Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk and the Claremonsters

During the four-hour memorial for Charlie Kirk at Arizona’s State Farm Stadium, Vice President JD Vance declared that the assassinated right-wing influencer was “Athens and Jerusalem”. Mentioning the two cities, representing reason and religion, was a nod to an important right-wing authority – Leo Strauss.

Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who spoke of Athens and Jerusalem as the two poles of Western thought, has influenced generations of American conservatives. His disciples include the “godfather of neoconservatism”, Irving Kristol, the sitting Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and the Nietzschean provocateur Costin Vlad Alamariu (“Bronze Age Pervert”). From Reaganite grandees to the alt-right networks around Donald Trump, Strauss is a constant.

It is perhaps surprising that Strauss, an Ivy League professor who emphasised the distance between philosophy and public morality, should have had such bombastic heirs. It happened in part thanks to a fight between Strauss’s students in the 1970s, some of whom formed a radical faction at the Claremont Institute, a think tank located on the edge of Los Angeles’ suburban sprawl.

The Claremont Institute was founded by a group of “West-Coast Straussians”, including Larry Arnn, who also spoke at the Kirk memorial, a former mentor to the assassinated right-wing influencer. Kirk, who once attended a ten-day course at Claremont, called it “the intellectual home of the new right.” This is no exaggeration. More than any single institution, the Claremont faction has generated a philosophy for Trump’s second administration, and its ongoing attempt to radically redefine America.

Born into a German Jewish family in 1889, Leo Strauss trained as a scholar of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. In 1932, he left Germany, emigrating to Paris, London, and then to America, landing in 1937. After years of uncertainty, he found a job at the New School in Manhattan, then known as “the University in Exile” because of the number of Jewish emigrés who taught there. One of them was Hannah Arendt, whom Strauss had tried to court in Germany. She had refused, remarking to a friend how brilliant he was but how conservative.

It was in America that Strauss elaborated his most enduring idea. In 1938, he wrote to a friend: “I shudder in the face of what I may cause by my interpretation.” He had been studying the 12th-century Sephardic scholar Maimonides, and had discovered (or rather interpreted) that Maimonides’s true commitment was to Aristotelian philosophy rather than Judaism. From this, Strauss concluded that reason (Athens) and religion (Jerusalem) were incompatible. He came to believe that all true philosophers were sceptics. Fearing persecution, philosophers learn to conceal scepticism in their public writings. Strauss would have viewed JD Vance’s suggestion that Kirk was both Athens and Jerusalem as absurd.

In his 1952 book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argued that, in true philosophy, there are two kinds of truth: exoteric truths, promoting the public morality of the time, and esoteric truths, hidden so that only the wise could understand them. He would go on to discover the truths hidden in Plato, Machiavelli, and Spinoza. This theory is a seductive, similar in its appeal to that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who each encouraged their readers to see things beneath the surface of a text. In other ways, Strauss’s method is highly distinctive. He argued that something a philosopher said only once in their work was more likely to be true than something they said repeatedly, and his classes pored closely over the texts of the great philosophers for their esoteric truths. Strauss’s interpretations, while powerful, were often eccentric. It’s difficult to disprove a conclusion based on what is “written” between the lines.

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One of Strauss’s cardinal examples is Socrates, who used irony to mask his true beliefs from the Athenian people. Eventually, the philosopher was put on trial, accused of corrupting the youth and blaspheming the city’s gods, and forced to commit suicide. Socrates’s trial demonstrates the real threat of persecution but also the difficulty of truly hiding what you think. The idea of esoteric writing was born of a mistrust of the people, understandable for a philosopher who had fled Nazi mobs. But within this lurked an argument against democracy: only an elite group were capable of true wisdom and perhaps only they were fit to govern. Influenced by Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who both became members of the Nazi party, Strauss developed a conservative critique of Western modernity. He had witnessed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and he concluded that liberal democracy was incapable of defending itself against both fascism and communism.

