Dukes in Trump’s Court

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Here’s a list of six people who attended Duke University between 1997 and 2007:

If personnel is policy, as the political canard goes, Duke has become an important institution shaping Donald Trump’s presidency, the broader MAGA movement, and the populist conservative fringes. The reputation for ruthlessness that the university earned over 30 years on the basketball court has been transported into politics, and Trump’s critics have found as much to dislike about certain Blue Devils as opposing sports fans.

Miller has become the face of many of Trump’s policies, most notably his administration’s mass round-ups of immigrants. But more than a dozen other Duke graduates have joined him in working for Trump or filling out the MAGA ranks elsewhere. They have shaped some of the defining elements of the Trump era, including revitalized white nationalism, aggressive and sweeping immigration dragnets, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“It feels like there are a lot of Duke alums” in Washington, said Paul Teller, a political consultant who worked in the White House in Trump’s first term. “We even get poked at and made fun of because, ‘Oh, another Duke alum’—that kind of thing. That wouldn’t be said if there were like two of us, right? People say that because we’re kind of everywhere.”

Trumpworld is a surprising place for Duke grads to cluster. The school is by and large known as an apolitical place; it lacked major upheaval even as Gaza encampments sprouted up at universities across the country. Graduates tend toward consulting firms, law schools, and medical programs, not the Hill, and the political leanings that do exist clearly tilt left. 

Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers, other schools are better represented in Trump’s White House. But Duke alumni have consistently made headlines throughout Trump’s second term.

Interviews with Duke alumni and professors revealed that some prominent MAGA figures—most of whom didn’t respond to requests for comment—were in many ways a product of the university’s history at the turn of the millennium. In the early 2000s, Duke was a hotbed for emerging academic trends and recruited an increasingly elite student body. The ensuing culture wars proved to be a crucible for young conservatives on campus.

“If the Duke of the 1990s had been a more open, intellectually honest culture, you would not have seen all these people come out of Duke,” said Berin Szóka, a conservative student leader at the time and now a Trump critic.

Duke officials declined to comment or did not respond to questions about this story, and its alumni engagement and Duke in D.C. teams did not respond to requests for information about their programs or alumni employment data.

Who’s Who?

In April, three days after Duke’s men’s basketball team lost in the NCAA tournament, Duke alumnus D. John Sauer took the spotlight at a different court.

As Trump became the first sitting president in history to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general and a 1997 graduate, sought to convince the justices that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee citizenship to everyone born in the United States. It would have been a radical revision of accepted immigration law, largely because the first sentence of the amendment seems to plainly say otherwise.

The day did not go well. Sauer earned widespread derision for stumbling over a question about how the administration’s interpretation would impact Native Americans, and the court ruled against him in July, though Trump is seeking a rare second hearing on the issue.

The Assembly identified over a dozen more Duke alumni playing memorable roles around Trump. They include Ken Starr, a 1973 Duke Law graduate most famous for running the investigation that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, who was on Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial. Aileen Cannon, a 2003 graduate and Trump-appointed district court judge for southern Florida, was randomly selected to oversee the trial over his handling of classified documents. She controversially dismissed the charges and will now oversee legal proceedings against those who led the prosecution.

Drew Ensign, a 2002 Duke graduate now leading immigration litigation for the Department of Justice, represented the White House in court during its attempts to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious El Salvador prison. A whistleblower accused him of conspiring to allow deportation flights to continue despite court orders. The judge began contempt proceedings as a result, though an appeals court panel halted them in April. The case is still proceeding through courts.

Two other Duke alumni have been so extreme in their immigration stances that Trump has occasionally distanced himself from them.

The most famous is Richard Spencer. Perhaps best known for getting punched on camera at Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Spencer was a leader of the alt-right—he even coined the term. The movement helped mainstream the fervent anti-immigrant arguments coming to fruition today. 

He spent two years as a doctoral student in history at Duke before leaving in 2007, the same year that Darren Beattie enrolled in the political science Ph.D. program. 

After completing his degree in 2016 and teaching at Duke for a year, Beattie joined the White House as a speechwriter. He was fired in 2018 after CNN reported that he had spoken at a white nationalist conference. Beattie launched Revolver News, a conservative outlet that claimed the FBI was behind violence at the January 6 riot. Trump brought Beattie back for his second term to serve as acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and a senior State Department official. He has since left both roles.

