Does Office Chair Ergonomics Explain The Claremont Strain of Trumpism?

by Andrew Donaldson · August 5, 2023

Photo by Beadillon, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

John Eastman, “Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence” and Conspirator No. 2 in this week’s Trump indictment, has given an extended interview about his aid to the former president leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

TPM breaks it down:

Klingenstein asked Eastman whether he would have acted in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, referencing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s election from Richard Nixon.

Eastman replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 represented an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”

The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

And what, pray tell, are these intolerable abuses?

But it’s the threat that Eastman sees the left as posing which runs through the interview. He at one point describes it broadly as an attempt to “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles,” and in more detail as an attack on everything from sexual and gender norms to gas stoves. He warns of “OSHA telling me what kind of chair I can have in my home office.”

What a schmuck.

For what it’s worth, here is what I found about OSHA’s office chair requirements.

Chairs should be well-designed and appropriately adjusted. You chair should provide support to the back, legs, buttocks, and arms, and it should reduce exposure to awkward postures. Desks should provide enough leg-room and allow for the proper placement of computer components

Not that it matters, really. The chair thing is a throwaway line that I shouldn’t be inordinately distracted by, and yet … it sure seems telling tome.

I spent a few years hanging out (virtually) in the proximity of some Claremont alums, and developed pretty close relationships with a couple — or, at least I thought so. I was insecure about my own intellectual abilities, they seemed really smart and well-read — more than me, certainly — if a little bit odd, but always chattering on about their fealty to the Founders and the Constitution. Seemed even noble to me, even if I didn’t share their general ideological outlook. So I thought it was odd when so many of them signed on with Trump in 2016, a guy who clearly didn’t care about A) reading or B) the Constitution.

Clearly I was wrong.

This Eastman quote suggests that Claremont’s brightest minds are (with some exceptions, I’m sure) a perfect fit for Trump: Pouty man-babies who shout “You’re not the boss of me!” and threaten to burn the house down if somebody suggests they use a slightly more comfortable chair. Secretly, they want to be the boss who chooses the chair. The difference between Trump and the Claremonsters is that they apply a high philosopher “wisdom of the ages” patina to their bullshit.

I’m still intellectually insecure! But I gave those folks way too much credit. They’re just wannabe tyrants with better libraries than you or me.