Despite a youthful engagement with Zionism, Strauss settled in America. In time, his adoptive nation would absorb the brunt of his critique of liberalism. In the paranoid years of the Cold War, many conservatives believed that communism was at the door. Strauss seems to have viewed the US with mistrust, as if it were a potential Weimar Republic, always threatening to fall. It was philosophy’s task to help it avoid this fate. In 1947, after being naturalised as a citizen, he became a professor at the University of Chicago. He stayed there for the rest of his career, inspiring bright young men and women to adopt his methods, his favourite authors, and his conclusions.

Perhaps his most famous student was Allan Bloom, the author of a famous conservative polemic, The Closing of the American Mind, later immortalised in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. Inspired by Strauss, Bloom attacked jazz, Walkmen, and politically correct subscriptions to diversity, and called for the revival of classical philosophy for those capable of understanding it. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq War, was a student of Bloom’s and a fellow Straussian. And the influence of an Ivory Tower philosopher on George W Bush’s unintellectual White House led to a flurry of articles in 2003 about whether Strauss, by then dead for several decades, had inspired the war against Saddam. Another Straussian in the administration, Abram Shulsky, claimed that esotericism had inspired his work in military intelligence.

Not all of Strauss’s students were supporters of Bush or the Iraq War, however. Many shunned political engagement, preferring to elaborate Straussian interpretations of classical philosophy. Over the decades, their influence has spread throughout North American universities. The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner claims that Straussianism remains “the prevailing way of approaching texts in the history of moral and political philosophy”. But Straussianism isn’t one simple thing. A schism emerged after the master’s death in 1973, focused on the nature of the US political system. In turn, this debate has helped to shape the political philosophy of Trump’s inner circle.

Harry Jaffa, one of Strauss’s first doctoral students and his most combative heir, maintained that the founding of the United States was inspired by principles consistent with the ancient philosophy that Strauss championed. Meanwhile, Walter Berns, a Georgetown professor, saw the American founding as a “low but solid act”, based on a pragmatic view of human imperfection. Their disagreement focused on the words of the Declaration of Independence, and in particular its famous preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” What does it mean to be created equal?

For Berns, and other “East Coast Straussians”, equality is a condition similar to the state of nature famously described by Hobbes as “nasty, brutish and short”. For Jaffa, by contrast, the defence of equality in the Declaration was consistent with the ideal of justice proposed by Socrates and praised by Strauss. In his 1959 book Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa studied the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in an 1858 race for the Senate. Jaffa argued that the Founding Fathers had articulated an equality in 1776 that had not actually existed until Lincoln abolished slavery and fulfilled the founder’s intentions. The emancipation proclamation had therefore brought about a “second founding”. If that sounds liberal, Jaffa would soon swerve to the right.

As a younger man, Jaffa had been a confirmed Democrat. But the 1961 Bay of Pigs crisis, which made JFK appear insufficiently tough on communism, caused him to defect. Three years later, Jaffa moved to California to teach at Claremont McKenna College. It was there that Jaffa’s students set up the Claremont Institute, turning Straussianism into a political movement. Soon, Jaffa was not only a Republican but a supporter of its radical right-wing. In 1964, he supported Barry Goldwater’s right-wing populist campaign for president, and wrote a memo that Goldwater used in a notorious speech at the Republican Convention, declaring: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” With those now-notorious words, Jaffa tried to convince the Republicans that his preferred candidate, viewed by many within the party as unacceptably extreme, was justified. In time, Jaffa’s heirs would do the same for Trump.

According to the stereotype, West Coast Straussians embrace a degree of political engagement that their East Coast colleagues disdain as vulgar. Jaffa developed a reputation for pugilism, attacking friends and allies without remorse. “If you think it’s hard disagreeing with Harry Jaffa,” the commentator William F Buckley said, “try agreeing with him.” At a Claremont conference, Jaffa once dismissed Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield as a “Calhounite” – comparing his interpretation of the Declaration to that of John C Calhoun, the pro-slavery president who said equality was a “self-evident lie”. This caused an uproar. The diminutive economist Milton Friedman tried to intercede, shouting “Gentlemen! We’re all friends here!” But it was to no avail. For Jaffa, friendship was no barrier to antagonism.

