Experts in the News | Miller Center

The MAGA Clown Car Reshaping America on Their Terms

Eric and Eliot pay their respects to the late Vice President Dick Cheney before welcoming their guest Laura Field to discuss her book, "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right." They explore the origins of the effort to create an intellectual ecosystem for Trumpism, as well as the emergence of post-liberalism and techno-monarchists. Finally, they touch on the openly theocratic efforts of Christian nationalists to fit into the Trumpist universe, and the overlaps and contradictions among these various Trumpist movements.

Eric Edelman

Dick Cheney: Statesman, Patriot, Principled Conservative

"History will judge in due time his role in the post-9/11 global war on terror and, in particular, the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of the current conventional wisdom on those subjects seems to me divorced from the urgency of the moment after the horrific attacks on New York and Washington a quarter of a century ago and tinged with partisan rancor and lack of appreciation for what French historians call la longue durée (the long run). What is incontestable is that al-Qaeda, despite its determination to strike the homeland again and again, has been unable to replicate the disastrous mass-casualty attacks it launched in 2001, which resulted in the greatest single-day loss of life on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Many deserve credit for that, but chief among them is Dick Cheney."

Eric Edelman

Why are we fighting about health care subsidies instead of health care costs?

Health care is at the center of the government shutdown fight. Democrats and Republicans are embroiled in a dispute that seems to have no end over whether to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits that were authorized in 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act and continued for an additional two years in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Guian McKee

Bloomberg Surveillance: Tech Selloff Drives Losses

Jennifer Lawless, Professor of Politics & Public Policy at University of Virginia, discusses Democrats' election night sweep and the ongoing government shutdown.

Jennifer Lawless

Spanberger names transition team, including Richmond Association of Realtors CEO Lafayette

Virginia Governor-Elect Abigail Spanberger Wednesday named her chief of staff and a 13-member transition team that will spend the next two months helping prepare a governing agenda and administration for her.

Chris Lu

'By no means the malevolent force he was painted out to be’

No one has come to the anomalous office of vice president better prepared for it than Dick Cheney. At the age of thirty-four, Cheney became White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and in later years he served as a member of Congress and secretary of defense. Cheney was also an eminent Republican conservative, a fact that commended his placement on the ticket with the younger Bush, who at that time was suspected by many in the party of being too much his moderate father’s son. That Cheney ran the process producing his own nomination occasioned a few chuckles among political observers, but Cheney’s bona fides as a serious voice in Washington could not be questioned.

Russell Riley