The Libertarian Case for Donald J. Trump

Donald J. Trump will address the Libertarian Party National Convention on Saturday. The Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for president of the United States. The reasons for doing so — policy and politics — are as solid as the Hope Diamond.

“Libertarians are some of the most independent and thoughtful thinkers in our Country, and I am honored to join them in Washington, DC,” Trump stated. “We must all work together to help advance freedom and liberty for every American, and a second Trump Administration will achieve that goal.”

This event is unprecedented. As Cato Institute President Peter Goettler observed in Thursday’s Washington Post: “It will be the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate.”

Trump turns conventional politics upside down every day. A Republican rallying thousands of adoring fans … in the Bronx?

Inconceivable!

And, yet, Trump did precisely this on Thursday evening.

Trump should ask for the Libertarian Party’s endorsement based, largely, on his presidential record. Reminding his audience about the measures that he implemented should make their freedom-loving hearts soar:

1. The $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was America’s largest infusion of tax relief. It sliced individual tax rates for all taxpayers and slashed the corporate tax rate from a punishing 35 percent to a globally competitive 21 percent. Immediate expensing of business equipment and other reductions fueled the best economy in 50 years. Black and Hispanic unemployment cratered to their historical nadirs. Female joblessness slid to levels unseen since the Eisenhower era. Black poverty collapsed to record lows. And, of all things, income inequality shrank, not by squeezing the rich but by lifting the poor. Between 2016 and 2019, before COVID-19 ruined everything, real median-household income grew 16.4 percent under Trump, up $9,664.
2. Trump cut red tape as never before. He promised to kill two old regulations for every new one. In fact, he scrapped eight old rules for each fresh one.
3. Trump restrained inflation. Prices were rising just 1.4 percent as he left office. This was a fraction of the “9 percent” inflation that lying Joe Biden repeatedly claims Trump handed him.
4. Likewise, before Biden’s record-breaking post-COVID spending spree, the 30-year mortgage rate as Trump departed was 2.77 percent versus 6.94 percent today.
5. Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill!” approach fostered energy independence. Low fuel and electricity prices helped moderate inflation and propel economic growth.
6. Trump rescued America from the economically crippling Paris global-warming treaty. Instead, he amplified fracking and liquefied natural gas to provide abundant power with half of coal’s carbon dioxide — for those who fret about such things.
7. Trump promoted parental rights and school choice and reauthorized and funded the Washington, D.C., school-voucher program.
8. Trump’s Education Department repealed the so-called guidance letter that turned mere on-campus sexual harassment accusations into de facto criminal convictions. Trump restored due process to the he said/she said minefield.
9. In a powerful blow, Trump required universities to respect the First Amendment, lest they lose their federal funds.
10. While Trump and Republicans never repealed Obamacare, they torpedoed that hideous law’s individual mandate, junked several of its taxes, and sandblasted several of its rougher edges.
11. Medical price transparency empowered consumers to shop for health care services and compare costs, as is routine in every other industry. This competition should slow ballooning health care expenses.
12. Trump signed Right to Try: Terminally ill patients now can receive experimental and possibly life-saving treatments before those drugs win full FDA approval. When at death’s door, what do these suffering Americans have to lose?
13. Trump nominated some 200 constitutionalist federal judges, including a seldom-seen three Supreme Court justices in one presidential term.
14. Trump cancelled and defunded federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and other state-funded racism schemes.
15. The VA Mission Act, which Trump signed, lets military veterans receive federally funded medical care in the private sector, if delays prevent their treatment in VA hospitals.
16. Trump signed a measure that streamlined dismissals of federal bureaucrats who abuse America’s beloved veterans.
17. Rather than burden U.S. taxpayers with the full cost of NATO, Trump pressured America’s NATO partners to obey their promises and dedicate at least 2 percent of GDP to the alliance’s collective defense. Trump named and shamed NATO’s deadbeats until they coughed up $100 billion in fresh funds from European treasuries, not American wallets.
18. Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, namely, Israel’s four peace treaties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Add unprecedented solidarity with Jerusalem, the obliteration of the ISIS caliphate, and the diplomatic and military isolation of Iran, and the Middle East began to resemble a safe neighborhood.
19. Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un did not denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. However, Pyongyang’s underground atomic-bomb tests, which repeatedly rocked the Obama–Biden administration, stopped under Trump.
20. Trump paired his overall national-security posture — Peace Through Strength — with a strategy that one might call: “Speak loudly and carry a big stick.” What critics decried as chaos and bullying yielded for Trump and the American people the first presidency since Jimmy Carter’s in which the United States did not enter a new war.

Most libertarians would say that this non-exhaustive roster of accomplishments truly shines.

But, many would ask, what about the areas in which Trump’s libertarian bona fides lacked luster?

First, Trump should have reigned in federal spending. He can be excused for many of the massive outlays due to the unforeseen COVID-19 catastrophe that plunged onto America like a giant asteroid. However, Trump must take responsibility for his fulsome pre-pandemic outlays.