Jaffa remained liberal in some respects to the end of his life. In 1994, he opposed a law that would have denied the services of the state to undocumented people. In this, he was still a student of Leo Strauss, who called philosophy “stranger wisdom” and saw it as seeking distance from the business of politics. Jaffa’s followers would have no such scruple. He died in 2015, on the same day as his East Coast rival Walter Berns. The following year, some of his disciples at the Claremont Institute embraced Trump’s bid for the presidency.

One of Trump’s biggest boosters in the Claremont crowd is Michael Anton, recently feted as the “MAGA Machiavelli”. Anton grew up in San Francisco, but his father sold the family home before the property boom. This meant that he grew up watching former hippies becoming millionaires, something that appears to have motivated a deep dislike of liberals. As a Claremont graduate student, Anton witnessed Harry Jaffa prowling the library stacks, and was proud to be considered one of his philosophical “grandchildren”. Then, Anton quit his PhD to go into politics, eventually becoming press secretary for Condoleezza Rice. Later, he worked for corporate behemoths Citibank and Blackrock. After going back into politics, he would disdain them as exponents of “woke capital”.

Once a prolific poster on menswear chatrooms, Anton’s publications include The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style. But his most influential work is an essay, “The Flight 93 Election”, published in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016. Signed “Publius Decius Mus” (the name of an ancient Roman general), it compared the United States to the airplane hijacked on 9/11 on which the passengers rushed the cockpit, causing the plane to crash but preventing an act of terrorism. “2016 is the Flight 93 election,” Anton warned: “charge the cockpit or you die.”

Anton was addressing those Republicans who refused to vote for Trump. While conceding that their candidate was “worse than imperfect”, Anton compared Hilary Clinton to Hitler, warning that a million Syrian refugees were on the doorstep. “2016 is a test – in my view, the final test – of whether there is any virtú left in what used to be the core of the American nation.” The term virtú comes from Machiavelli: it doesn’t mean virtue in the modern sense, but, instead, the decisive use of power proper to a ruler. It is characteristic of West Coast Straussianism to insist that America might once again fulfil classical philosophical ideals. Here that argument was put to the aid of a candidate, who, like Barry Goldwater, was an extremist in defending something he called liberty.

The “Flight 93” essay went viral, and Anton was quickly outed as its author. After the 2016 election, he was rewarded with a job in the new government. After that, his estimate of Trump’s virtues has risen. Over the past eight years, Anton’s writing has become even more apocalyptic. In recent years, he has made dark suggestions about the “right to revolt” enshrined in the US Constitution, even outraging other Republicans. But another one of the so-called “Claremonsters” would play a more instrumental role in Trump’s efforts to pervert the 2020 election.

In December 2020, as Trump was looking for a way to challenge the election results in certain states, Rudy Giuliani brought John Eastman to the White House. A legal scholar and Claremont board member, Eastman had come to Giuliani’s attention after writing an essay questioning Kamala Harris’s citizenship. Eastman was there to tell the outgoing president what he wanted to hear. Michael Wolf describes the encounter in his book Landslide: “Eastman told the president that the vice president could reject any of these votes and simply replace Biden electors with Trump electors.” In the weeks leading up to the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, Eastman’s advice added fuel to Trump’s argument that the election had been stolen.

The Claremont Institute has also guided Trump’s attempt to rewrite history. Published two days before the end of Trump’s first term, the 1776 Commission proposed a “patriotic education” to replace the critical view proposed in the New York Times’s “1619 Project”. The chair of the Commission was Kirk’s mentor, the Claremont founder Larry Arnn. Jaffa’s influence is most visible where the report suggests that the pro-slavery President John C Calhoun was “perhaps the leading forerunner of identity politics”. This outrageous suggestion draws on Jaffa’s reading of the Declaration, arguing that progressive reforms such as affirmative action violate the natural right of equality. The 46-page Commission report was dismissed by historians in The Washington Post as a “hack job”.

