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One of the most fascinating stories in contemporary American conservatism is the metamorphosis of the Claremont Institute. From a relatively obscure think tank—teeming with philosophers and erudite political scientists devoted to defending the Constitution—the institute has become a band of activists in the service of authoritarianism.
The narrative of this consequential transformation is important and takes on an urgency that is heightened just hours before the midterm elections. It explains how and why the Claremont fellows contributed to forging the doctrine that seized the Republican Party. By drifting toward illiberal populism, the institute moved closer to the nationalist conservatives and postliberals, with whom it now forms the tripod of the MAGA New Right. This relatively recent conservatism is today the heart and soul of Trumpism.
The Man Behind the Claremont Institute
In 1979, four former students of Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) founded the Claremont Institute in a town about fifty kilometers from Los Angeles. They aimed to extend the teaching of a singular master. A devotee of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), this philosopher and political theorist had imparted to Barry Goldwater, father of modern conservatism, a famous line: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
His students would take the lesson to heart. Their institute would be an ivory tower from which scholars would preach the Jaffaite gospel to the new generation of conservative leaders, with the aim of “training them to form a community devoted to preserving constitutional government.”
Their project would begin with education. From its inception, the institute gathered every summer promising young conservative intellectuals, ready to embrace its ideas and its objectives. The method proved devastatingly effective. It shaped generations of elites who would influence public policy and make decisions at the highest levels of the state, in law, the media, culture, and academia.
The second channel of its influence is a publication, the Claremont Review of Books, founded in 2000. Nicknamed “the New York Review of Books of the right,” this respected journal provides a platform for conservative thinkers and political essayists and serves the institute’s stated ambition, “restoring to the founding principles of the United States their rightful authority and preeminence in our national life.”
These principles, Jaffa read in the light of his master’s teaching. Against historicism and positivism, which he viewed as leading to relativism, Leo Strauss had rehabilitated the classical notion of natural law, convinced that “the contemporary rejection of natural law leads to nihilism, indeed, it is indistinguishable from nihilism.”
Jaffa extends this gesture. While Strauss drew mainly on the Ancients, his disciple seeks this truth in American history itself. He finds it in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, whose assertion of equality among men and of their inalienable rights constitutes, in his view, the heart of the political experiment.
As a leading Straussian on the West Coast, Jaffa sought to bring the American right back to these ideals. He faced two adversaries in this effort.
The first is the paleoconservative right, southern in heritage, which sees Abraham Lincoln as the grave-digger of local liberties and the promoter of abstract equality. For Jaffa, Lincoln is instead the faithful continuation of the Declaration. Far from betraying the principle of equality, he made it “a transcendent affirmation of what it must be.” In a slaveholding America, equality was not a reality but an ideal, a moral compass above the majorities, by whose name one could condemn slavery even when the law permitted it.
The second is an older Burkean tradition, of which Russell Kirk was the leading figure. It holds that the origin of the United States lies in English common law and in the liberties inherited by the colonists, not in universal principles. Skeptical of abstract ideas, it relativizes the reach of the Declaration and fears equality, which it regards as too close to the spirit of the French Revolution. For Jaffa, this confuses 1776 and 1789. The American insurgents did not merely claim the rights of the English, but those of every human being, grounded in nature rather than custom. Making tradition the sole source of law, he argues, would yield morality to the vagaries of history.
But this primacy of history, Jaffa found pushed to the extreme in the opposing camp, among progressives. It is against them that he wields the Declaration, which, in his hands, becomes a political weapon. At the turn of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and the reformers of his era regarded the natural rights proclaimed in 1776 as a relic obsolete, which they wanted to replace with a state that evolves over time and is entrusted to an administration whose legitimacy rests on technique.
To reconnect with these rights thus means challenging all their work. Jaffa’s heirs would make them their rallying cry. In 2018, Charles Kesler, editor-in-chief of the Claremont Review of Books, described a “cold civil war” between two Americas. One remains faithful to the Founders, the other has embraced the “Living Constitution” dear to the progressives. In this war, the target is the administrative state, this government of agencies and unelected experts born under Wilson, expanded by Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “the little law that devoured the Constitution.”
