Libertarians are right to reject Donald Trump | Opinion

Former President Trump recently took the stage at the Libertarian Party National Convention and urged members of America’s largest third party, which supports free market capitalism, civil rights and limited government, to stop protest voting and support Trump instead.

He was booed.

“We want the votes of liberals because you stand with us and you will not waste a single vote,” Trump said, drawing boos from some in the audience. “And we cannot allow the worst president in the history of our country to come back and finally destroy America.”

So should libertarians support Trump this time? Some libertarians may decide that Trump’s reelection is the lesser of two evils, but they should not be fooled for a moment into thinking that the former president “speaks for our beliefs.”

He doesn’t.

For example, it’s hard to imagine a more quintessentially libertarian position than an aversion to taxes. Yet Trump has proposed raising taxes in the form of tariffs that would cost Americans roughly $300 billion a year, or about $2,000 per taxpayer. The former president wants to impose a flat 10% tariff on all imports. While the government would officially impose these taxes on corporations, most economists agree that in practice, ordinary consumers would pay most of the cost through higher prices.

Yes, Trump is campaigning on the fact that American families are suffering greatly from Biden’s inflation, which is true, but he is also promising to hit them with crushing tax increases in the form of tariffs, which will also deal a serious blow to our economy.

The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimates that Trump’s proposed tariffs could result in the loss of 505,000 jobs, and as many as 825,000 jobs could be threatened if other countries respond with tariffs.

If pro-Trump libertarians were less focused on culture war issues like banning medical sex reassignment for minors (an issue that is decided primarily at the state level anyway), they might find that the candidate they support is trying to raise taxes in ways they would never normally embrace. But the economy is not the only area where Trump’s policies deviate significantly from libertarian priorities.

Libertarians have always been proud advocates of civil rights and have much more in common with the old-school ACLU on these issues than traditional “law and order” Republicans, but Trump campaigned on a hardline approach to crime that is totally at odds with civil rights.

First, Trump has called for the reinstatement of “stop and search” policies that allow police to randomly stop and search people on the street without even a suspicion of illegal activity — a practice anathema to civil rights activists and Fourth Amendment supporters.

The former president also wants to “strengthen” qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that gives government officials, not just police officers, immunity in many cases when they violate the constitutional rights of Americans. It’s really hard to imagine a more unliberal idea.

Some libertarians have been moved by Trump’s recent promise to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbright, a man serving two life sentences for technically facilitating drug sales who has broad support in the libertarian movement. But the contradiction here is striking, since Trump can act as if he was sympathetic to Ulbright (he had the opportunity to commute his sentence during his four years as president but did not do so) while actively calling for the death penalty for drug dealers.

Of course, libertarians are vehemently opposed to the death penalty and have no intention of entrusting incompetent government officials with the power to decide life and death. They also typically believe that drugs should be legal and that Trump’s rapidly escalating “war on drugs” has been a huge failure and an infringement on Americans’ freedoms. So the empty promise of freeing one man doesn’t come close to making up for an entire agenda that is at odds with their beliefs on the issue.

Even many libertarians understand the need to secure the southern border, but the staggering scale and brutality of President Trump’s immigration policies go far beyond simple border security. He wants to deploy the National Guard and the military across the country to round up and deport over 11 million illegal aliens — not just those who are actively committing crimes and harming our communities, but also countless others who are simply overstaying their visas, including women and children who have spent most of their lives here — good people who work and contribute to society. President Trump is even reportedly prepared to set up “migrant detention camps” as part of this drastic deportation effort.

There are many different kinds, but libertarianism is not one of them.

Another feature of libertarianism is an anti-interventionist foreign policy worldview that opposes foreign aid and US militarism overseas. Trump has often been right about this, promising to put “America First” and criticizing Republicans for their past support of wars of regime change.

Yet as president, Trump provided U.S. arms for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen that has massacred countless civilians; he promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan but never did; he continued U.S. drone wars around the world, in some ways escalating those wars; and he pardoned contractors convicted of killing civilians.

President Trump has been very vague about where he actually stands when it comes to U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which is exacting brutal civilian tolls, but based on his record in office, it seems likely that he will continue to support U.S. support for Israel’s wars, something that many anti-war libertarians fervently oppose.

On core issues like taxes, civil rights, and anti-interventionism, Trump is completely out of sync with libertarians, and this is just one example of where the former president’s policies are decidedly non-libertarian. (For more, see Trump’s views on press freedom, tech regulation, and government spending.)

The Libertarian Party exists for one reason and one reason only: to elect libertarians. While ordinary voters may be forced to make a cynical calculation about which of two evils is the better, that is certainly not the role of an official third party. The idea that libertarians should throw their support behind a would-be dictator who takes pleasure in taxing Americans in exchange for cheap promises and winks and nods is not just worthy of rejection, it’s worthy of being booed.

Brad Porambo (translator) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.