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Ten vexing issues for the party, 10 candidates for you.

DonaldTrump intends to address the Libertarian Partys presidential nominating convention on May 25. Hes 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, hes slightly less pro-government than the Democratic candidate, which isnt 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 hes not just the lesser (maybe) of two evils, hes stupendousthe 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. McArdles dads 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 doesnt manage to press its own 10 issues upon Trumps mind.

Trumps 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 dont 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.

Thats not to say hes the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. On a list of 10 somewhat-plausible 2024 presidential election winners, Id say hes 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 Argentinas 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 its 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. Seventhand lately competing with Trump for the love of the Libertarians in a tight race where both men know a few votes could be pivotalis Robert F. Kennedy, whos 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 hed even be better than Trumpand 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 minutelikely 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, Id 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.

Well find out in less than three weeks whether something magical, disastrous, or irrelevant comes out of the Libertarian convention. I wont 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.

ToddSeavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey

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Trump Talks to Libertarians - Splice Today

FreedomWorks was a central organ in the tea party. The group held rallies that flexed and motivated its grassroots supporters. Upstart conservatives courted the group and relied on its money. The establishment of the GOP feared and resented FreedomWorks.

Now FreedomWorks is no more. FreedomWorks dissolved on May 8.

Politicos story on the late groups tumultuous final years frames it as a clash of ideologies, a dissonance between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members.

Former FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon also used this terminology, saying he did my best to balance the two competing ideologies, which Politico describes as libertarianism vs. populism.

This is a standard framing in Washington, where insiders tend to see things in terms of policy preferences, principles, and beliefs. But if were being more precise, the tension here wasnt a clash between ideologies.

Some questions:

While the folks at the head of FreedomWorks tended to be libertarian, was libertarianism really what the group embodied and advanced?

Likewise, does it make sense to characterize, as Politico does, populism as the anti-libertarian force within FreedomWorks and the broader Right?

It doesnt, I believe.

Heres a more telling quote from that same article: A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist, Brandon said. So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.

Again, I think Brandon is mostly but not entirely correct here. The key point is that the new activists came in with Donald Trump. Thats important because of what the former president represents.

And what does Trump represent? Its not exactly populism. It would be more precise to say Trump represents Trump.

Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions, Brandon wrote in one internal memo.

Thats more accurate, and its more telling. This isnt really about ideas and policies as much as its about personalities. And this is the key to understanding the transition from the tea party era to the Trump Era.

The tea party era was characterized by candidates who were free market ideologues, but the wave they rode into power was mostly an anti-establishment wave. In the days after the Wall Street bailout, Obamacare, and the porky stimulus, anti-establishment meant anti-big government, and so it played nicely with libertarianism.

In other words, you could call 2010-era FreedomWorks a populist force.

FreedomWorks and the somewhat similar Club for Growth were mostly arrayed against big business and K Street lobbyists back in 2010. In contested primaries, the establishment candidates had lobbyist and big business funding, while the tea party candidates had FreedomWorks and Club for Growth funding.

Mike Lee, one of the marquee tea party insurgents in 2010, defeated Bob Bennett, who was branded Bailout Bob.

Back then, a few of us touted a libertarian populism as the central ideology of the tea party. FreedomWorks was with us in this populist stance.

Well, come 2016, GOP populism looked different, and we gained a more refined understanding of the energy behind the tea party. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) put it best:

All this time, Massie explained, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they werent voting for libertarian ideas they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.

Real leaders dont merely ride waves; they direct the forces. Trump rode in a populist wave, and he steered American conservatism and populism toward a very specific cause: himself.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

This left the erstwhile libertarian populists saddled with a base that didnt care about lower taxes or taking on cronyism but instead cared about supporting Trump and punching the media in the face.

There are plenty of organizations that could do that better than FreedomWorks. The groups time had come and gone.

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What was the tea party? What is Trumpism?: On populism and FreedomWorks - Washington Examiner

Robin Rayne/ZUMA Press Wire

On Wednesday, the Libertarian Party revealed a special guest speaker at its convention in late May. Surprise! Its former President Donald Trump.

This momentous occasion will mark the first time a former President directly addresses our members, candidates, and executive committee, the party announced. Dont miss this opportunity to hear insights from a prominent figure in American politics and watch him engage with Libertarian ideals.

That wasnt all. A version of the page that has since been taken down invited members to shop from what it called The Don Collectionan assemblage of t-shirts featuring Trumps hairdo over a range of favored LP issues, like freeing Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht from federal prison. For a $10 donation, you can even cast your vote on the topics President Trump will address during his time at the podium.

