It's almost nine months into Donald Trump's presidency and I've got a question specifically for the old "Libertarians for Trump" crowd: How much more winning can you take?
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There was a small but vocal band of limited-government folks who vocally supported the billionaire real estate mogul on the grounds that he couldn't possibly be as bad as Hillary Clinton or even most of the other Republican candidates, especially when it came to foreign policy.
Leading the pack was economist Walter Block, who beat me in a competitive debate in New York City right before the election. Block’s argument was that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and “the Donald is the most congruent with the libertarian perspective” especially on foreign policy.
Trump has turned out to be anything but an isolationist. He promised to bring fire and fury to North Korea, “the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
He bombed Syria on the same humanitarian grounds he explicitly denounced during his campaign. He escalated war efforts in Yeman and Iraq, And more recently, announced plans to "win" in Afghanistan.His secretary of state declared that while the United States might not walk away with a "battlefield" victory in the graveyard of empires, neither will the Taliban. That’s not inspirational, it’s stupid.
Apart from his foreign policy follies, this anti-free-trader and nativist has turned out to be even less libertarian than advertised during the campaign. He’s continued giving mealy-mouthed support to white supremacists and pardoned Joe Arpaio, "America's toughest sheriff," who was found in contempt of court after he continued to illegally racially profile and detain Latino suspects. And his attorney general is walking back a decade of incremental progress on criminal justice reform.
There's no question that the Trump administration is doing some good things, such as deregulatory moves related to the FCC, the FDA, and the EPA. His Education department is supporting school choice to the extent that the federal government can do so.
His deregulatory push is all to the good, but it’s overwhelmed by Trump’s other policies.
But there's also no question that at this point Trump is doing virtually everything else he can do to alienate libertarians who believe in shrinking the size, scope, and spending of government.
And the excuse that Hillary Clinton would have been worse is getting older than Bernie Sanders.
The perfect is the enemy of the good but what the president has shown us so far just isn’t good enough.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Written by Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Jim Epstein. Production assistance by Andrew Heaton.
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