Is Trump the most libertarian president ever? Left and Right alike misunderstand his worldview

The libertarian explanation, by contrast, is becoming more plausible by the day. Trump has made no secret of his leanings in this regard. In May, he spoke at the Libertarian Party National Convention — the “first president in history” to do so, as he boasted. His address, in which he attempted to stake his libertarian credentials, was remarkably on-message: “I will be a true friend to libertarians in the White House, and I am proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars. I took on the military-industrial complex. I broke the stranglehold on neocons and warmongers on the Republican Party…. I withdrew from the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun UN arms treaty, and I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization”. He concluded by saying: “We want libertarian votes because you stand for what we stand for”.

The address was a somewhat strange spectacle, since Trump was booed by the crowd through much of it. Deep-dyed libertarians from the crowd shouted that he was a “tyrant” and “had crushed our rights”; one held up a sign calling him a “wannabe dictator”. But Trump’s position was that he had simply made libertarianism work tactically by tying it to the GOP. “What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party getting 3%?” he argued with the crowd, inviting it to join forces with him.

Trump’s October interview with Joe Rogan — featuring his largest audience of the entire election cycle — was distinctly libertarian, as well. He argued for eliminating the income tax and railed against government regulation. He declared an intent to remove all governmental impediments to business, to make government truly as small as possible.

In tandem with his tax-eliminating, government-downsizing rhetoric, Trump developed a partnership with a number of Wall Street and Silicon Valley barons, culminating in Musk throwing his massive financial weight behind the GOP ticket. The two things — the libertarian rhetoric and the new alliances in tech and finance — went hand-in-hand, resulting in policy moves that should have utterly confounded Trump’s populist fans during the campaign.

Take Trump’s stance on legislation to ban TikTok unless the social-media platform separates itself from its Chinese owners. It should have been a perfectly Trumpian policy, striking at two birds, Big Tech and “Chy-na,” with one stone. Yet Trump came out against the ban, having earlier backed it, without offering a coherent explanation. It was notable, though, that one of Trump’s big libertarian backers, the hedge-fund honcho Jeff Yass, controls a minority stake in TikTok estimated to be worth north of $30 billion as of spring 2024.

Another telling campaign moment came when Trump appeared on an X (formerly Twitter) space with Musk and congratulated the world’s richest man for swiftly firing workers who organise to defend their mutual interests. A better Harris campaign might have made more of that unguarded moment for the way it belied Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric. Even Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters and a rare trade-union leader willing to work with the GOP, was forced to accuse Trump and Musk of waging “economic terrorism”.

On immigration, too, Trump has allowed his libertarian instincts to run wild. This might appear surprising, since border restrictionism was and remains one of the signature elements of his agenda. But opposing chaos at the border isn’t incompatible with a libertarian stance. Many libertarians object to illegal migration, even as they support making it easier for labor to cross borders as a means to lowering its price.

During his campaign, for example, Trump said that the advent of artificial intelligence requires the United States to bring in “more people.” He also offered green cards to all graduating foreign university students, even those taking two-year associates degrees. These stances should have raised concerns among Trump’s populist supporters, but their enthusiasm swept all doubt.

Now, as his administration takes decisive shape, Trump is translating his libertarian instincts into personnel choices. The planned Department of Governmental Efficiency — headed by Musk and the venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy — is only the most visible. Musk has claimed that he could eliminate up to $2 trillion worth of expenditures from the federal government. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramasaway described themselves empowering a “lean team of small-government crusaders … to cut the federal government down to size.”

Likewise, on the use of H1B visas that allow tech firms to import cheap workers, Trump sided with the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy — over and against his populist base. Last month, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Other personnel choices bespeak similar intuitions: from snubbing his first-term tariff guru Robert Lighthizer for the top job at the Treasury in favor of Wall Street stalwart Scott Bessent; to tapping Howard Lutnick, another Wall Street man who has advocated for eliminating the income tax, to serve as commerce secretary. True, there are a handful of exceptions, such as his choice to lead the Department of Labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, a rare Republican who favors strengthening collective bargaining; and Gail Slater, an antitrust crusader nominated to the Federal Trade Commission.

These exceptions damn Trump in the eyes of “official” Washington libertarians, who view him as not nearly pure or orthodox enough. But Trump isn’t pure or orthodox on anything, and the salient question isn’t whether he qualifies as libertarian for the purists, but the overall makeup of his political inclinations. On that front, his plans for a massive reduction in government are a better fit for libertarianism than for populism, much less fascism.

This isn’t to play down the Trump threat from a progressive perspective. Libertarianism is a naïve ideology that risks cutting deeply into the core functions of a state. What’s insidious about libertarianism is that it looks good at first. Listening to Trump talk about over-taxation and overregulation with Rogan, I couldn’t help but nod along. The problem is the erosion of state capacity and mounting red ink.

In his first term, Trump increased the deficit by $8 trillion — a direct result of tax cuts that endeared him to Wall Street while slashing the US tax base without generating any other source of revenue to replace it. This time around, Trump and the Republicans are determined to maintain his earlier tax cuts while dramatically diminishing the state. That’s a recipe for a plutocratic order that rewards those at the top, while squeezing the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

There is simply no way to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, as Co-President Musk aims to do, without eating into entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. So-called entitlement reform is deeply unpopular among nearly all social segments, Republicans and Democrats — except for the Wall Street fee-skimmers who’d benefit from administering privatized benefits and, of course, libertarian think-tankers in Washington.

Trump’s penchant for pulling all attention toward himself is reminiscent of a Mussolini type and thus seems to foreshadow an authoritarian takeover. But real authoritarianism takes work that Trump is uninvested in — and a state he’s unwilling to fund. He has a businessman’s revulsion for taxes and regulations. The other aspects of his worldview, including ones that seem to contradict his aversion to the state, amount to tactical maneuvring in service of his deeper pro-business agenda. That puts him in the libertarian camp, whether the libertarians themselves like it or not.