How did Donald Trump, an authoritarian Republican whose lawyers recently argued that the president can assassinate anyone he wants without being prosecuted, end up with a save-the-date for a libertarian conference? The simple answer is that the party invited both Trump and Biden to the event and Trump was the only one who said yes. (Third-party candidates Robert Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West all previously appeared at the California Libertarian Party convention in February.) But the relationship between Trump and the current incarnation of the LP goes a bit deeper than that. As I reported in a recent story for the magazine, the party is in the midst of one of its semi-regular civil wars:

Under the auspices of expanding the tent, some within the LPand a fair number outside of itbegan clamoring for a different kind of party: more aggressive, more offensive, and more right-wing. They werent interested in third-place showings; it wasnt entirely clear if they were interested in competing at all. Whats followed has been more than seven years of spectacularly messy infighting. New Hampshire was only one front of many. Across the country the Libertarian Party has been plagued by breakaway factions, leaked chatrooms and conspiracy theories, and bitter struggles over bank accounts and social media handles.

This power struggle played out across a series of larger events. After the 2016 election, in which LP nominees Gary Johnson and Bill Weld received the partys biggest-ever vote haul, some members argued the party had sold out by hitching its brand to two Republican ex-governors (a little ironic, given the current circumstances). After Charlottesville, libertarians split over whether to condemn bigots in their midst. And during Covid, party leaders faced a vocal backlash for not protesting loudly enough against vaccine mandates and lockdowns. This culminated, in 2022, in the takeover of the party by a faction called the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus (named for the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises), which wanted to turn the organization into a sort of the permanent campaign for the Ron Paul Revolution.

It would be a bit too simplistic to say that the Libertarian Party went full-on MAGA. But the new cohort was distinctly right-leaning in some key respects. They took concrete steps to disassociate the party from its support of socially liberal policiesrewriting the platform to eliminate the LPs longtime neutrality on abortion, deleting a pledge condemning bigotry as irrational and repugnant, and expressing support for the idea of secession. There was a sometimes virulent strain of angry anti-wokeness, and an affinity, at least in some circles, for a more nationalistic identity that rejects the free migration of people. One of the leading candidates for the partys presidential nomination said last year that open bordersplays into the globalist objective to erode the entire culture base of the United States.

In previous years, Trump and the LP would want nothing to do with each other. But this isnt the LP of previous years, and presumably thats why Trump accepted the invitation: There will be people in that room who might actually come over to his sideif they arent there already. Still, there is a silver lining for everyone else. Perhaps well get the answer to the question weve all wondered: Does Donald Trump think we should need a license to make toast in our own damn toaster?

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Donald Trump Will Speak at the Libertarian Convention. It's Not as Weird as It Sounds. Mother Jones - Mother Jones

In 2016, when it nominated former GOP governors Gary Johnson and William Weld for President, the Libertarian Party positioned itself as a sensible alternative to the statist Democratic Party and the far-right MAGA GOP. It maintained that position during Trumps presidency.

Whatever libertarian impulses Trump the candidate seemed to have, the party wrote in a 2018 statement, his actual performance as president stands in stark contrast. Donald Trump is the opposite of a Libertarian.

What changed? In 2022, the right-wing Mises Caucus won control of the party, powered by frustration at the Johnson/Weld nomination (which compromised on numerous Libertarian positions) and the partys failure to capitalize on anger at COVID-19 restrictions. In her speech to the California convention this year, LP national chair Angela McArdle said that she needed to focus on creative growth and finding new allies. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.s candidacy was appealing to the sort of anti-establishment voters who often voted Libertarian and some members were pushing for him to lead the ticket.

Were going to be in a tough election year, she said. If Kennedy is on the ballot in 40 or more states as an independent, its going to really hurt Libertarian vote turnout.

Kennedy, who did not rule out seeking the LP nomination, hasnt made serious moves toward winning it since getting a single vote in that conventions straw poll. The candidates now running for the nomination arent well-known outside of the movement. Trumps decision to attend will bring star power, media attention, and very unusual for the LP intense security to the event, while dividing Libertarians, some of whom are wondering why a Republican candidate who supports tariffs, mass deportations, and state abortion limits should share their stage.

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Donald Trump courts an increasingly friendly Libertarian Party - Semafor

On Wednesday, the Libertarian Party made an eyebrow-raising announcement about its upcoming convention: the headline speaker will be Donald Trump. For the little-noticed third party, which has mostly been overshadowed this year by more prominent independent candidates, it was certainly an attention-grabber.

It is unusual, to say the least, for the presumptive Republican nominee to speak at an event which is also slated to nominate a candidate to run against him. Its also bizarre given that Trump is, by any measure, the exact opposite of an ideological libertarian. But beneath the incongruity, there is a certain logic on both sides of this odd exchange.

