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In early May, the Libertarian Partys national committee announced a prominent speaker at the partys convention over Memorial Day weekend in Washington: Former U.S. President Donald Trump.

A few days later, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a post on X (formerly Twitter), issued a challenge: Were both going to be speaking at the upcoming Libertarian convention on May 24 and 25. Its perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.

The party hasnt publicly confirmed any invitation (offered or accepted) to Kennedy, but maybe thats coming.

Im not going to argue here, anyway over the wisdom of a political party inviting two of its most prominent opponents to use its national convention as a campaign rally location or debate venue.

I do, however, want all you voters out there to know three things about this things that the media coverage seems to either leave unmentioned or gloss over:

1. Donald Trump isnt a libertarian.

2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isnt a libertarian.

3. Neither Trump nor Kennedy will be the Libertarian Partys 2024 presidential nominee.

Weve got a pretty big field of announced candidates for that presidential nomination.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy have declared for that nomination (in fact, after flirting with doing so, Kennedy publicly rejected the idea).

Neither Trump nor Kennedy are eligible for that nomination or at least they wont be if they address the convention prior to the nominee being selected. According to the Libertarian National Committees policy manual:

No person shall be scheduled as a convention speaker unless that person has signed this statement: As a condition of my being scheduled to speak, I agree to neither seek nor accept nomination for any office to be selected by delegates at the upcoming Libertarian Party convention if the voting for that office occurs after my speech.

Since we havent selected our nominee yet, Im not going to sing his or her praises to you or try to convince you to vote Libertarian. I just dont want you to be surprised when you look at your ballot in November and dont see the name Trump or Kennedy next to the name Libertarian Party.

Between now and November, I hope youll take time to familiarize yourself with libertarian ideas and with the Libertarian Partys candidates for office across the U.S. They deserve your attention and consideration.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north-central Florida.

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No, Trump and Kennedy aren't libertarian candidates - Restoration NewsMedia - Restoration NewsMedia

1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenges Donald Trump to debate at Libertarian Convention  The Associated Press
2. R.F.K. Jr., Invited to Libertarian Convention, Seeks Trump Debate  The New York Times
3. RFK Jr. challenges Trump to debate at Libertarian Party convention  The Hill

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenges Donald Trump to debate at Libertarian Convention - The Associated Press

1. Libertarians are uninhibited by ordinary political rules and inviting a rival to address their convention is just the sort of eccentric move that appeals to them.

2. Party leaders, knowing Trump is more likely to be elected in November than their own nominee, want to encourage him to embrace libertarian ideals of shrinking government, expanding liberty, and curbing the welfare state.

3. Libertarian Party leaders never expected Trump to accept their invitation but will gladly exploit the publicity he brings them in order to promote their own issues and candidates.

4. The Libertarian Party has been taken over by hard-core MAGA supporters who want to help Trump win.

My money is on No. 4.

Though many of my instincts are small-l libertarian, I have never been a registered member of the Libertarian Party. On several occasions, however, I have voted for the partys presidential candidate. In 1996, I was far more impressed with Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party standard-bearer, than with the other candidates on the ballot Democratic president Bill Clinton, Republican senator Bob Dole, and billionaire businessman/crank Ross Perot. In a column that year, I marveled at a would-be president who was motivated not by ego or lust for power but by principle.

Imagine a candidacy based on individual freedom, economic liberty, parental authority, local control of local matters, an end to the national income tax, and a federal government that doesnt meddle in our lives, I wrote. What American would vote for that?

As it turned out, 485,759 of us Americans voted for that one-half of 1 percent of the popular vote.

I voted Libertarian again in 2016, unable to stomach the idea of casting a ballot for such dreadful candidates as Trump or Hillary Clinton. The Libertarian candidates that year two prominent former Republican governors, Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts were at best lukewarm in their libertarian commitments. But in terms of character, they were head and shoulders above the major-party nominees. Apparently quite a few #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary voters felt the same way, because the Johnson-Weld ticket drew 4.5 million votes, or nearly 3.3 percent of the nationwide popular vote an all-time high for the party.

