Meet the brains who explain Trumpism

Several years ago John Rigolizzo, then a fresh college graduate, spent two-and-a-half weeks by the beach in southern California with a dozen other young Republicans. They were not there for the surf or the sun, but to study Aristotle, Plato and Socrates at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think-tank. Together they learned the meaning of telos and read America’s founding texts. They watched “Top Gun: Maverick” with Michael Anton, a Claremont scholar who, in 2016, made an early intellectual case for Donald Trump. Mr Rigolizzo was already pro-MAGA before this crash course, but he says it gave him the philosophical and historical foundation to defend the Trump doctrine. Someone in his cohort called it an “intellectual bootcamp for the revolution”.

Mr Rigolizzo would later host a podcast for Gen Z MAGA fans with two friends from the fellowship. They disbanded when Mr Trump won re-election; one got a job in the White House and the other at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The head of OMB, Russell Vought, is also a former Claremont fellow—or a Claremonster, as they call themselves.

Claremonsters are everywhere in the Trump administration. By one count at least 70 hold or have held jobs there, from the vice-president’s chief of staff to the deputy director of the CIA, down to an army of special assistants and speechwriters. Matthew Peterson, who used to run Claremont’s educational arm, says that after the inauguration he couldn’t walk down a hallway in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building without bumping into a fellow.

Before Mr Trump came along, Claremont was peripheral. Founded in southern California, it scorned the neoconservative Beltway blob. It saw the Republican establishment as full of squishes: deluded about the Iraq war, pro-amnesty for unauthorised immigrants, unwilling to smash the administrative state, complacent about multiculturalism. Nearly all conservative intellectuals shunned Mr Trump initially, but Claremont saw that he was a crusading outsider who shared its enemies. It was among the first conservative think-tanks to recognise the opportunity and turn it into access and influence. Its trajectory mirrors a broader shake-up on the right, where policy shops have either MAGA-fied (like the Heritage Foundation) or stuck to their principles and faded into irrelevance (like the American Enterprise Institute).

Claremonsters have a talent for adding intellectual gloss to Trumpism. Mr Anton drafted the National Security Strategy, which seeks to rationalise the president’s resource-grabs in Venezuela and Greenland, and to bring coherence to a foreign policy driven by personalism. John Eastman, a lawyer at the institute, helped hatch the “fake electors” scheme to try to overturn the 2020 election. For his service to Mr Trump, he was indicted by state prosecutors in Arizona and Georgia.

Unlike other think-tanks, Claremont does not churn out policy papers. Its focus, says Brian Kennedy, a former president, is on history and principle. It aims to teach young conservatives “how the great statesmen of the past thought” and what later went awry in America. If that sounds grandiose, it is. “Everyone who engages with the Claremont Institute has a sneaking suspicion that something at the deepest level has gone wrong in our country and that it’s up to public-spirited people to try to understand it and fix it,” says Charles Correll, a 31-year-old a former fellow and a speechwriter for John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming.

Claremont was founded by students of Harry Jaffa, a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and an adviser to Barry Goldwater, who wrote the latter’s applause line: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.” Early Claremonsters argued that America went off the rails in the Progressive Era. They viewed remedial programmes of the 20th century—welfare, affirmative action—and the bureaucrats who designed them as un-American. Establishment Republicans were content to cut taxes and regulations: an approach inadequate for the task at hand. “The problem is not just high taxes or that government has gotten too big; it’s that we’ve slipped away from the consent of the governed,” says Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont fellow.

This sort of thinking—that too much has been lost, that the world has come undone—can quickly slip into catastrophism. Take it further and radical solutions beckon. Mr Kennedy says he no longer calls himself a conservative, but a counter-revolutionary. Matthew McManus of Spelman College says people have long conflated conservatism with the American right writ large. That is inaccurate. Conservatives believe that existing institutions and hierarchies evolved for a reason, and should be altered only with care. William F. Buckley said the job of conservatives was to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’”. Rightwingers of the Claremont variety, by contrast, think little is worth conserving.

Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, says Claremonsters agree more on their diagnosis of America than on prescriptions for it. Some find the current arrangements intolerable and want to overthrow them immediately; others are more cautious. Mr Kesler thinks Mr Trump is “rough” but an “amazingly effective political animal”. Asked how he would compare the president with Lincoln, who freed the slaves and whom Claremonsters regard as a model statesman, Mr Kesler hardly pauses: “Like Lincoln, he’s a defender, really, of human rights.” ■