How Hillsdale Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot
A few days before Thanksgiving 2020, a half-dozen or so people gathered at the home of a Michigan lawyer named Robert E. Norton II.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Norton is the general counsel of Hillsdale College, a small, conservative Christian school in the southern part of the state. One of his guests was Ian Northon, a Hillsdale alumnus and private lawyer who did work for the college. Also in attendance were a couple of state lawmakers, Beth Griffin and Julie Alexander, who represented conservative districts north of Detroit.Northon would later describe the meeting to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. “Somebody at Hillsdale reached out to me, said they are going to have this little meeting,” he testified. “I went to it. There were a handful of reps there, and then Giuliani called in.” That, of course, was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor turned personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump.“We don’t think that the laws have been followed, but we don’t know,” Northon recalled Giuliani saying over the speakerphone, then instructing the group to let the campaign know about any signs of election fraud they discovered. “He was not on the call for very long, and I don’t know if he knew that he was speaking to a group of legislators and lawyers in Michigan,” Northon said. “I got the sense that he was making a lot of calls around that time.”Trump’s campaign to remain in power was already in full, if flailing, swing. Just hours after the final polls closed on election night, in a televised speech from the White House, the president declared the election “a fraud on the American public”; he and his allies proceeded to spread the lie of a rigged election on Fox News, on conservative talk radio and on Twitter. Giuliani had held his infamously unhinged news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, where he floated the idea that “ballots have been manufactured in advance” by Democrats. At a contentious Oval Office meeting several days later, Trump sidelined the campaign lawyers and instead made Giuliani the point man for the rush of ultimately futile lawsuits challenging the election. The key swing states had yet to certify the vote; for Trump and his allies, Michigan became a focus. On Nov. 17, according to The Detroit News, the president called two members of the Board of Canvassers of heavily Democratic Wayne County and pressed them not to certify. Three days later, he brought a delegation of the state’s Republican legislative leaders to the White House to hear out his fraud claims. It is unclear precisely how the Hillsdale contingent was brought into this widening conspiracy-seeking swirl. But the college was nothing if not well connected. Northon also did work for the Amistad Project, a self-described “election-integrity watchdog” that emerged as a primary partner in the Trump campaign’s election-fraud litigation. Before Norton came to Hillsdale, he was a vice president of the Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based conservative philanthropy that has funded groups advancing voter-fraud conspiracy theories. And most prominent was Hillsdale’s president, Larry P. Arnn. Over two decades, Arnn had fashioned the college as an avatar of resistance to progressivism, all the while amassing relationships with many of the influencers and financiers who were transforming conservative politics in America. By the time Trump swept into the White House in 2017, Arnn had made Hillsdale an academic darling and supplier of philosophical gravitas to the new right. So prominent was Arnn that he was mentioned as a possible education secretary before losing out to Betsy DeVos, part of a wealthy Michigan family of major conservative donors and Hillsdale patrons. (Her brother, the private-security contractor Erik Prince, is an alumnus.) Hillsdale graduates became aides in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill and clerks at the Supreme Court. (“We have hired many staff from Hillsdale,” says Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s vice president and Arnn’s longtime friend, Mike Pence.) In the Covid years, the backlash against school closures, mask mandates and diversity programs made education perhaps the most important culture-wars battleground. Hillsdale was at the center, and nowhere more than in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis frequently invoked Hillsdale as he sought to cleanse the state’s schools of liberal influence. “How many places other than Hillsdale are actually standing for truth?” he said at a 2022 Hillsdale-sponsored event in Naples, Fla. The 2020 election was not particularly close in Michigan — Joseph R. Biden Jr. carried the state by more than 150,000 votes. But the pre-Thanksgiving gathering at Norton’s house presaged broader efforts to thwart the will of Michigan voters, as well as the entanglement of Hillsdale’s administration in the events leading up to Jan. 6. Norton and Northon would become involved in a plan to deploy fake Trump electors in