Trump Talks to Libertarians
Donald Trump intends to address the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominating convention on May 25. He’s not abandoning the Republican Party or pretending to be a libertarian but presumably will try to convince libertarians to vote for him in November anyway. Some may.
No matter how strange Trump may be, he presents libertarian potential voters with the same basic (though complex) dilemma any Republican presidential candidate does: At his best, he’s slightly less pro-government than the Democratic candidate, which isn’t much of an argument in favor of casting a vote for Trump, but you need to be the candidate with the most votes to win the presidency in the U.S. system, so voting for anyone other than one of the two leading contenders is arguably a waste of time, at best a symbolic gesture.
Trump, though, will tell them he’s not just the lesser (maybe) of two evils, he’s stupendous—the best president ever. Libertarian Party National Committee chair Angela McArdle, despite praising Trump, claims the Party will not take all this lying down but will press upon Trump “ten issues” they have with his governing style. McArdle’s dad’s a preacher, and this will perhaps be a bit like a rebellious Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a Catholic Church door.
Or perhaps Trump will roll the LP with a bunch of time-wasting, self-aggrandizing bluster, as he somehow manages to do to whole nations. So, I will note here just 10 of many possible “issues” I think libertarians should have with Trump, in case the convention is full of unphilosophical distractions and doesn’t manage to press its own 10 issues upon Trump’s mind.
Trump’s mania for preventing free individuals (of any nation) traveling to whatever parcels of private property will have them (if the travelers can get to them without damaging the land or property of people who for whatever reason don’t want to facilitate the travel), his almost blind faith not only in government border patrols but government police in general, his willingness to (for instance) sell billions in weapons to the Saudis while talking like an anti-interventionist, his manifest hunger to use government to punish his enemies and critics, his penchant for undoing existing arrangements and replacing them with near-identical ones that merely add his “thumbprint” (see: trade treaties), his brazenly big-government-oriented dreams of decreeing special innovation-incubating cities, his cavalier and record-setting deficit spending, his puerile inability to make rational or civil arguments, his embrace of the war against drugs and other draconian measures, and his general narcissistic faith in himself and craven loyalists rather than predictable and transparent procedures are all ample reasons for libertarians to reject the man and his presidential candidacies.
That’s not to say he’s the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. On a list of 10 somewhat-plausible 2024 presidential election winners, I’d say he’s about the sixth-best option. The Libertarian Party convention attendees may disagree with me. They might even nominate him for president if things get really nutty, who knows. I was present at the New York State Libertarian Party convention in the 1990s that nominated Howard Stern for governor, so anything is possible.
The ideal outcome in this or any election is that no one is elected and government everywhere is simply abolished, enabling people to run their own individual lives. Second-best would be some highly principled and knowledgeable libertarian of my own choosing, Party member or not (maybe Argentina’s Milei, if we abolish those cumbersome immigration rules I mentioned earlier?). Third would be thinktank president Jacob Hornberger, who strikes me as the most rational and articulate of the actual current crop of people vying for the Libertarian Party nomination. Fourth would be whoever the LP actually ends up choosing, assuming it’s at least vaguely some kind of libertarian, all libertarians being preferable to the usual crop of eagerly-governing authoritarians who get elected in this world. Fifth, hypothetically, is some very market-oriented and smart last-minute replacement the Republicans whip up at the convention if it looks like Trump is headed to jail, maybe a Steve Forbes but preferably not just some party-line stiff.
Sixth, I suppose, is Trump himself, who at least sounds ornery enough this time around to shutter some agencies. Seventh—and lately competing with Trump for the love of the Libertarians in a tight race where both men know a few votes could be pivotal—is Robert F. Kennedy, who’s undeniably a leftist and statist but sounds sincerely interested in challenging the establishment, cronyism, and the intelligence sector that he suspects of killing two of his relatives (maybe he’d even be better than Trump—and Kennedy lately sounds almost Lewis Lapham-like in his desire to restore a sort of Jeffersonian classical liberal order, or at least “classic liberal,” as he explicitly labels it in a recent ad, be his notions of such an order laissez-faire or not). Eighth, then, is Biden, who, as you may recall, is currently president. Ninth is whoever the Democrats might be tempted to replace him with at the last minute—likely to be worse, not better, than Joe because the replacement would almost certainly be more alert, and fully-conscious Democrats do far more damage (as Kamala Harris may well prove in mid-2025 if Joe retires a few months into his second term).
Tied for 10th, I’d put outsider candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein, both smarter than most politicians and admirably averse to the two-party duopoly but very likely to devote their energies to things I consider counterproductive, like radically quasi-Marxist wealth redistribution or more onerous green programs, respectively.
We’ll find out in less than three weeks whether something magical, disastrous, or irrelevant comes out of the Libertarian convention. I won’t hold my breath waiting for a perfectly rational blending of populist and individualist philosophies to begin then, no matter how many essays I could write about why that might be nice, and no matter how many pipe-smoking paleos with waxed mustaches would swoon at the idea. I must be realistic.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey