Before the 2024 election, I wrote about the perplexing phenomenon of libertarians who enthusiastically supported Donald Trump for president, given his anti-libertarian and authoritarian temperament, his being "fanatically against free trade," and pushing a "short-term promise to assault and kidnap and ship out millions of residents who have harmed no one's life or property, and in doing so destroy huge chunks of America's productive economy, disrupting the lives of the other millions of legal citizens who hire them, work for them, depend on their services, or rent and sell to them."
How Trump's administration has misgoverned in its first 100 days, with his most destructive abuses arising from his rejection of core libertarian principles about trade policy and immigration, the movement of goods and people across arbitrary government barriers, demonstrates why trying to supposedly balance those ferociously anti-libertarian tendencies with his acceptably libertarian ones (a stated commitment to shrinking size and cost of government, through Elon Musk's efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, have delivered less than promised, are rife with reporting errors, and seem to be aimed not at making government any more sensible or useful so much as scoring institutional points against the administration's perceived leftist enemies) leads to accepting near complete collapse of any meaningful distinctions between the U.S. government and the worst economically interventionist and authoritarian tyrannies.
Trump's rejection of libertarian verities, particularly as set forth in the works of the great classical liberal economist and libertarian movement founding father Ludwig von Mises, has caused severe and likely lasting damage to the U.S. economy and is causing cruelly destructive harm to many humans who have caused no harms that a libertarian should recognize as harms.