Michigan, as was done in other battleground states. Arnn would counsel Pence, as the vice president faced mounting pressure to block certification of the vote in the House of Representatives. Mike Pence after giving a lecture at Christ Chapel on the campus of Hillsdale College last March. He has called the college’s president, Larry Arnn, a mentor.David Guralnick/The Detroit News, via Associated PressLast July, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against all 16 of the state’s bogus Trump electors; she has said that her investigation remains open, raising questions about whether more charges might be coming. And while the Michigan indictments were the first stemming from the Trump campaign’s effort to seize electoral votes, at least four other swing states are now pursuing criminal investigations. Hillsdale administrators declined to be interviewed for this article. But in response to written questions, the college said its officials had acted and spoken in a “personal capacity” regarding the 2020 election. Hillsdale also disputed aspects of testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee, saying among other things that Norton’s call with Giuliani and his meeting with legislators took place separately. “The scope of Mr. Norton’s efforts has been vastly overstated,” the college said, adding that the general counsel’s goal “was to establish clarity and truth, and not a pre-established election outcome.”Hillsdale’s part in the election story, while hardly a secret, has received little notice beyond the local press. Viewed in the context of the vast and tentacled campaign to overturn the election, it falls somewhere between sideshow and main event. Consider it a reflection of an angry, untethered era in which unlikely actors have come to have an outsize imprint on our politics. Last spring, seeking a fuller picture of the college and its role in the tumult, I planned a trip to Hillsdale. I was told I couldn’t visit campus and reminded, after I asked to interview Arnn and others, that Hillsdale was a private college — though I was eventually granted a tour after students had left for the summer. Even so, interviews with scores of people — students, alumni, current and former faculty and staff members, donors, Republican operatives and politicians, former White House officials and lawyers connected to the state elections case — offered some answers to the overarching question: How did a small college in Michigan, self-defined by the idea that the project of American democracy is the realization of millenniums of Western wisdom, get mixed up in a plot to subvert it? Larry Arnn often talks about Hillsdale as a last redoubt of the classical liberal arts, guided by a reverence for the highest, most enduring ideas. Students are required to complete a core curriculum rooted in the great books and Western tradition. Much of what is taught at Hillsdale, Arnn has said, “was written before there was a United States of America, much less a modern conservative movement.” There’s something assertively old-fashioned about the place. Alumni refer to a “Hillsdale bubble”: Dorms are single-sex and the college affords parents a degree of access to their children’s grades and instructors more commonly found in high school. Hillsdale students tend to be high academic achievers; not all are particularly political. “For the most part, students are pretty focused on their studies,” says Caleb Greene, a senior. “They’re less concerned with all the other current events that are in the news right now.” Today, many leading universities find themselves in crisis debating the limits of allowable speech, on both the left and the right. Hillsdale, many alumni say, remains largely unmuddled by ideological diversity. In a 2016 essay in the college paper, one student ventured a modest proposal: “While conservatives condemn policies that restrict the marketplace of ideas in other schools, our own school may be guilty of a similar offense,” she wrote. “It’s time Hillsdale invited a progressive to campus.”Yet if Hillsdale can seem to exist in a time before the modern culture wars, Arnn is quick to frame his college as the heroic opposition. “Most liberal colleges and universities today deny that such a thing as ‘truth’ exists and instead encourage young people to find what is true for themselves, carrying their politically correct ‘safe spaces’ wherever they go,” he said in an email to a college mailing list last year. Under Arnn’s stewardship — on Facebook, one alumnus referred to the college as “Arnn Arbor” — Hillsdale has become as much a political and ideological campaign as it is a pedagogical home for its 1,600 students. Arnn arrived at Hillsdale in 2000, after the longtime president, George C. Roche III, resigned amid revelations of an affair with his daughter-in-law, which came to light after her death by suicide. Arnn had been running the Claremont Institute, the prominent conservative think tank in California of which he was a founder. He had a reputation as a staunch ideologue in the mold of his onetime teacher, the political philosopher Harry Jaffa, author of Barry Goldwater’s