🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
When former President Trump recently took the stage at the Libertarian Party National Convention, he made the pitch to members of the largest third party in the U.S., organized around support for free-market capitalism, civil liberties, and limited government, that they should ditch a protest vote and back him instead.
He got booed.
"We want libertarian votes because you stand what we stand for and don't waste a vote," Trump said, prompting some of the audience to boo him. "And don't allow the worst president in the history of our country to come back and do the final destruction of America."
So, should libertarians back Trump this time around? While some libertarians might decide that a second Trump presidency constitutes the lesser of two evils, none should be fooled for a second into thinking that the former president "stands for what we stand for."
He doesn't.
For example, it's hard to imagine a more quintessentially libertarian position than hating taxes. But Trump is proposing what would amount to a tax hike that would cost Americans roughly $300 billion a year—about $2,000 per taxpayer—in the form of a tariff: The former president wants to impose a 10 percent flat tariff on all imported goods. The government would formally levy these taxes on businesses, but most economists agree that everyday consumers actually end up paying the bulk of them via higher prices.
That's right: Trump is campaigning on the fact that American families have struggled mightily under Biden-era inflation—and they most certainly have—but is simultaneously promising to hit them with a crushing tax hike in the form of a tariff. Oh, and it would also seriously harm our economy.
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimates that Trump's proposed tariff would destroy 505,000 jobs—and potentially threaten as many as 825,000 jobs if other countries respond with tariffs of their own.
If Trump-supporting libertarians weren't so focused on culture war issues like banning medical gender transitions for minors (an issue largely decided at the state level anyway), they might realize that the candidate they're lining up behind plans to hike their taxes in a way they'd never normally accept. But it's not just the economy where Trump's agenda sharply diverges from libertarian priorities.
Libertarians have always proudly stood for civil liberties, having far more in common with the old-school ACLU on these issues than traditional "law and order" Republicans. Yet Trump is campaigning on a muscular approach to crime that is totally at odds with civil liberties.
For one, Trump is campaigning on bringing back "stop and frisk" policies where police can randomly stop and search people on the street, not even a suspicion of wrongdoing required, a practice totally anathema to civil libertarians and anyone who supports the Fourth Amendment.
The former president also wants to "strengthen" qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that grants government officials, including but not limited to police officers, a liability shield in many cases even when they violate Americans' constitutional rights. It's genuinely hard to imagine a less-libertarian notion.
Some libertarians have been compelled by Trump's recent promise to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbright, a man sentenced to two life sentences for his role in technologically facilitating drug sales who has garnered widespread support from the libertarian movement. But the incoherence here is staggering, because while Trump randomly appears sympathetic to Ulbright (although he had four years as president to commute his sentence and didn't), he's also actively campaigning on giving drug dealers the death penalty.
Libertarians, of course, oppose the death penalty point-blank, not trusting oft-incompetent government officials with the power over life and death. They also typically think drugs should be legal and that the "War on Drugs," which Trump is seeking to radically escalate, is a massive failure and violation of Americans' freedoms. So, a potentially empty promise to free one man hardly makes up for an entire agenda at odds with their beliefs on this issue.
And while even many libertarians can see the need to secure our Southern border, the jaw-dropping scale and brutality of President Trump's plans for immigration go well beyond mere border security. He wants to deploy the National Guard and military domestically to round up and deport more than 11 million people who are here illegally—not just those actively committing crimes and hurting our communities, but also the countless millions, including women and children who've lived here most of their lives, simply here on visa overstays; good people working and contributing to our society. Trump is even reportedly willing to set up "migrant detention camps" in service of this drastic deportation effort.
That's a lot of things, but libertarian isn't one of them.
One other defining element of libertarianism is an anti-interventionist foreign policy world view that opposes foreign aid and U.S. militarism abroad. On this, Trump often says the right thing, promising to put "America First" and criticizing the GOP's past support for regime-change wars.
Yet as president, Trump nonetheless provided U.S. weapons for Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen that slaughtered countless civilians. He promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan ... and never did. Trump continued and in some ways even escalated America's drone war across the globe. He pardoned contractors who were convicted for killing civilians.
As far as U.S. support for Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza, which is taking a brutal civilian toll, Trump has been very vague about what his actual position is. Yet if his track record in office is anything to go by, it seems likely Trump would continue to offer U.S. support to Israel in its war—something many anti-war libertarians ardently oppose.
On these core issues, taxes, civil liberties, and anti-interventionism, Trump is categorically not aligned with libertarians. And this is only a brief sampling of the areas where the former president's agenda is decidedly un-libertarian. (For more, sample Trump's views on press freedom, tech regulation, and government spending).
The Libertarian Party exists for only one reason: to elect libertarians. Everyday voters might feel compelled to make cynical calculations about the lesser of two evils, but that is explicitly not the role of an official third party. The notion that Libertarians should throw their support behind a wanna-be strongman who gets off on taxing Americans in exchange for a few cheap promises and a wink and a nod isn't just worthy of rejection—it deserves to be booed.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
