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Welcome to University of Trump-Los Angeles

The Claremont Institute, a right-wing ivory tower in the Inland Empire, has become a finishing school for the likes of Ingraham, Shapiro, Cotton—and a sinecure for the political minds behind Trump’s attempted coup. In the process, it’s spawned an academic movement to preserve Trumpism after Trump.

Claremont McKenna College
Photo by Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Tina Nguyen
October 19, 2021

In every White House, there’s always a publication that claims to embody the spirit of the sitting president. The New Republic was the in-flight magazine of Air Force One during the Clinton years; the Weekly Standard could be found on coffee tables in George W. Bush’s West Wing; and Barack Obama famously loved the explanatory journalism of Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman. There was no such publication during Donald Trump’s presidency, of course—Trump’s Twitter feed, in conversation with Fox News, was its own sort of sacred text.