lines that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Jaffa was the leader of a school of thought known as West Coast Straussianism, which holds that the Platonic ideal that is the original American republic has become corrupted by the unelected power of an ever-expanding administrative state and the corroding rot of progressivism. Arnn was an adherent. “Larry Arnn has the heart of a liberal,” a Claremont colleague once said. “He keeps it in a glass bottle on his desk.” In Arnn’s day, Claremont was a cloistered world; few foresaw it laying the theoretical groundwork for a radical transformation of the conservative movement. For Arnn, Hillsdale presented a chance to spread the gospel on a broader canvas, closer to the political ground. Founded in 1844 by Free Will Baptist abolitionists, the college had already turned rightward under Roche. But Arnn pivoted Hillsdale away from his predecessor’s libertarianism, then dominant in conservative politics, and put it on a more overtly religious and ideological path. While the college’s mission statement once invoked the “Judeo-Christian faith,” under Arnn the “Judeo” part was ditched and the school became more explicitly Christian. A new chapel patterned after London’s Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and financed by a $12.5 million donation from an Oklahoma sulfur magnate became an imposing architectural presence on campus. Arnn also honed a business model that has undergirded his political project. The college has rejected federal aid for decades, rather than be compelled to track admissions by race or comply with Title IX, the law that bars sex-based discrimination; Hillsdale has called the law “a serious assault on the school’s freedom.” As a result, more than half of its revenue comes from private grants, gifts or contracts, compared with 7 percent for a typical liberal-arts college, according to a report by the Institute of Education Sciences. Its fund-raising strategy is predicated on stoking outrage, with communiqués warning of “Marxist-inspired critical race theory” and an “emerging corporate-socialist totalitarianism.” Hillsdale has amplified its messaging by enlisting a digital fund-raising company called NextAfter, directing nearly $12 million to it in the college’s most recently reported fiscal year. Hillsdale’s revenue engine supports not just on-campus operations but also the many arms of its outreach — a newsletter called Imprimis (Latin for “above all”) that the school says reaches 6.4 million readers; a series of podcasts and online courses on subjects like “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism”; and a curriculum and training for a network of “classical” charter schools in more than a dozen states. All of this material is free, and all of it, in its ideological fervor, fuels the college’s fund-raising. “Hillsdale has adopted the strategy of radiating what occurs on its campus as far and wide, and to as many citizens, as possible,” according to words attributed to its chairman, the game-show host Pat Sajak, in a fund-raising pitch. (A longtime Arnn friend, Sajak is among Hollywood’s most outspoken conservatives.) The school has been lucrative for Arnn, whose total annual compensation exceeds $1 million, rare territory for the leader of a college of Hillsdale’s size. And there are other benefits. NextAfter promoted Arnn’s 2015 book on Winston Churchill as part of an effort to grow the college’s email list. (Hillsdale said Arnn donated his royalties to the college.) Arnn’s daughter Kathleen O’Toole was installed in 2019 as assistant provost for the college’s charter-school efforts. (Another Hillsdale official said in a recent deposition, related to a court battle involving a Florida charter school, that nobody else had been interviewed for the job; the college said Arnn “was not involved” in the hiring.) Arnn remains Claremont’s vice chairman, and from the first, he embedded Hillsdale into the institute’s intellectual orbit. Any number of Hillsdale academics are Claremont-affiliated scholars as well. (West Coast Straussianism’s “citadels are Claremont and Hillsdale,” according to the political philosopher Paul Gottfried.) Arnn also signed on visiting scholars like Christopher Rufo, the activist most responsible for making the academic discipline of critical race theory a boogeyman of the right. Arnn’s own CV lists longstanding affiliations with a run of influential conservative organizations. He serves on the Heritage Foundation’s board and is a member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive coalition of conservative heavyweights. Like others in his intellectual camp, Arnn seemed to love Trumpism more than the man himself. (“There’s obviously a lot of things that are really great about that guy, but we don’t teach our students at Hillsdale College to act the way he does on all occasions,” he quipped during a 2017 speech.) But the inflection point, both for Hillsdale and for American conservatism, was the election and reign of Trump. Money poured in from prominent donors with names like Coors, Koch and Uihlein. S. Prestley Blake, a founder of Friendly’s restaurants, left the college a Connecticut replica of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that Hillsdale uses for various events. The college’s revenue more than doubled; its endowment is now nearly $1 billion. Hillsdale became a regular stopping point for leaders on the right, from the Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo to the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who received an honorary doctorate. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has called Arnn a “dear friend,” spoke at the new chapel’s dedication. (His wife, the conservative activist Virginia Thomas, had previously served on Hillsdale’s board and worked at the college’s Washington outpost.) As Hillsdale made headlines by resisting state pandemic restrictions, Arnn found a soul mate in DeSantis, whose rising national profile was powered by his own shunning of Covid strictures. In its drive to remake Florida schools, DeSantis’s administration tapped Hillsdale to help overhaul civics standards and used a Hillsdale staff member and an undergraduate as consultants to review math textbooks for perceived whiffs of leftist ideology. DeSantis has said he prefers hiring Hillsdale alumni to those of his own alma mater, Yale, and when he engineered a takeover of the quirky and traditionally liberal New College of Florida, he appointed a top Hillsdale official, Matthew Spalding, to its new board. The new New College, the governor said, would be a public, Sunshine State Hillsdale. Clarence Thomas delivering a commencement address to the 2016 Hillsdale College graduating class. He has called Arnn a “dear friend.”Todd McInturf/The Detroit News, via Associated PressAll of this is evidence of how well Arnn had succeeded in embedding his college in the ferment. “We’re in the world-conquest business,” he said in an online talk that Hillsdale posted in 2020, “and we have just one weapon — teaching.”Three days after the 2020 election, Arnn appeared on a Hillsdale podcast hosted by the conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt. Calling the electoral process “corrupt,” Arnn mused about Republican-dominated state legislatures’ bypassing the voters and taking direct control of their states’ electoral votes. “There’s a wild idea,” he said. A couple of weeks later, around the time of the Giuliani meeting, he was asked on a podcast hosted by a Michigan conservative commentator, Steve Gruber, whether he trusted the outcome of the election. “No, I don’t,” he said. By then, Ian Northon, the Hillsdale-affiliated lawyer, was publicly advancing fraud claims and moving to sue the state of Michigan on behalf of the Amistad Project.“It’s simply a matter of mathematics,” Northon said on a different episode of Gruber’s podcast, in late November. “We’ve got a Ph.D., Dr. Zhang, Jennie Zhang from Hillsdale College, who just did the math. And when you do the math, it shows not just a handful of improper votes, or a handful of illegal votes, but hundreds of thousands, well over 500,000 in the general election alone.” He was referring to Qianying Zhang, a finance and economics professor who goes by Jennie and was paid $5,000 as an expert witness by Amistad. Based on a survey by a firm run by a former Trump campaign aide, she estimated how many people had received absentee ballots they had not requested. (In an email, Zhang said that while Northon had offered a “plausible” account of her findings, calling the votes “improper” or “illegal” went “beyond the direct scope of my analysis.”) In early December, Northon took part in a conference call with an old friend of Arnn’s from Claremont circles, the lawyer John Eastman. Northon, in his testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee, said this meeting, like the first one, “was set up by some Hillsdale people.” He specifically mentioned Spalding, dean of the college’s Washington graduate school, something of a nexus in the capital for academics on the right. Northon’s lawyer, Chip Chamberlain, said in an email exchange that neither Arnn nor Spalding was on the Eastman call. Northon, he said, simply “reviewed Dr. Spalding’s research on elections and constitutionalism before various filings with the courts.” (Spalding, in a statement through Hillsdale, said he had never met Northon.) Northon told the Jan. 6 committee that the two Michigan lawmakers who attended the Giuliani meeting participated in this one too, along with a third, Daire Rendon. (Rendon was charged last year in a separate case involving voting-machine breaches orchestrated by Trump allies.) The lawmakers “were people who wanted their colleagues in the House to do more,” Northon testified, adding, “That was the impetus of the Eastman call.” Eastman was one of the legal architects of the strategy to deploy fake electors in states Trump lost, in order to press Pence to forgo certifying Biden on Jan. 6. (He was indicted last year on charges related to this effort in Georgia, where he has pleaded not guilty.) Now, on the conference call, he explained to the lawmakers that the State Legislature held the power to take action on elections. “If somebody’s