The Enemies and Allies of Leo Strauss
The Straussian-inspired conservatism professed by the Claremont Institute develops alongside another current, neoconservatism.
Born in New York around Irving Kristol, this movement attracted other Straussian followers, whom one calls the “East Coast Straussians” to distinguish them from Jaffa and his circle. Among them were Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, and Harvey Mansfield, followed by their students, from William Kristol, Irving’s son, who has since become an opponent of Donald Trump, to Paul Wolfowitz, future Deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and president of the World Bank.
Between the two schools, rivalry is long-standing. Jaffa chastises his Eastern counterparts for viewing the founding of the United States as a mere pragmatic compromise and for Kristol’s acceptance of the welfare state, provided it is prudently managed. Yet their anti-Communism brings them together under Reagan’s presidency, and neoconservatives reach the apex of their influence under George W. Bush.
From the late 1990s onward, Claremont fellows began to critique neoconservatism more sharply. In their view, neoconservatives had merged into Washington’s establishment. This “ruling class” had seized power at the expense of what Angelo Codevilla, a fellow of the institute, would call in 2010 the “country class.” Worse still, the neoconservatives had failed to halt the advance of progressivism that now dominates this elite. Over the years, two more grievances would deepen the rift: their faith in free trade and their appetite for overseas military interventions, of which the Iraq War would become the symbol.
The starting gun was fired in June 1998. Charles Kesler, then a senior fellow of Claremont, delivered a provocative lecture titled What’s Wrong with Conservatism at the American Enterprise Institute, a stronghold of neoconservatism. According to him, the American right, victorious in the Cold War, had lost its sense of mission, and “its commitment to a high, clear, and superior cause had deserted it.” It knows better what it fights than what it defends. If conservatives have become indistinguishable from liberals, Kesler urged them to reconnect with the founders’ doctrine of natural rights to regain a moral compass.
This discourse opened a crack that would keep widening. In the 2000s, the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis discredited neoconservatism and nourished radical populism. Jaffa himself offered a harsh diagnosis of his own camp. Conservatism, he wrote, “suffers from the same nihilism and the same postmodernism that dominate liberalism.”
In addition to this rejection, there was the reproach addressed to Republican elected officials for their inefficiency, or even their reluctance to fight the left embodied by Barack Obama. The younger leaders of Claremont then sought allies against the dominant right, including at the margins of the far right. This rapprochement pushes the institute further toward postliberal populism.
In the Cockpit
Jaffa’s conservatism was Barry Goldwater’s—the Republican candidate crushed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but whose campaign redefined the American right around a defense of a restricted state and light taxation.
He died in January 2015, a few months before Donald Trump entered the race, and Jaffa would not see his heirs align with Trumpism. Yet he had already perceived the institute’s drift. According to his son Philip, in his final years he repeatedly warned that his former students had not waited for his death to bury his teaching. “What they’re trying to do,” he would say, “is to put Jefferson Davis in a top hat and call him Abraham Lincoln, to dress The Grapes of Wrath by Ayn Rand in the cover of Nicomachean Ethics and pretend it’s Aristotle.”
One year and a half after his death, the rupture is consummated. In September 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election, Michael Anton, a graduate of the Claremont Graduate School and future director of political planning for Donald Trump’s second term, published in the Claremont Review of Books, under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, a dark and apocalyptic essay titled The Flight 93 Election.
There he compares American voters to the passengers on the hijacked flight of September 11, 2001, who had no choice but to storm the cockpit. Voting for Trump would be the only way to avert the crash that Hillary Clinton’s victory would herald.
A few months earlier, in an essay with the provocative title “For a Reasonable and Coherent Trumpism,” Anton had already made Trumpism a doctrine in its own right. It rested on three refusals: immigration, globalization through free trade, and foreign military interventions.
On immigration, Anton denounces “the incessant importation of third-world foreigners” lacking a tradition of liberty, which would, in his view, render the electorate “more democratic and less American with each election.” His critics see in it a variant of the far-right conspiracy theory of the great replacement.