The Libertarian nominee four years later, political activist and college professor Jo Jorgensen, didnt do nearly as well; she polled only 1.8 million votes, or a little more than 1 percent of the national total. But that, some claim, may have prevented Trumps reelection as president. In four states that Joe Biden narrowly carried Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin Jorgensens vote total was larger than Bidens margin of victory. There were those who argued that had there been no Libertarian option on the ballot, most of the votes Jorgensen amassed might have gone to Trump and sent him back to the White House.

To be clear, I dont subscribe to that theory. Many Jorgensen voters, including me, could not have been induced to cast a ballot for Trump under any circumstances. That wasnt just because of his character failings but also because Trump is no libertarian.

Unlike Johnson and Weld, who could at least portray their views as libertarian-lite, Trump is affirmatively opposed to most libertarian principles. There is his long-standing animus against immigration, both legal and illegal. His decades-long hostility toward free trade and support for higher tariffs. His call to confiscate guns without waiting for due process. His declaration that a US president has untrammeled authority to order businesses to close. His vow to never cut a single penny from the crushingly unaffordable Social Security and Medicare programs. His repeated fawning over the worlds dictators, including Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. The nearly $8 trillion he added to the national debt during his presidency.

As the Libertarian Party itself declared in 2018, Trump is the opposite of a Libertarian.

But that was the Libertarian Party then. The Libertarian Party now is a very different creature.

Beginning in 2017, a bigoted faction calling itself the Mises Caucus moved systematically and ruthlessly to take over the Libertarian Party. For years, the LP had had a reputation for free-market fundamentalism, open immigration, drug legalization, and live-and-let-live tolerance. All that began to change as the new faction moved in and took over the partys communications channels. Suddenly the Libertarian Party was employing some of the ugliest tropes in the alt-right lexicon.

The caucus began taking over state parties, packing members into sparsely attended conventions, recounts Andy Craig in the Daily Beast. As they did so, they quickly started attracting negative attention for saying things that sounded less like liberty and more like the tiki torch brigade. For example, Libertarian Party social media posts equated COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust with yellow Star of David patches, denounced Pride Month as degeneracy, told a Black politician she should pick cotton or go back to Africa, and pronounced it obviously correct that the end of apartheid destroy[ed] South Africa.

The move by the Mises Caucus to take control of the party seems to have begun immediately after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The violence of that episode was promptly condemned by the Libertarian Partys national committee, which released a strong statement declaring bigotry, in the words of the party platform, irrational and repugnant. The statement affirmed that there is no room for racists and bigots in the Libertarian Party.

But to some on the far-right fringe of the movement, that was intolerable. As Joshua Eakle, a longtime libertarian activist and former Libertarian Party state chairman, recounted in an eye-opening thread on X last week, the statement denouncing the Charlottesville bigots infuriated some extremists, who launched an insurgency to take over the party for the Trumpian right. By 2022, that takeover was largely complete. An early priority of the new administration was repealing the platform language condemning bigotry. By the thousands, traditional Libertarian Party leaders and dues-paying members quit or were forced out. What remains of the partys national committee, Eakle wrote, has become nothing more than a satellite of MAGA authoritarianism.

Perhaps there will be a movement by genuine lovers of liberty to take back the Libertarian Party from the bigots who have usurped it. If so, I will cheer from the sidelines. But as long as the party is in the hands of its current operators, the odds of my voting for a Libertarian alternative to Trump and Biden is nil.

This is an excerpt from Arguable, a Globe Opinion newsletter by columnist Jeff Jacoby. Sign up to get Arguable in your inbox each week.

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Trump's MAGA takeover of the Libertarian Party - The Boston Globe

(Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY, the largest third party in the United States and the self-described party of principle, announced last week that former President Donald Trump will be speaking at its national convention on May 25.

In the announcement, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, Angela McArdle, bills the move as an incredible opportunity to advance the message of liberty, and to make an impact on the policy positions of a past, and possibly future, president.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has a different take, saying, If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election wont even be close. We cannot have another four years of death, destruction, and incompetence. WE WILL WORK TOGETHER AND WIN!

Despite Trumps rhetoric, Trumpism has little in common with libertarianism. His hostility to free trade, support for qualified immunity, continuation of overseas military action and drone strikes, and unilateral banning of bump stocks stand in direct opposition to both libertarian principles and the partys platform.