going to do something about it, it’s them,” Northon recalled Eastman saying. Northon also prepared a draft resolution for the Legislature’s Republican leaders, hoping they would declare that they were investigating the election. As he composed the draft, he said, he showed it to Norton and Emily Davis, Hillsdale’s communications chief. When House investigators asked Northon about his running election-related documents by Hillsdale’s brass, he said: “Well, my — I represented Hillsdale and all this — although this wasn’t something I was doing for them, I thought they should be aware of it, that it was happening. I thought it was important for them.” Around the same time, Norton reached out to the state Republican chairwoman, Laura Cox. According to her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, the Hillsdale general counsel explained that there was a plan afoot to swing the state toward Trump: A group of Republicans posing as electors would hide overnight in the State Capitol in Lansing and then cast votes on Dec. 14, the date the official electors were to cast Michigan’s vote. Cox was aghast. “I told him in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” she testified. She said she tried to impress upon him that this was a “harebrained” plan, that it “was a very, very bad idea and potentially illegal.” But Norton, she said, “didn’t care about my opinion. Just, we had words, and I believe I eventually hung up on him.”Norton had come to Hillsdale from an automotive background — his father ran auto-service shops in the Detroit area — and after spending years as a lawyer working his way through the industry. In 1997, he was reprimanded by Michigan’s Attorney Discipline Board after admitting that “while shopping at a retail store, he placed a different bar-code price tag on a package of colored pencils in order to lower the price.” That hiccup did not stall his career, and in 2002 he became assistant general counsel at Chrysler. Seven years later, he left to join the Bradley Foundation, the conservative philanthropy that has been active in election issues. “It was time to take the more mission-driven path,” he said on a college-sponsored podcast. Arnn hired him in 2014. (The next year, Arnn received one of the Bradley Foundation’s annual $250,000 prizes.) Hillsdale disputes Cox’s account of her conversation with its general counsel. “Mr. Norton spoke with Ms. Cox in the capacity of a civically engaged individual who was asking a friend” about “the election and perceived irregularities,” the college says, adding that Norton had been “an early supporter” of Cox’s husband, the former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox. Norton, the college says, did not know where Cox “got the idea” of a “supposed plot” for an overnight in the State Capitol.But Cox held fast to her account at a pretrial hearing for the fake electors in December. And in an interview, she said, “We’re not friends, I want to make that really clear,” and pointed out that she could find no record of Norton personally donating to her husband’s campaigns. She also provided a copy of a text message from Norton that she said was sent on Dec. 13, 2020. “The electors should try to get into capital early, as we have planned,” it said, noting that she would be hearing from a lawyer for the Trump campaign.“He kept texting me all these things and trying to lobby me to do something,” she said, adding, “They think they are going to hide in the Capitol and nobody is going to see them?”After learning about the planned sleepover, Cox told the Jan. 6 committee, she called Mike Shirkey, the leader of the State Senate’s Republican majority. Shirkey had been hearing from Norton and Northon, too: For days, they had been urging him to recognize the slate of fake Trump electors. Shirkey had also heard from Phillip Kline, the former Kansas attorney general who heads the Amistad Project, which was working with Trump lawyers to bring election-fraud lawsuits across the country. Kline later spoke at a Hillsdale symposium where he called 2020 “the most lawless election in United States history.”Shirkey, who retired last year with warnings of the peril of “one-world governance, one-world religion, one-world health care, one-world currency and one-world control,” might have seemed an unlikely resister. But according to Cox, he also thought hiding electors in the Capitol was a terrible idea. “It was a pretty high-pressured process, having these gentlemen come to our offices or invite us into one of their homes,” Shirkey said of the trio in his House testimony, adding that they kept urging him to “do the right thing.”On Dec. 14, Northon joined the fake electors at the Capitol, where they were turned away by guards. Not all of the 16 designated Trump electors picked before Election Day agreed to take part in the scheme; one who bowed out, Terri Lynn Land, was a former Michigan secretary of state who has said she did not see a role to play given that the state’s vote had already been certified for Biden. The remaining electors and two replacements ended up in the basement of the state Republican headquarters, signing