Priority No. 1 for Trump was to rebuild the Armed Forces, which had withered under Obama–Biden. The price for those defense dollars, Trump has said, was his acquiescence in Democrat social expenditures.

This rationale is hardly riveting, but it’s easy to understand. While a tougher line on spending was the better policy, Peace Through Strength ain’t free.

Second, Trumps’ tariffs violated the free-trade orthodoxy that drove the GOP since at least the 1980s.

Most libertarians, including me, dislike tariffs as jumped up import taxes. That said, most libertarians, including me, dislike the Chinese Communist Party. Trump’s tariffs provided the blunt-instrument trauma needed to teach the CCP some manners.

Beijing eventually signed a free-trade agreement with America and agreed to end intellectual-property theft and other abuses. Alas, COVID-19 soon erupted, and this trade treaty drowned in a sea of masks and respirators.

Trump also threatened tariffs to achieve non-trade goals. When Mexico was not helping America stop illegal aliens, Trump warned that steep tariffs were coming. The very next day, Mexico’s foreign minister was in Washington, scrambling to scuttle Trump’s potential trade restrictions. Mexico felt the heat, saw the light, and began helping America seal the U.S.–Mexico boundary. Mexico even placed soldiers on its side of the line to keep illegal aliens far from the frontier.

On the plus side, Trump replaced NAFTA with the U.S.–Canada–Mexico Agreement. He also signed a free-trade deal with South Korea and negotiated a commercial agreement between Kosovo and Serbia to start cooling centuries of intra-Balkan hatred.

Trump proposes reciprocal tariffs, or what I call a Golden Rule trade system: America should do unto our trading partners as they do unto us. If, say, Germany slaps 25 percent tariffs on U.S.-vehicle imports, then America should apply 25 percent tariffs on German automobiles.

Fair is fair.

If Berlin dislikes 25 percent tariffs, then it can cut them to, say, 5 percent or ditch them outright, and America will do likewise.

Trump also proposed radical free trade to major U.S. financial partners: 0 percent tariffs across the board so long as these nations greeted American goods with equally open arms.

They replied: “No!” “Non!” “Nein!“

So, the old system of varied import taxes survived.

Third, some libertarian purists believe that borders hinder the human right to waltz into and out of nations at will. While they might bristle at Trump’s big, beautiful border wall, most libertarians down here on Earth accept the right of nation states to exist, delineate themselves with borders, and defend their boundaries against those who invade with neither permission nor papers.

Hardcore libertarians who favor virtually unfettered immigration cherish the rule of law and understand the need to make even generous immigration legal and orderly. Biden’s border bloodbath is no libertarian’s vision of immigration policy.

So much for policy.

What about politics?

As Trump said: “We all have to remember that our goal is to defeat the Worst President in the History of the United States, BY FAR, Crooked Joe Biden. If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close. We cannot have another four years of death, destruction, and incompetence. WE WILL WORK TOGETHER AND WIN!”

The Libertarian Party should give Donald J. Trump its nomination and run him on its line on ballots across America.

While Trump spends little time quoting Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, he has turned more libertarian ideas into public policy than have all the Libertarian Party nominees combined who have run for president and lost. Trump will incarnate even more libertarian concepts as America’s 47th president, especially if the Libertarian Party nominates him rather than a spoiler who will siphon votes from Trump and, thus, reelect Joe Biden — the biggest socialist in the White House since at least FDR.

Election data from 2020 confirm the dangers of Libertarian spoilers.

As the nearby chart illustrates, Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen’s votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin exceeded Biden’s margin of victory. In Pennsylvania, Jorgensen’s 79,380 votes trail Biden’s 80,555-ballot margin by just 1,175 — a deficit that just a bit more GOP campaigning could erase.

Assuming that the Libertarian nominee’s votes in these four states had gone to the Republican standard bearer in 2020, he would have eclipsed Biden and scored 289 Electoral College votes, and Donald J. Trump would be in the Oval Office right now.

If Trump had lost Pennsylvania but won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the electoral vote total would have been — brace yourself — 269 to 269! With the Electoral College deadlocked, the U.S. House would have decided the race.

Each state delegation would have had one vote based on its members’ party affiliation. The just-seated 117th Congress included two tied delegations, Georgia and Pennsylvania. If party loyalty prevailed among the other 48 states, Biden would have scored 22 Democrat-dominated state delegations. Trump would have scored 26 Republican-majority delegations and, with them, the White House.

In reality, such a retrospective intellectual exercise is mere adult entertainment for political junkies. And, alas, the time machine that could animate this scenario remains maddeningly uninvented.

Still, 2020’s theoretical lesson remains exceedingly relevant in November 2024: In skin-tight swing-state elections, a Libertarian Party spoiler could drain just enough votes from Trump to hand Biden four more years to Make America Tyrannical Again.

As Crooked Joe likes to say:

Don’t.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.

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