Donald Trump meets the Libertarians
Why this weekend was a big win for Trump, and a big loss for the Libertarian Party
Whenever the topic of the Libertarian Party comes up, I always stress that while I’m a libertarian, I’m not a Libertarian. Meaning, I hold to libertarian ideals and I’ve studied a lot of academic and philosophical libertarianism, but for a variety of reasons I’ve never cared for the Libertarian Party. More on that later. So this weekend was absolutely fascinating to witness for me.
Donald Trump became the first former President to ever address a third party’s nominating convention. In theory, this was a win-win for both parties: Donald Trump got to try to appeal directly to Libertarian voters and argue for why they should support him for President. The Libertarian Party got to get Trump to speak to issues that are important to them specifically.
Trump tailored his speech decently well to a libertarian crowd. He touted his record of having started no new wars during his presidency. He bragged about taking on the neocons. He tried to make the case that the best option for libertarian voters would be to ally with him to take on the biggest threat to liberty on the ballot: Joe Biden.
But Trump did more than tout his own accomplishments. He also made meaningful offers to libertarians. He pledged to put libertarians on a review board to assess potential pardons and commutations for political prisoners. He pledged to free Ross Ulbricht who is eleven years into a double life sentence, essentially for building a website. That’s a popular policy goal of libertarians and has been since Trump’s first term. He pledged to put a libertarian in his cabinet and appoint other libertarians to senior positions.
Were these serious offers that Trump will fulfill? (Or would have fulfilled if the LP had thrown its support behind him?) I wouldn’t bank on those promises, but I certainly wouldn’t shrug them off either. It’s meaningful that Trump felt the need to pander to libertarian voters and make offers, even if they were ultimately empty offers. That showed that the Libertarian Party, and libertarians at large, have political leverage over the Republican Party.
Sadly, the delegates and other attendees mostly didn’t seem interested in using that leverage. I think it’s appropriate to boo Trump if he says something worth booing, but I also think Trump should be praised for some of his more libertarian-friendly accomplishments like the ones he touted. But the Libertarian Party is mostly not made up of serious people, and they seemed mostly interested in engaging in cathartic heckling. Trump wasn’t endorsed by the LP, but in some ways what happened the following day were even better for him.
For some brief context, there’s been a power struggle within the Libertarian Party for the last several years. The old guard in the party are mostly left libertarians who, if given power, would govern effectively as “DNC lite.” They might use the same rhetoric as right libertarians, but their leftist cultural positions are hiding just behind that edifice. The other group aren’t explicitly rightwing libertarians, though there tend to be far more right libertarians in this group. This second group wanted to reclaim the party for the kind of libertarianism made popular by Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and Ron Paul. This group is much closer to my personal libertarianism. In 2022 they succeeded in winning nearly all of the seats on the Libertarian National Committee, including the party chair. This group was responsible for bringing Trump in to speak (and invited Biden too, for the record).
The day after Trump spoke to the Libertarian convention, the party held several rounds of votes to nominate a Presidential candidate. At the end of the day, the leftwing old guard won the day, and nominated Chase Oliver as its Presidential candidate. Oliver is a cultural leftist. He wants widespread immigration. He calls himself a “trans ally” and supports chemically transitioning children. He has celebrated drag queen story hour. He supported corporations enforcing vaccine and mask mandates on their customers and employees. It’s a low point for the Libertarian Party.
There is some positives to come out of this though. First, it will hopefully push more good libertarians away from the LP. I’ve always felt that the good libertarians who get involved in the LP are squandering their finite political resources. I’ve always favored Ron Paul’s political strategy: work within the GOP to spread libertarian ideas and secure libertarian policy wins. Ron Paul made it ok again on the right to oppose foreign war spending and to make ending (or at least auditing) the Federal Reserve a common talking point in American politics.
The other positive is that any votes that will go to Chase Oliver are votes that would have otherwise gone to Biden. While Trump is far from my ideal candidate in almost every conceivable way, he’s clearly the better choice to Biden and is more open to libertarian figures and voices.
Getting Trump to speak at the LNC and offer grants of privilege to libertarians was the most effective political action ever accomplished by the LP. The nomination of Chase Oliver the next day may well result in the lowest vote totals of an LP Presidential run in a long time. Just a fascinating weekend in Washington.