The first 100 days of Trump

The first in his family to graduate from college, Mark Warner spent 20 years as a successful technology entrepreneur and business leader in Virginia before he was elected Governor in 2001. When he left the Governor’s Office in 2006, Virginia was ranked as the best state for business, the best managed state, and the best state in which to receive a public education.

Governor Warner was elected to the United States Senate in 2008, where he serves on the Senate Finance, Banking, Budget, and Rules Committees as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, where he is the Vice Chairman. He has been recognized as a national leader in fighting for our military men and women and veterans, and working to design a bipartisan, comprehensive plan to address our country’s debt and deficit. At a time when much in Washington seems to be stuck in a political standstill, Senator Warner stands out as a forward-thinking leader who’s willing to cross partisan divides to bring people together and get things done.

As an early investor in the cellular telephone business, he co-founded the company that became Nextel and invested in hundreds of start-up technology companies that created tens of thousands of jobs. Leaning on his background in technology and state government, Senator Warner uses his position in the Senate to promote policies that encourage innovation and entrepreneurship and bring the federal government into the 21st century.

William J. Antholis serves as director and CEO of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history. Immediately prior, he served as managing director at The Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014. In that capacity, he worked directly with Brookings' president and vice presidents to help manage the full range of policy studies, develop new initiatives, coordinate research across programs, strengthen the policy impact of Brookings’ research, and ensure the quality and independence of that research. Antholis is the author of the book Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global . It explores how country-sized provinces and states in the world’s two biggest nations are increasingly becoming global players. He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade. From 1995 to 1999, Antholis served in government. At the White House, he was director of international economic affairs on the staff of the National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he served as the chief staff person for the G8 Summits in 1997 and 1998. He also was deputy director of the White House climate change policy team. At the State Department, he served on the policy planning staff and in the economic affairs bureau. Prior to joining Brookings, he served for five years as director of studies and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Antholis earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in politics (1993) and his B.A. from the University of Virginia in government and foreign affairs (1986). 

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times covering President Donald J. Trump. He previously covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton for The Times and The Washington Post winning the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award for White House coverage. He is the author of: Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution, and his latest, Obama: The Call of History.

Nicole Hemmer is an Assistant Professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center, where she focuses on the history of American politics and media. Her new book, Messengers of the Right , charts the history of conservative media activism in the United States, and her current work-in-progress is a history of conservatism in the 1990s. Hemmer is also an active public intellectual, as a contributing editor to US News & World Report, and as co-host and producer of the popular history podcast Past Present . Hemmer also holds an appointment as a research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Russell Riley is Co-Chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, and an associate professor at the University of Virginia. He is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on elite oral history interviewing and on the contemporary American presidency. In his time at the Miller Center, Riley has logged more than 1,000 hours of in-depth, confidential interviews with cabinet officers and senior members of the White House staff reaching back to the Carter and Reagan administrations. Since 2003, he has led the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project, interviewing more than 100 former Clinton-era officials, including leading members of Congress and foreign heads of state. Riley is the author of: Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History, The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-keeping from 1831-1965, and co-editor of, The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House.

Douglas A. Blackmon is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and filmmaker. His first book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, won the Pulitzer-Prize in 2009. He is currently host and executive producer of the nationally broadcast weekly public television program American Forum, produced at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Formerly, he was senior national correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and a member of the staff awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of the 9/11 attacks. His first film, based on Slavery by Another Name, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. He is the co-author, with former Attorney General Eric Holder, of the upcoming book, Pursuing Justice (2018).

Brian Balogh is Compton Professor and Chair of the National Fellowship Program at UVa’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Brian Balogh is the author of The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century and A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America and is currently at work on In the Nation’s Backyard: How History Preserved Rural Life in Green Springs, 1970 to the Present.

Ed Ayers is President Emeritus and Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities at the University of Richmond. He is also former Dean ofthe College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of History at the University of Virginia and winner of the 2013 National Humanities Medal. Ed Ayers has written and edited ten books, including In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America, winner of both the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize; The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction and he’s currently working on The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil war and the End of American Slavery.

Christa Dierksheide is Historian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in Plantation America, 1770-1840 (University of Virginia Press, 2014), examined how planters embraced the European Enlightenment idea of “improvement” on New World plantations. She has conceptualized and written exhibitions for Monticello, including “The Boisterous Sea of Liberty” and “The Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello” and is also co-author of “Thomas Jefferson’s Worlds,” the introductory film. In addition, she has served as the Monticello faculty lead for teacher institutes and executive leadership seminars focused on Jefferson, and also as a lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her current book project, The Sun Never Set on Jefferson’s Empire: Race, Family, and Fortune in America, 1820-1880, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.