Charles C. Johnson, a former intern and fellow at the institute who studied under Jaffa, wrote the 2016 notice asking if former associates of the institute wanted to help elect Trump. Once a right-wing provocateur who has since stepped away from those endeavors, Johnson said the institute today has “little to do” with the worldview of his former professor. “I regret my involvement,” he said, stressing in particular the institute’s rhetoric about a “cold civil war.”

Jaffa would have been disappointed but unsurprised by the institute’s fealty to Trump, according to one of his sons, Philip Jaffa, who said his late father had grown disturbed by the institute’s teachings.

Philip Jaffa said his father had harsh words for the institute, which he “repeated endlessly those last few years.”

“They did not wait to bury the teaching with the teacher,” Jaffa recalled his father saying. “What they are trying to do is put a top hat on Jefferson Davis and call it Abraham Lincoln and the dust cover of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ on ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and call it Aristotle.”