Trump’s Straussian Shysters: The Scary Sequel
Nearly three years ago I wrote here about the far-right constitutional theory behind Trump lawyer John Eastman’s role in the inept yet deadly January 6, 2021 coup attempt against then President-elect Joe Biden. I described the idiosyncratic reworking by Eastman and other so-called west-coast Straussians at California’s Claremont Institute of the ideas of the German-Jewish refugee Leo Strauss (1899-1973), an imposing, deeply conservative political theorist, into an apology for an executive-directed counterrevolution aimed ostensibly at restoring the original US constitutional order. I naively hoped that Eastman’s activities supporting insurrection would discredit the irresponsible constitutional ideas that contributed to January 6th. Little did I imagine that Strauss’ Claremont disciples would soon enjoy a political comeback, and that they would once again be wreaking constitutional havoc. Not only has a politically resurrected President Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists (including white supremacists and others who committed terrible crimes); he is also now bringing their ideological allies back into the halls of power.
The Claremonsters’ Comeback
On the west coast Straussian account propagated by the Claremont Institute, the US constitutional system’s founding had complex yet identifiable links to the ideals of premodern classic natural right that Strauss taught his disciples to revere. Whereas Strauss and most of his followers have stuck to teaching the classics and writing erudite scholarship, the Claremont Institute has given that agenda a decidedly sharper right-wing political edge. From its perspective, US constitutional development from Woodrow Wilson to the present represents a dangerous revolutionary assault on America’s natural right fundaments. Although readers of Strauss will find little evidence for similar animosity within his learned commentaries on Plato or Machiavelli, the self-described “Claremonsters” fault the modern administrative and regulatory state – allegedly, a product of liberal and leftist lawyerly machinations – for distorting the constitutional system’s early natural right heritage and leading us into an existential crisis. For Eastman and other self-described “Claremonsters,” Trump remains the strongman ruler Americans desperately need to redeem the republic and return to the glory days of 1789.
Anyone who doubts the Claremont Institute’s astonishing political comeback simply needs to visit its website, which now proudly documents its ties to Vice President JD Vance along with the fact that many of its past and present associates — including Michael Anton, a fiery early Trump enthusiast and now his director of policy planning– have key positions in the second Trump Administration. Never mind Eastman’s role in fomenting a violent attack on the US Capitol or conspiring to overturn the 2020 election: the erstwhile “conservative” Claremont Institute (where Eastman still serves as Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence) shamelessly vaunts his and other Claremont intellectuals’ roles in paving the way for Trump’s preposterous executive order revoking birthright citizenship (and the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) – an order, fortunately, thus far stalled in the federal courts. The ideological origins of Trump’s ongoing assault on the administrative and regulatory state are neatly encapsulated in a statement celebrating Trump’s victory from Claremont President Ryan Williams, who reiterates west coast Straussian orthodoxy that America’s founding legal ideals were decimated by a hegemonic progressivism that has resulted in an “unelected, out-of-control bureaucracy.” For Williams, as for Eastman and other self-described “Claremonsters,” only Trump – and now Trump’s loyal sidekick Vance, a frequent Claremont event participant and conversation partner– can save the republic and bring about the requisite constitutional restoration.
Hostility to the administrative state
The constitutionally most shocking of Trump’s myriad shocking recent moves have been a series of executive orders shutting down and/or defunding federal agencies whose legality rests on congressional mandates and for which Congress has allocated resources. Presidential decrees, it seems, can override constitutional amendments and congressional statutes. Many political commentators have accurately noted that the strategy behind this astonishingly expansive view of executive power was sketched in the much-discussed Project 25, Trump’s playbook despite his misleading assertions during the presidential debates last fall that he knew nothing about it. Claremont’s intellectuals proudly defend Project 25: after all, it worked with other erstwhile conservative – but now identifiably right-wing authoritarian – think tanks and advocacy groups, all funded by wealthy donors, to write it.