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Trump isnt the only non-Libertarian candidate the party is courting. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at the California Libertarian Partys convention; back in March he wasreportedly even mulling running as a Libertarian following discussions with McArdle and party leadership, although it is unclear if he is still considering that possibility. Like Trump, Kennedy is no libertarian, though he appeals to certain populist and conspiratorial elements within the party.

Despite his lack of libertarian policy beliefs, Trump has a clear incentive to siphon votes away from the eventual Libertariannominee. In the 2020 election, the Libertarian vote share covered the spread between Trump and Biden in several key states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsinall of which broke for Biden. The opportunity to speak at the partys convention provides Trump a prime opportunity to stop a repeat of 2020 in its tracks.

Ostensibly, the opportunity to speak is a neutral one that was offered to all major candidates (including RFK Jr. and President Biden), though the rabid enthusiasm with which activists and party leadership greeted the news of Trumps speech calls this into question. Almost immediately after the announcement, the Libertarian National Committee was selling official t-shirts with a silhouette of Trumps head alongside such libertarian catchphrases as End the Fed and Taxation is Theft. (These products have since been removed from the website.)

As McArdle put it, My loyalty has to be to the Libertarian party . . . but Donald Trump is a much better person and president than Joe Biden. Theres no contest. Her clear admiration for Trump in spite of his platform and his promises to be a Day One dictator signal that the years-long transformation of the Libertarian party is now complete.

IN 2016, THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY was handed a ripe opportunity for unprecedented success. With two widely disliked major-party candidates, many Americans were desperate for a viable alternative. Enter Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico turned Libertarian and the 2012 Libertarian presidential nominee. He selected the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, as his running mate, despite Welds lack of history with the party and concerns from some members about his political beliefs.

Some early polls suggested the campaign was not far from the elusive 5 percent electoral threshold that would trigger automatic ballot access in subsequent elections in many states. But missteps, from Johnson forgetting the name of the Syrian city where a fierce battle was causing mass atrocities (What is Aleppo?) to Welds near-endorsement of Hillary Clinton (Im not sure anyones more qualified to be president of the United States than Hillary Clinton) diminished libertarians enthusiasm for Johnson.

Still, the Johnson/Weld campaign by far was the most successful Libertarian ticket in history, earning 4.5 million votes (3.3 percent of the total votes cast). For the first time since 2000, the ticket was on the ballot in all fifty states. The future of the party looked bright.

LIKE ANY POLITICAL PARTY, the Libertarian party has always been fraught with division. Whether on particular policy issues like abortion and immigration or tactical questions of messaging and political strategy, intraparty conflict has long been the norm.

Broadly speaking, the party can be divided between two branches: pragmatists and radicals. Pragmatists focus on marginal movements toward liberty and winning elections. Radicals yearn for the libertarian revolution, and see the party as a vehicle for promoting libertarianism even to the detriment of the partys electoral chances.

Welds inclusion on the 2016 ticket, and growing internal conflict over strategy, messaging, and culture-war issues related to race and gender, led radical elements within the party to form the Mises Caucus. The caucus sought a more radical realignment of the partys strategy, messaging, and politics, and quickly began growing in numbers, money, and influence.

The caucus is named for Ludwig von Mises, a twentieth-century Austrian economist who is one of the intellectual godfathers of the modern libertarian movement. Though named for Mises, the caucus owes much of its philosophy to Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and perennial presidential candidate (alternately as a Republican and a Libertarian).

The Mises Caucus spread like wildfire online, through celebritarian Twitter threads and promotion via the extensive network of libertarian podcasts. By the 2022 Libertarian National Convention in Reno, the Mises Caucus was on the verge of taking over the party. Growing grassroots dissatisfaction with party leadership, as well as lingering frustration over what they saw as a lackluster response to pandemic-era policies like lockdowns and mandates for mask-wearing and vaccination, catapulted the Mises Caucus to victory.

McArdle, who was a Mises Caucus board member and was endorsed by the caucus to chair the national committee, summarized the Mises-backed candidates goals: I will move heaven and earth to make this thing functional and not embarrassing for you. We are going to change the country.

