charlottesville, Virginia, to violently protest the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Miller Center Senior Fellow Douglas Blackmon is interviewed on CNN.

Douglas Blackmon

Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as Confederate generals.

“It’s the difference between a monument to the founder of our nation, and a monument to a key figure in an effort to break apart the nation,” said Miller Center Senior Fellow Douglas Blackmon. "The most kind explanation of that can only be ignorance, and I don’t say that to insult the president.”

Douglas Blackmon

Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as Confederate generals.

Douglas Blackmon, an author and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he’s sympathetic to white nationalist views.

Douglas Blackmon

Why this happened in Charlottesville, my hometown

From a distance, Charlottesville looks like a smooth blue bubble in a sea of red, a university town abutting Virginia’s rural foothills and farmland. Up close, it’s a mass of conflicts and contradictions. While it’s tempting to reduce those conflicts to the disagreements over the Confederate statues that dot the downtown, that would be a mistake. The battle over the monuments exposed the ongoing battle over what the town stands for, and who should represent it.

Nicole Hemmer

Is There a Way to Prevent the Next Charlottesville?

Zelikow argues that towns and citizens have the right to sue and enjoin such heavily armed organized groups from staging such rallies...Ultimately, Zelikow compares the appearance of these sorts of heavily armed groups asserting the right to mass public assembly to darker periods in world and U.S. history.

Philip Zelikow