Josh Hawley might be the Claremont Institute’s heir to a Trumpist American future | Opinion

Earlier in his short life, the young senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, was a Teddy Roosevelt biographer writing about the former president’s belief in a muscular “Manifest Destiny” for an expanding American empire. Some around Hawley see in him, too, a man of destiny, though of a less muscular sort.

The leaders of California’s Claremont Institute may be betting that way by naming a current Hawley staffer and two alumni of his Senate office to their prestigious Publius and Lincoln fellowships.

The three even younger men, legislative aide and Benedictine College graduate Alex Gorman, former Hawley staffer Pierson Furnish, now a senior lawyer for House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Kansan Eric Teetsel, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who was Hawley’s chief of staff, are all clearly on the way up in their own right.

On their way up and in future roles in an increasingly likely second Donald Trump administration, they will be building the experience and network of Hawley-affiliated influencers who can help make Hawley Trump’s heir.

Missouri’s senior senator already laid claim to that role with the famous fist-pump as the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection was about to turn violent. The Claremont Institute is looking to be the brains and network shaping Trump’s agenda and easing the path for a Trumpian successor in the Claremont mold.

More than anything else, the think tank based in an Upland, California, office park has a particular story it wants to tell about American history and its future. In the simplest terms, the story is that America’s design was made clear in the Declaration of Independence most powerfully with the language of all men being created equal, but our nation failed to live up to that design in the founding, which had to be completed through Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War that ended slavery.

Bringing the story into the 20th and 21st centuries, the design of America was betrayed by the progressivism that seeped into government and culture during and after the two world wars. Conservatives in this tale fought valiantly but failed to stop it.

A new founding would be necessary to return America to its glory through a leader who would throw off the shackles of old ways and crush the progressives and the freedom-sapping administrative state they created. That man is Trump and, to right the American ship, things may get messy, as they did for Lincoln.

Beyond traditional conservative beliefs, it is this story that Claremont inculcates in young leaders who are selected for its fellowships.

I know a little about the Publius fellows. Some have worked for me at USA Today, and I’ve talked to a few for this column. I applied when I was a wee journalist back in 1995, but I didn’t make the cut.

Primarily, the fellowships teach through lectures and readings of just the right folks who narrate Claremont’s story of America, but there are social events, shooting excursions and, some years, showings of the John Wayne movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

More often than not, the people who look at Claremont, like the people who look at Hawley, see the network through a lens of fear and paranoia. That’s not shocking. What Claremont fellows and leaders see as intellectual experimentation can seem crazy when it comes out in The American Mind, a Claremont web publication that veers from edgy to loopy on a daily basis.

One Publius fellow I talked to cautions me not to overstate the influence of the crazies. The test, the young fellow argues, is to see what moves into the mainstream and can get broader purchase in the culture. But with Trump at the helm, crazy sometimes seems the whole point.

That’s one reason the group email for Publius alumni broke up in acrimony and was ultimately shut down. As among all Americans, within the think tank’s chummy network there was plenty of division over Trump and even more strong feelings.

This fall the stakes couldn’t be higher. Missouri voters will have a say in whether Trump gets to lead a third founding of America and a say in whether Josh Hawley stays in office long enough to be Trump’s Ulysses S. Grant, the man who takes over and establishes all he fought for.

Let’s hope the crazies aren’t as influential as they look.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com