Increasingly, the Claremont men depart entirely from Strauss: Anton speaks dismissively of Straussians as rarified Ivory Tower intellectuals – no doubt thinking of those, like Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who are “never Trumpers”. John Eastman, who Trump called a “very smart guy”, has not only been disbarred, but also did not receive a presidential pardon or payment for his services. In 2024, Eastman was indicted on charges of conspiracy, fraud, and forgery. Meanwhile, Claremont McKenna College has discontinued the programme in political philosophy. However, its graduates have already migrated to right-wing universities such as the New College of Florida and Hillsdale College, where Arnn is the president, not to mention Washington DC. The Claremont ideology – no longer only on the West Coast, and no longer really Straussian – has become government policy.

Even as the “Claremonsters” have moved away from the subtlety of Leo Strauss, they have lent his intellectual weight to an otherwise untheoretical White House. One sign of this enduring link is the fact that Peter Thiel is funding research into Strauss’s arguments about natural law, one of the bedrocks of his philosophy. The notoriously secretive Thiel is a thinker well suited to Strauss’s work. In a 2007 essay entitled “The Straussian Moment”, the billionaire investor uses Strauss to make dark warnings about the future of liberal democracy. The essay contains esoteric hints – in its epigraphs, its interest in numerology, and an untranslated German warning about a coming “Caesarism”. While Thiel’s interest in the esoteric is connected to his belief that the state should not be transparent, it is Strauss’s explicit arguments about the weakness of liberalism that appeal to Thiel’s acolyte JD Vance.

On 5 July 2025, shortly after a landmark Supreme Court judgment helped accelerate Donald Trump’s executive order to ban birthright citizenship, JD Vance gave a speech at the Claremont Institute. He spoke about the need “to redefine American citizenship in the 21st century”, and asked for their help. Anton, now director of policy planning for the White House, and a leading diplomatic negotiator with Iran, was in the audience that day. Anton was the only person that Vance mentioned by name, perhaps because Vance was using Anton’s own arguments.

Vance’s call to reimagine citizenship harks back to the dark side of Jaffa’s understanding of equality. Jaffa liked to remind his students that the Declaration mentions “savages”, which he took as a reference to those unsuited to or undeserving of liberty. In a 1987 essay, “The American Founding as the Best Regime”, Jaffa claims the founders wouldn’t have wanted equality to extend to “lesbians, sodomites, abortionists, drug addicts, and pornographers”.

Likewise, in his Claremont speech, the Vice President distinguished between those who deserve to be citizens and those who don’t. He attacked New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for his qualified praise of America. Trump had already questioned the citizenship status of Mamdani, who was born in Uganda. Echoing this, Vance suggested that it’s not only criminals that should forfeit citizenship but those who lack gratitude for their nation. “This is one of the things we need to run with over the next few years,” Vance told the Claremont faithful. They are ready to oblige.

Despite professing reverence for the Constitution, the Claremont men support a president who has used his office to enrich his already Pharaonic dynasty, who threatens to strip citizenship from their political opponents and stokes rumours of an unconstitutional third term. How serious Trump is about a third term remains to be seen. If his actions on January 6 are anything to go by, the next attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of power – one of the great achievements of US democracy – will be opportunistic, vague, and chaotic. One thing is clear: Strauss’s dissident heirs are using his work to undermine democracy in the precisely the way that he feared.

At Strauss’s funeral, in 1973, Psalm 114 was read at the request of his friends. It speaks of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt and their sanctuary in the land of Judah. For the mourners, this must have called to mind Strauss’s own escape from Nazi Germany and his finding refuge in America. Today, his work is being used by those trying to ensure that America is no sanctuary.

[Further reading: The prophet of the new right]