In an interview with Reason shortly before she won the chairand indeed the entire slate of Mises-backed candidates won their party leadership electionsMcArdle offered more concrete goals. She was committed to better messaging from the national party, in contrast with controversial and bigoted remarks from some state parties, like the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. She said she would seek to broaden the party to encompass the broader liberty movement, including all those at odds with what several Mises Caucus proponents described as woke and SJW elements in the previous leadership. McArdle also pledged to better manage the partys finances, and to work to grow both membership and donations.

Now, two years later, what has the leadership of the party looked like under the Mises Caucus crew? From messaging to party growth to internal management, the past two years of the Libertarian party have been an unmitigated disaster.

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THE FIRST AND MOST OBVIOUS CHANGE that the new crew brought about concerned the partys messaging. For many in the Mises Caucus, the question of whether the partys Twitter account was sufficiently owning the libs was more important than workaday political-organizational concerns like ballot access or running candidates.

Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant. One has to wonder: What kinds of would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those wordsand, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?

The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version of the 14 words, a white-supremacist slogan.

The Mises Caucus faithful were thrilled by this change in the partys public stance. Still, beyond this contingent, the party struggled to make inroads to new members.

Contra McArdles stated commitment to the broader liberty movement, the Mises Caucus has always been pugnacious toward its intramural competition. One of their prime longstanding targets is regime libertarians, shorthand for nonprofits like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. Those organizations perceived compromise and lack of radicalism, as well as their willingness to accept imperfect and incremental improvements towards libertarian ends, meant they deserved scorn and sanction from the party.

For example, following the publication of a Cato Institute blog post praising the COVID-19 vaccines as a triumph of globalization and international cooperation, McArdle herself wrote that the Cato Institute should be excommunicated from the liberty movement and has nothing to do with our political movement. If one of the major, long-established national centers of libertarian thought and policy wasnt aligned with the new Libertarian party, who is? (Besides, apparently, Donald Trump, who supervised the government-led effort to develop the vaccines in the first place.)

The latent hostility of the partys messaging and open hostility toward libertarians not aligned with the Mises Caucus started to drive away longtime party members. According to data compiled from publicly available information by the Classical Liberal Caucusthe main opposition to the Mises Caucus within the partysustaining memberships (denoting party members who give at least $25 to the cause each year) have significantly declined since the Mises Caucus takeover.

The new leadership has likewise alienated longtime donors, as fundraising more generally has declined alongside membership. The partys financial outlook has become bleak enough that there are plans to cease operations from the partys Alexandria headquarters in order to rent the building out instead.

This chaos has percolated from the national party to the state level, as state parties have disaffiliated (in New Mexico and Virginia), splintered (in Massachusetts and Michigan), or formed new parties outright (Pennsylvanias Keystone Party).

The state parties that remain are growing less enthusiastic about actually electing Libertarian candidates. The Libertarian Party of Colorado announced they would no longer run candidates in races that already have strong liberty minded Republicans in them. Likewise, the Libertarian Party of Montana changed its bylaws to allow endorsements of candidates of any political affiliation. In Arizona, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022 dropped out to endorse Republican Blake Masters.

The partys response to its own slow-moving collapse has been mixed. Publicly, McArdle is quick to blame previous leadership. In a blithe and low budgetlooking video, she likened the old Libertarian party to a car thats been driven by drunken rats that new leadership needs to fix up before it can run properly again. But never fear, she said: The era of woke regime libertarianism is never coming back.

Privately, things are not looking so good. In a leaked internal memo from 2023, McArdle acknowledged that we are in serious in trouble, no one is coming to save us, and the takeover is turning into a disaster. We need to radically change things if we are going to survive the next year, she writes.

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ALL THIS THRASHING FOR RELEVANCE amid internal chaos helps to explain the Libertarian partys embrace of bizarre strategies: Its leadership is desperate, out of ideas, and willing to try anything. Thats how the caucus of principle and radicalism has come to court the likes of cracked Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr. and former Republican president Trump.

In this, the partys current leadership shows that it is willing to abandon libertarian principles built in the partys platformand to do so for the sake of visibility and influence. Theyre not minor principles, either, but core principles, such as those expressed in the partys positions on free trade and migration (Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders), industrial policy (We oppose all forms of government subsidies and bailouts to business, labor, or any other special interest), and justice (We support the abolition of qualified immunity). What would DJT or RFK Jr. have to say to a gathering of libertarians on those topics?