A New Sense

A key event launched Spencer and Miller on their trajectory to prominence: the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which three white students were falsely accused of rape by a Black woman hired by the lacrosse team to dance at an off-campus party. But the roots of the campus culture clash date further back.

Duke’s most famous alumnus is also among its most infamous: former U.S. President Richard Nixon, a Republican who graduated from the law school in 1937. “I always remember that whatever I have done in the past, or may do in the future, Duke University is responsible one way or the other,” he said in a 1960 speech in Greensboro.

Through the 1970s, Duke was still a regional college, if an impressive one. But as the Reagan Revolution swept the country, Duke embarked on a project of “outrageous ambitions,” a phrase that has become a core part of the university’s mythos since the school’s former president, Terry Sanford, uttered it in 1984. The goal was to become an elite, global research university. 

It worked. The same year as Sanford’s speech, The New York Times Magazine labeled Duke a “hot college,” especially for wealthy New Englanders. Add in basketball success—the Blue Devils won the first men’s national title in 1991, then another in 1992—and the university was suddenly a national power flooded with elite applicants.

One of them was Szóka, who said he turned down scholarships elsewhere because his parents wanted him to go to the best-ranked school that admitted him. In 1998, that was Duke, then No. 3 in the still-novel U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Szóka was disappointed by the culture he found on campus, which lacked debate organizations with the history of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies or elite gatherings like Harvard’s Porcellian Club. “All of a sudden, you had this small, sleepy school that was now a big deal, that didn’t have the institutions like a debate society—that’s what I really wanted in retrospect,” he said.

Szóka identified as a libertarian, so he and his conservative friends looked to political groups instead. The conservative publication on campus, The Duke Review, was a soon-to-fold project dominated by a student committed to capitalist iconoclast Ayn Rand, so they ruled that out. They felt the Republican club was ineffectual—“They were not interested in ideas, let’s just put it that way,” Szóka said—so he and his friends tried to take it over, but were rebuffed. 

Lacking other options, the friends founded the Duke Conservative Union. When the organization launched a magazine in 2001, they called it New Sense, and the homonym was intentional: Serving as a campus nuisance was a point of pride.

The group was a pre-internet version of the young right-wing trolls who have powered MAGA for the past decade. “Yes, we are hateful people,” read one 2003 New Sense headline. After their staff found an issue in a campus bathroom stall, they placed a target in the next issue and labeled it “Piss here!”

Enemy No. 1 for the Duke Conservative Union were the faculty, who were increasingly adopting the postmodern social and political theories that the Trump administration is currently trying to stamp out.

During the era, Duke brought in unabashed academic radicals across its humanities departments, including Fredric Jameson, a towering figure in Marxist scholarship; Walter Mignolo, a semiotician and a progenitor of decolonial theory; and Ariel Dorfman, a novelist and a former advisor to socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende. 

But the university’s crown jewel was the English department, which was fashionable enough to merit New York Times profiles. Under the leadership of renowned scholar Stanley Fish, it hired Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer studies; feminist scholar (and Fish’s wife) Jane Tompkins; critical theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith; and prominent African-American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

Szóka and his friends revolted against this academic boundary-pushing. The first issue of New Sense called for the abolition of the “pseudo-discipline known as ‘Women’s Studies.’” Nearly every issue in the magazine’s four-year run echoed the call or expanded it to other departments, and Szóka described the Fish era in one article as a time when “the serious gave way to the silly—so long as it was trendy.” 

The Conservative Union’s guiding principles backed the free market, individual rights, and the “value of the Western Tradition.” They also rejected egalitarianism on the grounds that “civilized society requires orders and classes.” 

Beyond sweeping political objections, conservatives thought Duke’s intellectual trend-chasing undermined their education. 

“If you were a particular kind of student who was a militant conservative—and those are the people that are most likely to go into politics—that subgroup came to Duke and felt betrayed.”

Michael Munger, Duke political science professor

As a senior, William English, then president of the conservative union, blamed “the fractured incoherence of most program of study” for his dissatisfaction with Duke, along with “the shallowness of student life, the mediocrity of student interests.” Szóka says he looked for a class on British history one semester and only found “Gender and Power in Britain.”