Charles Kesler, whose review publishes the essay on its site, judges the metaphor melodramatic. He nonetheless recognizes in it a distinctly American appeal to the polls, in the name of a Republic in peril, and then described himself as the most pro-Trump editor. “In a strange way, Trump jumped over the post–Cold War conservative and Republican establishment,” he explained in 2017. According to him, Trump thus reconnects, albeit unconsciously, with an older republicanism.
From then on, giving this intuition a philosophical foundation becomes Claremont’s task, which positions itself as the nerve center of the MAGA movement.
Forging a Doctrine for Trumpism
Kesler, Anton, and the leading Claremont figures harbor little illusion about Trump’s morality. They nonetheless see in him the instrument of their program, with Kesler hoping to reconnect with the old pre–Cold War right, the era when “the party of William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge dominated national political life.”
This republicanism was protectionist, committed to assimilating immigrants, and wary of external adventures. Kesler sees in it the predecessor for Trump’s positions on trade, immigration, and war.
To build this conservative populism, they wage a cultural war against “wokeness,” which they define as progressivism in all its forms, from multiculturalism to identity politics, including affirmative action and anti-racist measures. They view it, like many conservatives, as reverse discrimination against whites, particularly against young men.
The offensive intensified following two events. The first is the 2019 publication by The New York Times Magazine of the 1619 Project, which reinterprets American history from the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia. Claremont responds on the battlefield of national memory. Kesler labeled the summer 2020 riots as “the 1619 riots.” In the autumn, Trump creates a commission tasked with promoting patriotic history education. Chaired by Larry Arnn, one of the institute’s founders, and with Kesler among its members, the 1776 Commission published in January 2021 a report designed as a reply to the 1619 Project and nourished, according to the New York Times, by Claremont’s ideas.
The second event is the Black Lives Matter wave that followed George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. The institute targets “critical race theory,” diversity and equity policies, and LGBTQ+ rights. Thus Claremont partners with the Idaho Freedom Foundation to denounce the social-justice ideology on the state’s university campuses. In the wake of this, the state Parliament removes $2.5 million in funding for these programs and bans public institutions from requiring students to affirm the theses of “critical race theory.”
For Claremont, this fight also involves a reinterpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ryan Williams, president of the institute since 2017, adopts the thesis of essayist Christopher Caldwell. The law was meant to end segregation and build a color-blind society. Instead, it would have served to create categories of citizens enjoying special protections, starting with affirmative action, and thus fed the expansion of a progressive welfare state.
A Coup in Search of a Theory
The 2020 defeat of Trump pushed Claremont onto a path of unconstitutional authoritarianism.
A central figure in this drift, John Eastman still sits on the institute’s board and runs its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. In late December 2020, this jurist drafted two memos for Trump’s campaign, one two pages long and the other six, in which he explains how to retain power despite the defeat.
The plan unfolds in several steps. On January 6, during Congress’s certification of results, Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the session, would announce that seven states had transmitted competing slates of electors. He would then discard their votes. Trump would thus win by 232 to 222. If the Democrats protested, the election would be sent to the House of Representatives, where each state has one vote. The Republicans, controlling 26 delegations, would elect Trump.
On January 6, 2021, Eastman presented this plan to the crowd gathered on the Ellipse, the park south of the White House, at the “Save America” rally. He claimed, without evidence, that voting machines hid secret files designed to rig the election. A few hours later, the Capitol was stormed. Pence refused to follow the plan, deeming it unconstitutional.
Eastman did not act alone. Other Claremont figures spread the “big lie” of a stolen election, before and after the vote, to the point that the institute came to be seen as the mind behind the insurrection. The judiciary would rule harshly. In March 2022, federal judge David O. Carter deemed “more probable than not” that Eastman and Trump had attempted to obstruct the certification of the election. He described their endeavor as a “coup d’État in search of a legal theory.”
Pursued in Georgia and then in Arizona, Eastman saw the Georgia charges dropped in November 2025, while the Arizona proceedings remained suspended. On November 7, 2025, Trump granted him federal clemency, along with 76 other people involved in contesting the election. On April 15, 2026, the California Supreme Court struck him from the bar.
After the failure of this coup, some Claremont fellows draw an even more radical conclusion. On March 24, 2021, in an essay titled “‘Conservatism’ Is No Longer Enough,” Glenn Ellmers argued that the Constitution no longer works and that there is almost nothing left to conserve. “Most Americans,” he wrote, “are not Americans, in any real sense of the term.” His conclusion is blunt: “We must accept the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution.”
