A right-wing think-tank founded in southern California by students of Harry Jaffa, a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and an adviser to Barry Goldwater who wrote the latter's famous line: "Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice." Members and alumni call themselves "Claremonsters."
Unlike other think-tanks, Claremont does not churn out policy papers. Its focus is on history and principle, aiming to teach young conservatives "how the great statesmen of the past thought" and what later went awry in America. Early Claremonsters argued that America went off the rails in the Progressive Era. They view remedial programmes of the 20th century—welfare, affirmative action—and the bureaucrats who designed them as un-American. The Claremont position holds that establishment Republicans were content merely to cut taxes and regulations, an approach inadequate for the scale of the problem: "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."
The institute scorned the neoconservative Beltway establishment, regarding it as full of squishes: deluded about the Iraq war, pro-amnesty for unauthorised immigrants, unwilling to smash the administrative state, complacent about multiculturalism. The Claremont Review of Books, edited by Charles Kesler, is its principal publication.
Nearly all conservative intellectuals shunned Donald Trump initially, but Claremont saw in him 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. Michael Anton, a Claremont scholar, made an early intellectual case for Trump in 2016. John Eastman, a lawyer at the institute, helped hatch the "fake electors" scheme to try to overturn the 2020 election; he was indicted by state prosecutors in Arizona and Georgia.
Claremont's 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).
By one count at least 70 Claremonsters hold or have held jobs in the Trump administration, from the vice-president's chief of staff to the deputy director of the CIA, along with an army of special assistants and speechwriters. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, is a former Claremont fellow. The institute runs fellowships for young conservatives—a crash course in Aristotle, Plato and Socrates alongside readings of America's founding texts. One participant called it "an intellectual bootcamp for the revolution."
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.
Once I finally figured out all of life's answers, they changed the questions.