“It’s a fine topic for people who have already had the 101 course on modern British history,” he said. But with a room full of students lacking a grounding in the basics, it didn’t work. “It was a terrible class,” Szóka said. 

It can sound like standard conservative grumbling, especially since English would return for his Ph.D. and course catalogs from the era show many British history survey courses. But the faculty had similar complaints.

Just before Szóka arrived on campus, an external review committee performing a regular audit of the English department was “shocked by what they found,” journalist David Yaffe wrote in a 1999 article. “The department still finds itself without anything we would be disposed to describe as an undergraduate or a graduate curriculum,” the review concluded. The English faculty also turned on each other, accusing their colleagues of homophobia and anti-intellectualism.

“I would say two-thirds of the decision had to do with my loss of respect for the department I was in,” Sedgwick told the New York Times after she decamped for New York City.

The judgment from her young political opponents was even harsher. 

“If you were a particular kind of student who was a militant conservative—and those are the people that are most likely to go into politics—that subgroup came to Duke and felt betrayed,” said Michael Munger, a political science professor at Duke.

The disorganization left under Duke’s showy surface, thanks to its quick journey to the global academic elite, amplified the problem. For the young conservatives, there was a void of culture and curriculum. 

“What filled that gap was, on the left, a sort of theatrical progressivism of people who were really smug and self righteous about fairly picayune things,” Szóka said. “And then people who reacted against it, like me. And it kind of pushed us all together.”

Eating Your Liver

By the time Miller enrolled at Duke in 2003, the battlelines were clear. Miller was well prepared to enter the fray, having been mentored in high school by right-wing writer and provocateur David Horowitz, according to a 2020 biography.

Miller and his likeminded peers adopted a laser focus on a perceived lack of conservatives on campus. 

“Left-wing slant in college is normal,” Miller wrote in a 2003 New Sense article announcing that he was launching a chapter of Horowitz’s group Students for Academic Freedom. “Perhaps this explains why its presence at Duke does not seem to be an issue of great concern to many students and faculty members.”

But Munger, who was the Duke Conservative Union’s faculty advisor in 2005, thinks Duke’s young gadflies got it wrong. 

When he was first named chair of his department in 2000, Munger said, he looked up the party affiliations for faculty at all of the top-20 political science departments in the country. Duke had more Republicans than the other 19 combined, though there were just five of them.

“Duke is disproportionately a place where conservatives feel comfortable,” he said. “They are still only a tiny minority, but the number is not zero. And that’s what distinguishes Duke from other places.”

That Republican core alone is likely not enough to attract more conservative students, but it played a role, especially when combined with its location in the South. 

“I was politically on the right as early as middle school or high school,” said 2011 Duke graduate Josh Hammer, who is now a Trump-friendly writer and podcaster.
“So I was excited that it was outside of the liberal Northeast bubble. But I wouldn’t say that it was close to top of mind.”

What Duke’s Republican friendliness did, according to Munger, was attract “a disproportionate number of people who feel that their conservative identity is an important part of their intellectual life.” Students like Miller and Szóka, who were true believers in the cause.

But what made them stand out most on campus was not their conservatism. It was that they expressed strong partisan beliefs at all. (After all, several Trump administration figures besides Miller were at Duke around the same time, though The Assembly didn’t find evidence they were involved with the conservative union.)

“We were not a political campus,” said M. Shadee Malaklou, a 2007 graduate who was often thought of as Miller’s left-wing analog thanks to the sex column she wrote for the student paper. “You put your head down and do your work, and then you party hard.”

Despite the impression conservative students had about their teachers, something similar was true of the faculty, too. Administrators were not so much concerned with politics as with what furthered the university’s reputation, said Michael Hardt, a Marxist literature professor who was occasionally the target of New Sense’s barbs. Fish was a moderate Republican, after all.

“Focusing on the brand is indifferent towards different political positions,” Hardt said. “And that does give a kind of freedom for professors.”

But the Duke lacrosse scandal upended things. For conservatives who already felt marginalized, the charges against three lacrosse players surfaced their worst fears about the persecution of white men in a pluralistic society, especially when some faculty signed a public letter decrying “the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.” When then-Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped the charges and declared the players “innocent,” they felt they had proof.