a document entitled “Certificate of Votes of the 2020 Electors From Michigan.” For Shirkey, the weeks since the election had been an unending ordeal. He was part of the Michigan contingent lobbied at the White House in mid-November. And Trump kept calling — four times through Dec. 14, once while Shirkey was up in a tree stand, hunting. “I was getting frustrated,” he testified. “All these allegations, all these claims, and all the damage, potential damage we’re doing to the country and confidence in elections. And I was tired of hollow claims with no action. And I just wanted to put a pin in it. I didn’t want any more calls.”Growing up in the small Arkansas city of Pocahontas, Arnn wasn’t obviously destined for a life of academe. He often describes the personally transformative effects of studying philosophy, which took hold in a political-theory course his senior year at Arkansas State.“We read Plato’s ‘Republic,’ and it was life-changing,” he once told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “I fell under its spell.”Alumni, with varying degrees of admiration and exasperation, describe Arnn, who is 71, as evincing a grandfatherly pop intellectualism. He keeps a longstanding routine of stopping by the cafeteria to ask students about the nature of “the good, the true and the beautiful.” Pence, who has called Arnn a mentor, began a 2018 commencement speech at Hillsdale by assuring the students that “unlike Dr. Arnn, I will not be asking you to define ‘the good.’” Arnn’s speaking style meanders — sometimes beyond the typically circumscribed utterances of college presidents. Hillsdale likes to talk about its abolitionist roots, but one thing it doesn’t talk about publicly is the racial makeup of its student body. (Students and alumni I spoke with say there is little racial diversity.) At a legislative hearing in 2013, Arnn recalled that the school had been admonished by the state because, as he put it, “we didn’t have enough dark ones.” Asked to clarify, according to press accounts, he explained that the state had sent people “with clipboards” to campus “to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw. We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?”In 2022, a plan by Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee to create 50 Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools faltered after the Nashville TV station WTVF obtained video of Arnn, in public comments at a Hillsdale reception with the governor, declaring that teachers “are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges.” He later tried to explain in a Tennessean column that by “dumb” he didn’t “mean ‘unintelligent’” but “ ‘ill-conceived’ or ‘misdirected.’” Tom Griscom, who led the state’s charter-school commission, was sent the article by a colleague, and in an email uncovered by the TV station, he lamented, “That really helped, not.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Arnn was speaking in dire terms. “We are Americans, and have the dangerous privilege of living in a time when the whole direction of the country and the whole view of human nature it adopts is up for grabs,” he said in a Hillsdale podcast on Dec. 4 that focused on the Senate runoffs in Georgia. No evidence has emerged suggesting that Arnn was involved in the Michigan fake-electors scheme. But in a rambling speech at a Hillsdale-sponsored conference in Phoenix a month after Trump left office, he appeared to acknowledge knowing something about the activities of his general counsel. “I’ll tell you what happened in Michigan,” Arnn said. Speaking about the State Legislature and its role in the election, he said: “We know them. My general counsel has spent, his hair is gray, he’s been spending time with them. And he gives them advice for nothing.” Arnn added that he had thought all along that the Legislature should assert its power over the electors, once state leaders began altering voting rules amid the pandemic. “You’re changing it, we reserve the right to pick our own slate.”On Dec. 18, Arnn was in Washington, where he was named to lead Trump’s 1776 Commission, announced as a rejoinder to the George Floyd racial-justice upheavals, which the president called “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” (It was also framed as a response to “The 1619 Project,” published the previous year by The New York Times Magazine.) The commission, according to Trump’s executive order, was to prepare a report on “the core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of ‘the blessings of liberty.’” That report, released two days before Trump left office, was widely derided by historians as a politicized, soft-focus version of American history; it took particular aim at progressivism, which it lumped in with slavery, fascism, communism, racism and identity politics as one of the “challenges to America’s principles.” Arnn’s standing in Trumpworld, though, was complicated by the fact that he was far closer to Pence than to Trump. Indeed, even as Trump was imploring the vice president to block the election certification in the House, Arnn was counseling caution. When Arnn returned to the White House on Jan. 5 for the first meeting of the 1776 Commission, he also met briefly with the vice president, according to Pence’s aide, Marc Short. And two days after the Capitol riot, Arnn told Hugh Hewitt: “You know, the vice president asked me more than once, What should he do? And I said, ‘Well, there are some boundaries.’ I said: ‘The first thing is, you probably ought to say, this is not about me and Donald Trump anymore. This is about fair elections.’” Last year, introducing Pence at a Hillsdale function, Arnn went further, saying he had agreed with the former vice president’s ultimate decision. Which is not to say that Arnn didn’t harbor deep reservations about the election. During the podcast interview, he said he had “floated the crazy idea” that Trump should’ve said, “If I vindicate this election and prove that I won it, I’ll surrender to Mike Pence in 30 days because it’s questionable.” By February, Arnn was talking about the country sinking into despotism. “I’ve been warning about all this all my life, warning that they’re going to rig the electoral system so you can’t get them out,” he said in his remarks in Phoenix. “And now it’s happened, right? Probably.” He knew “how Michigan was stolen,” he said earlier in the speech, “because I have the misfortune sometimes to live there.” In Michigan, the fight over 2020 continues. In late October, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, dropped all charges against one of the fake electors in exchange for cooperation. During an interview with the office’s investigators, the elector was asked if he could identify photos of a handful of figures involved; among them was Norton, the Hillsdale general counsel. (The elector was unsure.) In the days that followed, her investigators questioned one of the architects of the multistate fake-elector scheme, Kenneth Chesebro, according to one of his lawyers. Both developments suggest the inquiry could widen. The attorney for Northon, the Hillsdale-affiliated private lawyer, said investigators had contacted him about interviewing his client, who had declined to participate. During the recent pretrial hearing, Nessel’s office described Northon as an “uncharged member of the conspiracy.”Pointing fingers upward will clearly be a defense strategy. John Freeman, a Michigan lawyer who represents a Trump elector, told me that his client “followed the directions of persons better versed and more knowledgeable in election law” and that “we intend to establish this in court.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at an appearance with Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, in April. DeSantis has said of the college, “How many places other than Hillsdale are actually standing for truth?”Chris duMond/Getty ImagesHeading into the coming presidential election, Arnn has hedged his bets. He has called DeSantis “one of the most important people living,” but remains neutral on the Republican field — “counselor to many and endorser of none,” as Hugh Hewitt put it in October. But with Trump, at least for now, lapping the field, the election could herald the moment for the ideas so long promoted by Arnn and his Hillsdale-Claremont comrades. In a second administration, Trump and his allies are determined to engineer a sweeping transformation of American government, including a further repudiation of America as a land of immigrants and a politicization of the Justice Department and other agencies of the executive branch. This gutting of the reviled administrative state would be enabled by a legion of lawyers with an Olympian view of presidential powers — at least while a Republican sits in the White House.Arnn’s college is at the leading edge of the planning. Two fellows at Hillsdale’s Washington campus — one current and one former — are associate directors of Project 2025, a clearinghouse created by the Heritage Foundation to staff and overhaul policy in a new conservative administration; it counts Hillsdale among 80 organizations on its advisory board. One of those fellows, Troup Hemenway, previously drafted a report examining how the Presidential Personnel Office can be harnessed more aggressively. Another recent Hillsdale fellow, Saurabh Sharma, co-founded a group called American Moment, which seeks to staff the next administration and congressional offices with MAGA adherents. James Sherk, a Hillsdale alumnus at a think tank called the America First Policy Institute, has crafted a plan central to Trump’s ambitions, removing civil-service protections from thousands of career government officials and replacing them with loyalists. Hillsdale’s student body is similarly evolving, at least in the reckoning of Avery Noel, a senior from Indiana who is president of the school’s small College Democrats chapter. Applications have climbed more than 50 percent over the last decade, the college has said, including a spike of interest after the school rebuffed pandemic lockdown requirements. “You’re getting people who are more drawn to the ideological setting of the school,” said Noel, who described himself as a lapsed conservative. In an email exchange, Nathan