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Donald Trump’s explosion onto the American political landscape divided the conservative intellectual movement in two. While some conservatives became “Never Trumpers,” others enthusiastically supported the outsider president. This was particularly true of the contemporary disciples of Leo Strauss and Harry V. Jaffa, who write for the influential conservative journal the Claremont Review of Books. These so-called “West Coast Straussians” vociferously defended Trump’s decisions in terms of immigration policy and judicial appointments in the name of a philosophy that calls for a return to the doctrine of natural law, which they view as inseparable from the meaning of American democracy itself.