But in truth, the Mises Caucus abandoning principles for optics is nothing new. At the 2022 convention, Justin Amash (the first Libertarian congressman in the partys history) read a string of quotations at odds with Mises Caucus orthodoxy as part of his speech: Libertarianism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism, he said, and Libertarianisms thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.

In response to a chorus of boos, Amash revealed that every quotation he had just read came from Ludwig von Mises himself (although Amash replaced the word liberalism in the original quotations with libertarianism). If the Mises Caucus rejects the words and ideas of its namesake, what parts of the libertarian tradition do they support?

Whoever the eventual Libertarian nominee is this year, that person will struggle to reach the heights of 2016, or even the 1.2 percent attained by the partys 2020 presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen. Promises that Trumps appearance will lead to valuable media attention, or that Trump will change his platform after hearing Libertarian concerns, are laughable. The only thing that he will take from Libertarians is votes, and he will give nothing in return.

The Mises Caucus, which formed predominantly in online communities with messaging and growth strategies based almost solely on provocative digital engagement, has failed spectacularly at every one of its promises to the Libertarian party since it took over. Their story is one of compromise, not principle; decline, not growth. And at the end of the month, when the Libertarian party all but endorses Trump for president, they will slide further into irrelevance.

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Tyler Groenendal is the manager of foundation relations at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

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The Libertarian Party Crackup - by Tyler Groenendal - The Bulwark

Former President Donald Trump made thesurpriseannouncement last week that he will be appearing at the Libertarian National Convention later this month.

Libertarians are some of the most independent and thoughtful thinkers in our country, and I am honored to join them in Washington, D.C., later this month, Trump said. We must all work together to help advance freedom and liberty for every American, and a second Trump administration will achieve that goal.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be appearing at the convention as well, and on Tuesday, the eccentric long shot issued achallengeto the 45th president.

Lets meet at the Libertarian convention and show the American public that at least two of the major candidates arent afraid to debate each other, Kennedy said. I asked the convention organizers and they are game for us to use our time there to bring the American people the debate they deserve!

Ideally, the Libertarian Party would include either its nominee, if the nominee is decided in time, or another representative of the party in such a debate. Both former libertarian vice presidential candidateSpike Cohenand comedian and podcasterDave Smithhave offered their formidable debate skills. Whether this hypothetical debate would include a libertarian or be a one-on-one with Kennedy, Trump should accept.

Trump is clear that he wants to debate President Joe Biden. It isunlikelythat the Biden team allows its candidate within a country mile of a debate stage, considering his age andmental decline, even compared to four years ago. But Trump accepting this debate would put the pressure on the Biden camp.

It would, at least, make for a good attack ad. This debate would also offer both Trump and Kennedy the opportunity to sharpen their swords as Election Day approaches. Kennedys strength is his recall, and unlike in a four-hour Joe Rogan podcast, he wont be able to grandstand with numbers and statistics real or imagined. Trumps typical stump-style rhetoric wont work, either.

Even if a Libertarian Party representative isnt included onstage, I assume there would be competent, principled libertarians questioning the candidates Cohen and Smith would be two obvious choices and the audience wont be won over by either candidates go-to tactics.

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Lets be honest: There is no real downside for anyone involved. Kennedy gets another chance in the sun, libertarians get an opportunity to question a former president and a strong third-party challenger on the topics that matter most to liberty-loving Americans, and Trump removes Bidens he wouldnt debate DeSantis and Haley card as the 46th presidents staff attempts to shield their doddering candidate.

Even if Trump takes a beating from a libertarian candidate, the audience, or Kennedy (brain wormand all), it is still six months from Election Day. No undecided voter will go blue instead of red this November because of what happened at the Libertarian Party convention. This debate would be fun, and it would be beneficial for Americans to see the former president and the highest-polling third-party candidate in decades answer intelligent, thoughtful questions in front of a neutral, even hostile, audience.

BradyLeonard(@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host ofThe No Gimmicks Podcast.

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Trump should debate RFK Jr at the libertarian convention - Washington Examiner