Assessing Donald Trump’s first year

Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College. He has published multiple books, the most recent of which is Resilient America: Electing Nixon, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (2014). Other recent books are The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014, with Sidney Milkis (2015); The Presidency and the Political System, 10th ed. (2014); and The Elections of 2012 (2013). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Politics and Political Science Quarterly and in periodicals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Guian McKee is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002, and he is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. At the Miller Center, McKee heads the Great Issues program and has worked extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program. He is currently working on a book project that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II, focusing on the development of hospitals and academic medical centers as critical but problematic urban economic anchors as well as drivers of cost in the larger health care system.

Mary Kate Cary served as a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as senior writer for communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign. Cary is the executive producer of 41ON41, a documentary film about President George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States. 

Melvyn P. Leffler is Edward R. Stettinius Jr. professor in the department of history at the University of Virginia and Compton Visiting Professor in World Politics. He served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA from 1997–2001. In 1993, he won the Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) and, in 2008, he won the George Louis Beer Prize for his book, For the Soul of Mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (Hill & Wang, 2007).