Schlueter, a philosophy professor, explained what seemed to be a prevailing view. “Progressives currently control virtually all the levers of financial and political power in this country,” he said, adding, “They have been aggressive not only in promoting causes about which Americans reasonably disagree, but in shaming and punishing dissenting voices. In this atmosphere, the College is extremely vulnerable.”To some, though, the college is the emergent bully. A number of Hillsdale graduate students have become active in local government. In 2022, Joshua Paladino, a doctoral candidate in politics who served on the city’s public library board, proposed that the library’s children’s section exclude books “tending to corrupt the morals of youth,” including those depicting “delinquency, child abuse, underage sexual activity,” as well as “graphic violence” and “profanity.” He suggested proscribing books with any reference to political content, including the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and Black Lives Matter. In an interview, Paladino said the library wasn’t “focusing on the books that were going to have long-term, lasting value.” Soon library board meetings became more crowded and angry, and the librarian, the children’s librarian and the library board president all departed. Soon after, one of the college’s librarians took over as the library board president. “There’s always been this rift, the college elites and us townies,” says Penny Swan, a Republican who was defeated by Paladino in the 2022 City Council election. “But it’s never been as bad as it’s been in the past couple years, and the college Ph.D. students seem to want to take over the town.” On campus, a legal challenge emerged in October, when two women filed class-action litigation claiming that Hillsdale officials including Norton had sought to hide sexual assaults rather than seriously investigate them. One plaintiff, Danielle Villarreal, who transferred to another school, said in an interview that Arnn was “too busy trying to kind of promote Hillsdale’s reputation for truth and liberty and ignoring the contradictions that are already within.” (The college said the suit was based on “serious mischaracterizations” of its processes, as well as its actions.) Contradictions were on the minds of the nearly two dozen students and alumni who sought me out after hearing about my reporting on social media or from friends. Almost all expressed gratitude for their liberal-arts education and said that, despite the hard-edged pitch to donors, Hillsdale had nurtured the critical-thinking skills that led them to reject Trumpism. But many felt revulsion at the public coziness between the college and the former president. “The undergraduate college has been used as a base for the intervention into American politics,” said Will Smiley, class of 2005. Arnn, he added, “was lending the institutional credibility of Hillsdale to Donald Trump.”Anna Meckel arrived at Hillsdale in 2014 as a star student celebrated in The Omaha World-Herald with the headline “Home-Schooled Nebraska Senior Tallies Perfect SAT, ACT Scores.” She came from a conservative family but had been drawn to Hillsdale by its focus on the classics, not its politics. Yet even as she thrived academically, she found her values unmoored from the emergent brand of conservatism espoused by Arnn and his administration. In an interview, she recalled her graduation, in May 2018. She was the valedictorian. Pence delivered the commencement address, declaring that the Trump administration was “advancing the very principles that you learned here in the halls at Hillsdale.”“I was sitting there in the audience in tears, in embarrassment and frustration,” Meckel told me. “This is supposed to be the culmination of the education that I received, and instead the school is making a mockery of itself.” She added: “I was literally crying. I’m going to sound like a snowflake, I guess, but whatever. It was a travesty. Another student heard me crying and reached out to me afterward and said, ‘This isn’t the send-off we deserved.’”Meckel sent me a link to a fund-raising pitch that cited one of the college’s free online courses, on Dante. It warned that “the Biden administration is trying to force critical race theory into K-12 curricula” and offered the poet as an antidote to “the Left’s assault on American education.”“It’s not about Dante or the ‘Iliad’ or the ‘Odyssey,’” she said. “It’s about getting clicks and views from people who want to own the libs and be enraged by the Biden administration or by cancel culture. And that’s nothing like what I was taught in the classroom when we went through great books. My professors didn’t say anything about reading Dante to own the libs.”Opening photo illustration: Source photographs by Leigh Vogel for The New York Times (Arnn); Chris duMond/Getty Images (school); Scott Olson/Getty Images (Trump); Ethan Miller/Getty Images (Pence).Joan Wong is a photocollagist and a book-cover designer who frequently collaborates with The Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She previously worked for Penguin Random House. More