In an article about the role of the scandal in birthing the alt-right, New York magazine reported that Spencer dropped out of Duke because he was offered a job at the American Conservative after speaking on a panel about it. Still an undergraduate student, Miller defended the players on cable news and devoted much of his biweekly Duke Chronicle column to the issue. He later told The Atlantic it was the thing he was most proud of from his time at Duke.

Miller was always incendiary, but Munger—who worked with Miller to organize a number of events over his four years—believes that energy was once aimed at constructive ends. One 2007 event on affirmative action (just before Cooper declared the players innocent) stands out in his memory: Miller already had the combative persona he adopts on TV now, but he used it to drill down into real issues in a way that even liberal professors told Munger they found enlightening. 

Miller’s disgust at the lack of repentance from faculty who signed the letter, and the lack of punishment from the university, changed him, Munger said. The two grew apart, and from afar, Munger saw a person changed.

“It just broke him,” he said, and Miller decided to “eat his own liver for the rest of his life.”

With 30 years of hindsight since he started the group that nurtured Miller and other future Trumpworld figures, Szóka sees it slightly differently: His erstwhile allies had always been ready to join a “cult of victimhood,” he said. 

Partisan divides on campus, affirmative action, immigration, the lacrosse case: All are events that presented conservatives as a beleaguered minority, and that gave Miller and the others an excuse to lash out, Szóka says.

There Is No Group Chat

Some of the Duke alums from that era who have made it to Trump’s orbit knew each other on campus. 

Miller and Spencer met through the Duke Conservative Union. Spencer told Mother Jones he knew Miller well, though Miller has pushed back on that claim and disavowed Spencer’s beliefs. English, the acting chair of the NEH, preceded Miller as the conservative union’s president and told the Duke Chronicle in 2017 that he and Spencer both periodically advised the group while Miller ran it. 

But Hammer said there’s not much of an alumni network shepherding students into Trumpist political circles. He said he met Beattie while living near him in Florida, Miller through non-Duke friends years after graduation, White House official Andrew Giuliani at a mutual friend’s engagement party, and former Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio through the Federalist Society (a powerful national group for conservative lawyers).

“We even get poked at and made fun of because, ‘Oh, another Duke alum’—that kind of thing…we’re kind of everywhere.”

Paul Teller, political consultant

That informal, even haphazard, network stands in contrast to what exists at other elite schools. One reason Biden’s staff was stocked with Harvard graduates is that long-running social clubs provide backroom networking. Stanford, meanwhile, built connections to Silicon Valley investors who turned the university into a talent incubator by hosting events, launching fellowships, and spending their days in campus coffee shops. 

Young MAGA believers at Duke don’t have such a pipeline to follow, especially in the Trump administration. Duke’s most prominent conservative faculty—including Munger and his political science colleague Peter Feaver, a former official in the George W. Bush White House—are publicly opposed to Trump.

“If there’s a formal network, if there’s a WhatsApp chat or anything like that, then I am not a part of it, I’ll put it to you that way,” Hammer said.

The closest Duke has may be Teller, a political consultant who worked in the White House during Trump’s first term. He makes a point of returning to campus to speak to classes and meet with budding conservatives, including this April, a week before he spoke to The Assembly. He met both Hammer and Miller while speaking to political science classes, and Hammer asked Teller for advice and connections shortly after he moved to D.C.

But Teller told The Assembly his trips to mentor Duke students happen on an ad hoc basis, as his time and interest allow, not through any official Duke programs. 

Complicating things further is the fact that Teller is a close ally of former Vice President Mike Pence, who has had an uneasy relationship with MAGA since January 6 rioters chanted for him to be hanged. 

Szóka, now president of the technology think tank TechFreedom, isn’t part of any Duke MAGA network either. He has cut ties with his fellow Conservative Union alumni.

“It starts about some silly thing like, ‘What counts as sweatshop labor?’ and if they’re better off if you don’t buy goods from their countries,” he said, summarizing how Duke’s conservative intellectual culture developed over the decade when it produced the most important future Trump officials. 

“Then it becomes gay marriage, and then it becomes whether these white players were properly accused. Pretty soon, it’s: ‘Was the Holocaust a good idea?’”