When Should a Libertarian Have Walked Out of Trump's Congressional Address?
On Tuesday, March 4th, Donald J. Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress for roughly one hour and forty minutes.1
Of those one-hundred minutes, when should a libertarian, had there been one in the chamber,2 have walked out? When one reviews a transcript of the address, one is reminded of what one heard: Trump offered plentiful reasons to leave to leave.3
I declared a national emergency on our southern border. And I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country.
This alone would be enough to depart the room. There is no foreign invasion we now face justifying the new deployment of the American military within our borders.
And I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.
Only hours earlier, Trump threatened to deport or imprison students for ‘illegal protests’:
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Trump's recent appointee, U.S. Attorney Ed Martin (District of Columbia), has unleashed a campaign against lawful speech. Martin's Operation Whirlwind is an attempt to recast political speech as criminal threats. Martin's own past conduct reveals his hypocrisy:
Legal analysts said Martin’s actions would be more credible but for his own actions in the three weeks since taking office and Trump’s long pattern of sowing falsehood-laden attacks and encouraging violence against political critics. Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies, according to NPR, including against former president Joe Biden, senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and nongovernmental organizations, and has accused the media of being an “enemy of the American people.”
And two days ago, I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America. I renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The man who decries supposed censorship of the state declares the power of the state to pick among languages arising in private discourse or to rename places against longstanding usage. No one at Apple or Google would have renamed the Gulf of Mexico had it not been for Trump's return to power.
We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government.
It's not an end to some diversity policies, or even most diversity policies, that Trump wants. It's an end to federal recognition of the diverse civil society from which legitimate federal power derives. That civil society exists and evolves. Trump demands that the federal government acknowledge only part of that society, leaving vast millions as castaways or enemies.
Trump claims his objective is a society that does not see race. On the contrary, Trump's objective is a state that sees only one race.
I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.
One man meant only to govern under law, instead assuming the power of a monarch outside the law, declares that he has created a department outside the law, and has appointed outside the law another man to subjugate those acting within the law.
Trumpists who incongruously claim that Musk is an America version of a 'prime minister' should look further back: he's more Ricimer than Rockingham.
If you don’t make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff and in some cases, a rather large one.
Make America Protectionist Again. Trump is the enemy of free markets in labor and capital. Hundreds of years of sound economics set aside as Trump adopts, mercurially and spasmodically, unsound deviations that time and again have brought economic calamity.
Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer — I love the farmer — who will now be selling into our home market, the U.S.A., because nobody is going to be able to compete with you. Because those goods that come in from other countries and companies are really, really in a bad position in so many different ways.
Trump's only embrace of inclusion is to extend a regressive economic policy to all: industry and agriculture will experience equal pain. Farmers here in the Midwest know what this will mean:
During the last major trade war, U.S. agricultural export losses exceeded an estimated $27 billion from mid-2018 to the end of 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Iowa, Illinois and Kansas were hit the hardest, with over $1 billion in annualized losses in Iowa and Illinois, and $955 million in losses in Kansas.
Entire towns like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, buckled under the weight of the migrant occupation and corruption like nobody’s ever seen before. Beautiful towns destroyed.
Neither Aurora nor Springfield are as Trump described them. Here in Whitewater, Wisconsin we've been subjected to the same false claims, although we were not targeted again on Tuesday night.
We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it — one way or the other, we’re going to get it.
There is no libertarian defense of 'one way or the other, we're going to get it.' It is repugnant to the cooperative and consensual foundation of free exchange between free people.
Simultaneously [with messages from Ukraine] we’ve had serious discussions with Russia. Then I’ve received strong signals that they are ready for peace. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?
While libertarians are optimists, this libertarian is, sensibly, a tragic optimist, seeing the world with clear, dry eyes. There are no cataracts large enough to cause someone to view Putin as a man who wants peace. A brief interlude until the next conquest, surely. That's not peace; it's rearmament before the next invasion.
All of Trump's remarks, the ten listed and more, make the question When Should a Libertarian Have Walked Out of Trump's Congressional Address? a rhetorical one.
No libertarian — committed to individual rights, liberty from interference, free markets in labor & capital, limited government, property rights, a spontaneous & dynamic social order, in advancement of social justice, each presumptively held and supported — should have attended the address.
- Not a Castro-length address, but then Trump's a morbidly obese man with a questionable grasp of nutrition.
- If someone were to contend that Rep. Thomas Massie or Sen. Rand Paul are libertarians who stayed for the full address, then they'd be half right: they did stay for the full address. As for being libertarian, that requires holding principled positions that are, by their nature, adversarial to Trumpism.
- Reasons apart from his loathsome bouts of self-praise.