Trump, for his part, obviously seeks to undercut a perceived spoiler threat. In 2020, the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen exceeded Bidens margin of victory over Trump in several swing states. Trump has also previously complained that his loss of the national popular vote in 2016 can be pinned on Gov. Gary Johnsons Libertarian bid, which set a record for the party by taking 3.2 percent of the popular vote.

Republicans have long seen the Libertarian Party as costing them winnable elections, pulling away more GOP-leaning voters with its small government message.

For its part, the Libertarian Party aint what it used to be.

Through most of its history, the L.P.s free-market fundamentalism was paired with similarly radical social liberalism, advocating an open borders immigration policy, drug legalization, and LGBT rights.

But in recent years, the party was subject to a hostile takeover. Out went the traditional live-and-let-live tolerance, to be replaced with culture warriors drawn from the fever swamps of the alt-right and its allies. So its not entirely surprising that the new management has turned the partys convention into a literal Trump rally.

Their first order of business was to delete a nearly 50-year-old platform plank condemning bigotry as irrational and repugnant.

The L.P.s internal turmoil, in and of itself, can be rather tedious and of little interest to outsiders. But the Trump campaign might end up wishing theyd taken a closer look before accepting this particular invitation. In rushing to accept the implicit endorsement, theyve put their candidate on what might be the most overtly bigoted stage of his career.

In 2017, when then-President Trump was offering his infamous take on the very fine people at the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, others were playing out a similar reaction in miniature. The Libertarian Partys leadership including its national chair at the time, attorney Nicholas Sarwarkhad emphatically denounced the chants of blood and soil and Jews will not replace us.

Within days, an organization called the Mises Caucus was founded with the purpose of expelling such woke sentiments from the party. In a sick bit of irony, they took their name from free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian-born Jew who fled the Nazis.

The caucus began taking over state parties, packing members into sparsely attended conventions. As they did so, they quickly started attracting negative attention for saying (mostly via party Twitter accounts) things that sounded less like liberty and more like the tiki torch brigade. Examples included equating COVID vaccines to the Holocaust with yellow Star of David patches, denouncing Pride Month as degeneracy, and telling a Black politician to pick cotton and go back to Africa.

Things came to a head in 2021, when a vote to expel the New Hampshire party over such antics failed on the partys national committee. In response, most Mises Caucus opponents walked out. Joe Bishop-Henchman, a nationally respected tax policy expert whod been elected chair of the national committee in 2022, resigned in protest, writing that he would not chair a party that has knowingly and now affirmatively chosen to stay affiliated with the toxic garbage being spewed by Mises Caucus-controlled states.

A year later, the caucus took control of the national party at its 2022 convention. Their first order of business was to delete a nearly 50-year-old platform plank condemning bigotry as irrational and repugnant.

The new chair, Angela McArdle, defined the new mission as fighting wokeism. In practice, this meant saying outlandishly racist things and then playing the victim when anybody objected.

Angela McArdle at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in 2023.

The remade Libertarian Party embraced a wide range of bigotries, with a particular zeal for overt antisemitism. It also suffered a collapse in membership, revenue, and vote totals as longtime Libertarians fled.

McArdle, in an interview on Tim Pools podcast, eagerly promoted the German New Medicine conspiracy theory, which holds that Jewish doctors deliberately give white people cancer. She defended the Mises Caucus headlining a virulent Holocaust denier at its events by pivoting to praise him as a truth-seeker willing to ask why Jews control Hollywood.

The national party tweeted a version of the notorious Happy Merchant anti-semitic caricature to allege a link between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and disgraced con artist Sam Bankman-Fried, who have nothing in common other than both being Jewish. The party has long opposed foreign aid in general, but talk of Israel in particular soon leaned into the dual loyalty trope with statements such as Israel First is America Last.

This is the organization whose stage the 45th and would-be 47th President of the United States has eagerly agreed to share.

In his statement accepting the invitation, Trump praised the party as some of the most independent and thoughtful thinkers and urged them to help him defeat President Biden.

It would be fair to say, for all his controversies and own problematic statements over the years, Trump has never spoken to such an openly bigoted organization before. This is less like the very fine people comment and more like if hed showed up himself to speak at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. It is particularly notable at a time when Trump and his fellow Republicans have been eager to denounce alleged antisemitism on the left in context of the war in Gaza.

It might be unsurprising that a party transformed into (for all intents and purposes) a hate group would accept Trumps seal of approval. But its less clear if Trump, or his campaign staffers, knew what he was signing up for. The embrace of such an organization by a normal presidential candidate would be a major scandal.

It remains to be seen if, for Trump, it even gets noticed.

Original post:
Is the Libertarian Party Too Bigoted Even for Trump? - The Daily Beast