Observers have also zeroed in on the crucial role of a former Claremont Fellow and self-described Christian Nationalist, Russell Vought, Trump’s new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Although a right-wing activist who worked in the last Trump administration rather than a Straussian intellectual focused on resurrecting Plato, the programmatic overlap with Claremont constitutional theory is substantial.
In a 2022 essay published in the Claremont journal American Mind Vought reproduced not only Claremont’s familiar call for constitutional restoration but also its deep hostility to the administrative state. There, Vought advocates a “revolutionary constitutionalism” tasked with rolling back the administrative state – a shady “double government” inconsistent with the constitutional framers’ original vision, and now supposedly the institutional basis for the unchecked rule of “woke” bureaucrats in Washington. The culprits, predictably, are left-wingers and their fellow travelers responsible for engineering an independent civil service based on expert knowledge and outfitted with a measure of job security – in other words, the so-called “deep state” despised by the hard right. Never mind that Woodrow Wilson was hardly a leftist, and that the modern US state remains a bipartisan product. Or that the national security apparatus (FBI, CIA, etc.) has been regularly enhanced by conservatives at least as much as by liberals.
A recipe book for authoritarian presidentialism
Obviously, eighteenth-century constitutional models do not seamlessly mesh with modern institutional realities. Constitutional adaptation to rapidly changing social imperatives has indeed taken complicated and sometimes messy forms, in part because of the US Constitution’s infamously difficult formal amendment procedures. Nonetheless, on Vought’s fiery authoritarian originalist call to arms, it is high time to recognize “that we are living in a post-Constitutional time,” and therefore to “put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it. That and only that will be how American statesmanship can be defined in the years ahead.”
Writing when Trump’s political fate remained unclear, Vought presciently hinted that one path to constitutional restoration entailed presidents simply ignoring supreme court rulings. Describing Chief Justice John Marshall’s worries in the context of Marbury v. Madison (1803) about the prospect of President Jefferson refusing to respect the court’s decision, Vought playfully suggested that “it was Jefferson who gave us a glimpse of the posture that prevents encroaching powers.” At any rate, a “titanic struggle” between the executive and other branches, Vought suggested, might prove necessary to smash the administrative state.
At present, The New York Times, Washington Post, and other media sources are filled with speculations that the new Trump administration may simply ignore unfavorable court rulings. Those speculations were prompted by Vice President Vance’s jolting declaration that Trump would be right to do so: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Never to be outdone when it comes to endorsing irresponsible views, Trump’s billionaire buddy and de facto prime minister Elon Musk chimed in, denouncing judges who have temporarily thwarted his illegal efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy. Their statements cohere with Vought’s American Mind call for a (counter)revolutionary constitutionalism in which right-wingers “throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.”
Even as he draws all the wrong conclusions, Vought is right to infer that it is a matter of legitimate debate whether the US framers sought a powerful constitutional court with the final say over key constitutional questions. Like other features of US constitutional democracy, judicial supremacy was established by institutional players facing real-life political and legal quagmires, not some perfect constitutional master plan developed by superhuman founders with secret ties to Plato’s philosopher kings and queens. To their credit, the original framers – unlike their cultist Straussian disciples at Claremont– were realistic enough to grasp that future generations would face dilemmas requiring far-reaching legal and political innovation. They would see the Trumpist Right’s attacks on judicial supremacy and calls for constitutional restoration for what they are, namely: a recipe book for authoritarian presidentialism, something they abhorred. Given some framers’ anxieties about excessive material inequality and the dangers of oligarchy, they would also be horrified to learn that an unelected billionaire has been tasked by Trump with radically downsizing the federal government.
Trump’s return brings to mind Marx’s famous quip in The 18th Brumaire of Napolean Bonaparte (1852) that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The Claremont Straussians are again working hard to make sure that Trump succeeds where he previously failed, that is, at transforming our flawed and imperfect constitutional democracy into something far worse. Defenders of the rule of law will need to work even harder to make sure they fail. Trump’s political resurrection may be farcical, yet no one should underestimate the existential dangers it poses to an embattled US constitutional democracy