Claremont seems best poised to face this moment. “It is precisely because of this understanding of fundamental principles that Claremont may be the only ‘conservative think tank’ capable of continuing its work, practically unchanged, in the face of the great revolutionary upheaval we are currently experiencing.”
A New Claremont for a New Trumpism
Ellmers is not the only one aiming to rebuild the institute. Ryan Williams, its president since 2017, and Arthur Milikh, who came from the Heritage Foundation, also believe Claremont must reinvent itself to lead this “counterrevolution.”
“The right, at the moment, is not up to the fight,” Milikh writes in February 2021, in the founding document of the Center for the American Way of Life he has just taken up in Washington.
The institute becomes more militant and more responsive to current events. Williams opens it to a generation of young writers, bloggers, and podcasters, some of whom hail from the alt-right and fringe forums where people write under pseudonyms. American Mind, Claremont’s online journal launched in 2018, regularly publishes texts deemed racist, sexist, or conspiratorial. Curtis Yarvin signs a series of essays there as early as 2019. In May 2021, he debates Michael Anton there and argues for a techno-Caesarist monarchy.
This transformation accompanies the rise of the MAGA New Right, whose nationalism-conservatism is one of its most striking expressions. Initiated in 2019 in Washington, the NatCon conferences gained momentum during the Trump interregnum from 2021 to 2025. In 2022, a Declaration of Principles set the program for this eclectic coalition. It calls for far stricter immigration, even a moratorium if necessary, and aims to root public life in Christianity where it is predominant. It also rejects any transfer of sovereignty to supranational bodies. Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, nonetheless refused to sign it, regretting that it invokes the Constitution but leaves out the Declaration of Independence.
The radicality of the return to power by Donald Trump is being prepared with Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation. As early as June 2022, Claremont sits on its advisory board. Published in 2023, the Mandate for Leadership constitutes its manual. It foresees strengthening the executive, dismantling the regulatory state, and placing the family at the center of American society. The institute’s imprint is tangible there.
Michael Pack, its former president, wrote the chapter on the media, and the text leans on Claremont’s work to attack gender theory. Yet the institute downplays its role, and Anton maintains that he had “very little to do with” the project. The key figure in the apparatus, Russell Vought, had already articulated his vision in The American Mind. “We are living in a post-constitutional moment in our country,” he wrote in September 2022.
The 2024 reelection of Trump gives this new Claremont considerable influence. Anton joins the State Department to head political planning. In February 2025, Vought returns to head the Office of Management and Budget. Sometimes described as the most powerful man in Washington, the budget director enjoys broad presidential support for both the directions he proposes and the means to implement them. Claremont in particular salutes four priorities: decrees against diversity policies, the offensive against the administrative state, mass expulsions of migrants, and the culture war against universities and museums. Its members can thus boast of being the brains behind the MAGA movement.
Anton leaves his post in the fall of 2025, but he leaves behind a foundational text. Published on December 5, 2025, the National Security Strategy, for which he drafted the first version, breaks with thirty years of American doctrine. Washington renounces global hegemony to focus on the Western Hemisphere, in the name of a Trumpian corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Europe appears there as a weakened ally, threatened by “civilizational erasure” through immigration, demographic decline, and constraints on freedom of expression.
Marco Rubio reprises this vision at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, then on the Pnyx in Athens on October 7, 2026. Greece, Rome, and Christendom form the bedrock of a West of which America sees itself the guardian, and Rubio extols the deliberate pursuit of national power. The three texts share a single diagnosis: a West endangered from within, and a single remedy: a return to its foundations. They reveal the imprint of Claremont, this belief, inherited from Strauss and Jaffa, that the crisis of modernity is cured by returning to the Ancients and to the founding principles.
The ivory tower of Jaffa’s students has thus become the doctrinal workshop of the Trumpist counter-revolution. Yet, on the eve of the midterm elections, the war against Iran, Medicaid cuts, and polling data foreshadow a divorce between Trump and those who thought they could solidify a Trumpist doctrine.