May Mailman

May Mailman was recruited by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Stephen Miller because of her various roles in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. For the second term, she would help with the transition, write Mr. Trump’s deluge of initial executive orders and help set up a process for turning his campaign promises into policy. She had always planned to depart after six months, she said. She became a crucial component of one of the White House’s most divisive endeavors — a sprawling political and legal bid to root out perceived liberal bias from colleges and deter the use of race in admissions. Her father, Dr. Duncan Davis, was administering vaccines to children in South Korea in the 1980s when he met her mother, Kyungae Davis, who was teaching in one of the schools he visited. They moved to the United States, married and gave birth to their first child, Sylvia May Davis, in 1988. At the University of Kansas, where she majored in journalism, Ms. Mailman joined the college Republicans. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015. In 2021, took a job as deputy solicitor general of Ohio and married David Mailman, a former baseball player with a corporate job in Cleveland. They moved to Houston, had their first child in 2022 and a second in 2024. In 2024, Ms. Mailman was named the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center. The center is a project of the Independent Women’s Forum, a Virginia-based nonprofit created by a coalition of women who supported Justice Clarence Thomas during his contentious nomination hearings in the early 1990s.