Atlas, Thugged

Trump Versus The Libertarians.

Someone is getting fired over this one.

Last night, Donald Trump had one of the most hilariously terrible speeches in front or one of the most hostile audiences I’ve ever seen.

Before we start, a mild confession: my political DNA has a sort of genial offshoot of leave-me-the-hell-alone libertarianism in it, and a similar caution about the power of that state, but I’d sooner eat the first thing I found in a week-old dumpster behind Ol’ Uncle Ptomaine’s Shrimp Shack than be a Big-L Libertarian. It’s a much longer article, but the recursive descent into a Hobbesian nightmare is what

(While we’re at it, the State is a fact of life. Ron Paul was a lunatic, Ayn Rand is a terrible, turgid writer, and crypto is a Ponzi scheme, not the magical solution to free economic activity from the dead hand of the state.)

Now, on with the very, very bad show.

First, the event’s optics were godawful.

The “Become Ungovernable” sign behind Trump was both a graphic design artifact from 1992 but truly, madly, deeply off-brand.

Clown Train To Burning Tire Mountain

The room was low and dark, and Trump was more badly lit than usual. For the duration of his speech, sign-wavers kept blocking the C-SPAN camera shot, and not by some small degree.

If you haven’t seen the nightmarish trainwreck, the entire video watch it here:

I mean, someone had to know this, even if the grownups on Trump’s staff wanted to go home to their fourth families or their local Asian massage parlor mamasan (“Annyeong, Mr. Jason!) for a weekend of rest and relaxation from Trump’s eternal tantrum.

Trump’s instincts are failing. His performance was off. His staff didn’t read the room or the event ahead of time. It was terrible.

The night was a striking failure for Trump. Mike Lee, that oleaginous suet sack in a bad suit, tried to warm up the crowd for Trump and was roundly jeered. Vivek Ramaswamy tried to pitch a “Libertarian-Nationalist” movement, which, as a friend texted, is like a “Nazi-Jewish” movement.

The usual calls of “We Want Trump” were drowned out by “End the Fed!” within seconds. Trump did a mini-pander by offering to commute the sentence of notorious Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht and offering them a Cabinet seat. (“As what?” you may well ask, but I’m as stumped on that as the next guy.)

Chase Oliver, a Libertarian primary candidate, noted, “If he thinks he is going to win our nomination, he’s more delusional than I thought.”

Has Trump descended so far into senescence that his ego drove him to attend an event chock-full of people who hate everything he stands for in this life? Is the staff of his legal defense fund-cum-campaign that checked out? Who thought putting the most obvious authoritarian statist in American history in front of a room of Ayn Rand fanboys was a great idea?

Trump’s MAGA party loves the power of the state. The MAGA movement is all about making the American people bow to the will of a cadre of religious and nationalist zealots who deeply desire the monitoring, control, and punishment of anyone with a lifestyle at even the slightest variance from their imagined norm.

Project 2025, their roadmap to the future, is a roadmap to a hellscape for libertarians, with massive expansions of the power of government. MAGA doesn’t want a smaller, smarter, or less intrusive government at all. Their vision relies creating a constant, intrusive Panopticon of monitoring and control, just like the Chinese, but with flag, eagle, and Punisher skull branding.

Even libertarians believe the rule of law is a fundamental underpinning of liberty. If libertarians believe that the government's role should be bounded and strictly limited to protecting individuals' rights to life, liberty, and property by the most minimal state possible, MAGA, as the Gen Z kids say, ain’t it, boss. QED, every word from them about Donald Trump’s legal challenges. “We love the rule of law, but the divine right of Trump is our guiding principle” isn’t exactly libertarianism at its finest.

MAGA and Trump, if they can be said to have one unifying policy belief, is that it’s time to round up the immigrants to America and ship them home. Their number varies depending on the phase of the moon and where they are on their oxycontin dose that day, but in a second Trump term, between 7 and 25 million immigrants are going to be rounded up, placed in detention camps, and shipped back to their home countries.

To do this, Stephen Miller's vision of America must vastly expand police forces at the state and federal levels and surveillance powers so wildly that the Patriot Act will look like a post office renaming.

A party that wants to monitor women’s periods, create a national registry of pregnant women, and merrily seeks to ban travel, birth control, and medical privacy over abortion isn’t exactly a poster child for libertarian beliefs, either.

Trump’s economic ideas are a moronic gumbo anathema to libertarians. He most certainly believes in picking economic winners and losers, offering selective and preferential tax treatment to his donor class. Sure, libertarians love low taxes, but not low taxes where the President picks and chooses who gets the tax cuts as a political payoff.

Trump also embraces a portfolio of discredited economic nostrums around trade and tariffs, none of which are even vaguely libertarian. Far from ending the Fed, Trump has lately stated he wants to put the Fed Chairman under the President's direct control.

By the end of the speech, Trump was trying to sell them on “being winners” and asking for their nomination (unlikely in the extreme) or their votes in November. By that point, the jeering was deafening. Trump was mocked, booed, laughed at, and, worst of all, dismissed.

It was an embarrassing night all around. The Libertarian Party, a fractious bunch of bearded incels on their best days, will no doubt descend into wordy recriminations and nominate RFK Jr.