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The intellectuals of Trumpism: the case of the Claremont Institute

Donald Trump’s emergence onto the political scene has divided the conservative intellectual movement in the United States. While some conservatives have become “never Trumpers”, others have strongly supported this unconventional president. This is particularly true for intellectuals working on a very influential journal in conservative circles, the Claremont Review of Books, based in California. How can one explain the Claremont Institute’s support for Donald Trump’s policy? On what intellectual grounds does it base itself in order to justify his politics?

Conservative thought in the United States has never been monolithic. One of its lesser-known currents, the “West Coast Straussians”, gained considerable importance during the Trump years. Its key figures have shown unwavering support for Donald Trump through their think tank, the Claremont Institute, and its influential journal, the Claremont Review of Books


  • Coste F., 2022, « Trump ou l’apocalypse, une histoire intellectuelle du conservatisme américain à l’ère de Trump », Revue d’histoire, vol. 20 & 21, n° 153, Paris : Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, pp. 19-32.

    Françoise Coste is a member of the CAS Laboratory (Center for Anglophone Studies), University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès: francoise.coste@univ-tlse2.fr

     

  • This article is published in connection with the Festival of the Americas organized by Toulouse Jean Jaurès University (March 17–24, 2026).

The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank established in 1979 near Los Angeles. Its members claim two spiritual fathers, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015). Its present direction is largely based on a current of thought conceptualised by Leo Strauss: the pivotal importance of natural law and its application to the history of American democracy. For Strauss, the natural law is a “trans-historical” and “trans-religious” law, based on “what is good by nature as distinguished from what is good merely by convention”. Strauss was convinced that this conception of the world has disappeared in contemporary times. Rather than believing in natural rights defined by “what is intrinsically good or just”, contemporary man has chosen to “tolerate all opinions about what is good and right”. As a result, relativism reigns supreme. All values, ideas and cultures are equal.

 

Harry V. Jaffa was one of the first to apply Strauss’ philosophical principles to the American political tradition. Jaffa highlighted the existence of a philosophical link between Thomas Jefferson (author of the 1776 US Declaration of Independence), President Abraham Lincoln and Leo Strauss. Jaffa was convinced that Lincoln, like Jefferson, rejected any relativistic conception of the world and that, on the contrary, the two men fitted into the long-standing tradition of natural rights restored by Strauss. Rediscovering this philosophical relationship is crucial because the belief in natural rights has a major corollary consequence for the political functioning of the United States: it is the basis of government by consent of the people. Given that “the authority of one man over another man does not derive from nature”, it can in fact only result from the consent of the governed.

Consent and democracy

This link between natural rights and government by consent of the people is the keystone for understanding American democracy for the followers of Harry V. Jaffa who work and publish for the Claremont Institute today. For them, the legacy of natural rights was abandoned in the United States from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920). This former academic (political scientist at Princeton) profoundly transformed the nature of the US Federal State, making it an ambitious tool for reform and progress for the population. This in turn led to the emergence of a state that the promoters of the Claremont Institute describe as an “Administrative State”. However, an Administrative State is the very negation of the values defended in the writings of Strauss and Jaffa, as here the experts are in charge and will define, according to the historical process and current scientific knowledge, the rights to which citizens can aspire. In doing so, they are replacing a moral and political order based on immutable human nature. The State, in the absence of natural rights and having become all-powerful, no longer has any limits.

In this new context, government by consent of the people breaks down since, as John Marini writes in the Claremont Review of Books, “the sovereignty of the people” has been “replaced by the sovereignty of the State”. The main culprits are the Democrats who, in the footsteps of Wilson, have constantly strengthened the Administrative State under the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt (1932-1945), Lyndon Johnson (1963-1968) and more recently Barack Obama (2008-2016). The Administrative State created and nurtured by these presidents has moved the United States into a situation of “cold civil war” by destroying national unity; within the population there would no longer be common values, only an archipelago made up of different groups.

The symbol of this decline was the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1964. According to the West Coast Straussians, this law meant that the State’s priority was no longer to protect natural rights, but rather to combat discrimination. As a result, fundamental rights such as freedom of association or religious freedom are no longer respected, at least for Americans who are “reactionary”, “ignorant” and “full of prejudice”. Of course, the various minority groups in American society have gained new rights through this process; but they made a pact with the devil because they achieved this win within a framework that denied natural law and the principle of government by consent of the people, as summarised by Charles Kessler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books: “From the 1960s, the deal that Americans made with their government involved exchanging ever-growing aspects of people’s control over government for a guarantee of new and constantly updated rights, distributed by the government to economic, social, ethnic, racial, gender and transsexual groups”. In other words, minority Americans have gained rights, but in doing so they have done away with freedom.

Support for Donald Trump

In the wake of Anton’s text, intellectuals associated with the Claremont Institute have committed to Trump, seeing him as a claimed enemy of the much detested Administrative State. His resounding rejection of the establishment, bureaucrats and experts (economists, diplomats or scientists) is seen as the restoration of the power of the people against professional elites. Therefore, what has been widely interpreted as a populist speech on the part of Trump is, for West Coast Straussians, in actual fact an intellectual approach. Although obviously not conceived as such by Trump himself (since he has never read either Strauss or Jaffa), and almost in spite of himself, it is embodied in his famous slogan “Make America Great Again”. With this slogan, he is rejecting a relativistic view of the world and claiming that America was greater in the past, a past defined, as the Claremont Review of Books writes, by “the defence of the eternal principle of political law understood in terms of an eternal human nature”.

Through this intellectual framework, we can understand the support given by West Coast Straussians to the Trump administration’s most controversial initiatives between 2016 and 2020. For example, they were ardent supporters of the promise to build a wall along the Mexican border. It is clear to them that the opening of the US borders is a deliberate strategy on the part of the Administrative State, because “the continued importation of foreigners from the Third World who have neither the habit nor the taste […] for freedom” reduces the number of “traditional” American voters who still believe in the primacy of natural law. The same goes for Trump’s decisions on moral issues and the rights of sexual minorities. Indeed, since the 1980s, Harry Jaffa rebelled against “moral relativism” which allows each individual to “choose their lifestyle” regardless of the reality of “human nature”. They particularly regret that the widespread use of contraception has put an end to the “natural punishments” (such as pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases) that once forced young people to remain “chaste”. Hence the great satisfaction of the members of the Claremont Institute when Trump appointed three judges to the Supreme Court who were fervent followers of the philosophy of natural law, judges who made the abolishment of the federal right to abortion possible in June 2022.

During the Trump years, the Claremont Institute gained tremendous visibility. Through its close proximity to the administration, for which several of its members have worked, it developed a taste for power and finally decided to switch from the world of ideas to that of politics: in February 2021, the California institute opened a branch in Washington, the “Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life”. This rise in power was accompanied by a radicalisation of its conservatism. Its members never accepted the defeat of Trump in 2020 and the legal justification for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was elaborated by one of them, John Eastman. One can therefore easily anticipate a major comeback for the West Coast Straussians at the highest level of US power should Trump achieve victory again in November 2024.


  • Anton M., 2016, « The Flight 93 Election », The Claremont Review of Books, 5 septembre 2016
  • Jaffa H., 1984, American Conservatism and the American Founding, Claremont: The Claremont Institute
  • Strauss L., 1953, Natural Right and History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Illustration by Adèle Huguet for Mondes Sociaux: CC BY-NC-ND
To see more of her drawings, visit https://adelehuguet.wordpress.com/

 
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Françoise Coste (20 mars 2026). The intellectuals of Trumpism: the case of the Claremont Institute. Mondes Sociaux. Consulté le 10 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15x4o


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