Trump the libertarian? Yes. And how.

Since 2016 I’ve had people ask me why I, as a libertarian, support Donald Trump. I think we’re seeing why now.

It’s true that Trump’s instincts, particularly in his first term, weren’t especially libertarian. Oh, the claims that he was an authoritarian, possibly a Fascist, maybe even a Nazi, were obvious bullshit from the beginning. But he showed no particular enthusiasm for limited government.

Still, by that point I saw the government apparat as deeply corrupt and dysfunctional, and dangerously close to making its position so entrenched as to be unassailable through ordinary politics. Anyone promising to shake it up looked good to me, and in 2016 Trump had the added advantage of not being Hillary Clinton. I knew what her instincts were.

Had the Democrats simply accepted Trump as a normal president, and not pulled out all the stops against him, the shaking up would have been comparatively modest, though still worth it. Reagan never really shrank the government – even the Department of Education, which he promised to eliminate, actually grew – but he did slow things down and redirect them, and that was enough to boom the economy, and reboot American culture, for over a decade.