I was never a Trump enthusiast. But then, as a consistent libertarian, I don’t like any politicians. So, with my usual mix of dread and apathy, I was willing to wait and see how his first term turned out. That first term was made more bearable by the fact that he was on the defensive most of the time—fending off deceptive media, lawless intelligence agencies, non-peaceful protestors, and countless humorless scolds. His second term, during which he’s acted with greater confidence, has clearly been worse.
Perhaps he just had time to stew in his own authoritarian juices during the four-year Biden interregnum, but second-term Trump is more dangerous. Since most people either love Trump or hate him, they’re probably disinclined to dwell on this nuanced distinction. They may not even believe it exists. The hardcore Trumpers will insist he was great before and remains mostly-great now. The anti-Trumpers will insist that the excesses of the second term have merely made the scales fall from the eyes of some Trumpers or Trump-neutral commentators. (“You see what naive fools you have all been and how right my prophecies of doom for the Republic were!” etc.)
I’m sure many anti-Trumpers will flat-out refuse to believe that some current Trump critics were also on record long ago criticizing the man, since some of the current critics didn’t condemn him at the same moments and in quite the same terms the more strident anti-Trumpers do.
I worked for a TV news unit that condemned Trump two decades ago for ignoring property rights and relishing coercive government powers such as eminent domain for use in clearing homeowners out of the way of his casinos. I never imagined he was a principled free-marketeer. Years before that, I wrote columns criticizing the amorphous, unreliable nature of populism in general. I never voted for Trump. Early in the 2016 primary process, about four successive acquaintances had to tell me they were rooting for Trump before I believed any of them were serious. The guy with the red hats and the evasive sentences? Really?
So, as someone who’s demonstrably neither a Trump supporter nor a liberal/Democrat, I think I’m being fairly objective here when I suggest (for starters) 15 ways the man is worse this time around than he was in his first term. People should notice the shift (and learn some libertarian lessons from it).
On numerous issues, Trump 2 was more devoted to imposing the right’s will on society than simply on protecting the public from the left’s will. There’s a real difference between, say, trying to abolish the Dept. of Education (good!) and dictating that every syllabus should make America look great (intrusive!).
The emphasis on domestic enforcement of immigration laws, leading inevitably to masked secret police raiding homes and businesses for people trying to make a living, almost makes one long for the days when Trump’s anti-immigration energies were focused on building his big, futile wall at the Southern border. The sadistic Stephen Miller becoming White House Chief of Staff will be the sequel to his days as homeland security advisor, and it remains to be seen which role will do more damage to the general populace. He’s but one of the would-be tough guys elevated by Trump’s primitive, pugnacious idea of what counts as an effective official.
Trump 2 likes wars more than Trump 1 did. One of the more complicated ironies of the past two years, one the mainstream media are ill-equipped to parse, is that every time the left or the media implied Trump was a Nazi, he probably vowed all the more to prove himself philosemitic through clumsy moves like attacking Iran. Every time antiwar activists (including some conservatives and libertarians) warned of wars’ economic costs, ruthless would-be pragmatist Trump likely vowed to seize more oil the next time we fight one, as in Venezuela, which may prove no less socialist (or drug-using) than it was before but will give Trump allies a bigger “cut.”
The partial nationalization of various businesses, while rightly likened to (the oft-forgotten economic components of) fascism, should be remembered as having begun in earnest with the startling announcement during the Biden/Trump transition (an announcement that almost certainly would’ve happened regardless of who won the 2024 election) of an official tech oligarchy, subsidized with billions, named after a longstanding intelligence project called Stargate, headed by moguls far too rich to need any help, and shakily justified by the “need” to compete with China on A.I., though communism was something better outstripped by private, decentralized, market-based efforts last time I checked. For this high-tech centralization, America elected a populist president and a rural v.p.?
And speaking of that rural v.p., whether you view Vance as better or worse on balance than Mike Pence, there’s no denying he’s been far more explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-libertarian (condemning economist Milton Friedman by name, etc.). One can reject Vance and his faction of paleo dumb-dumbs even while denouncing Rubio and his neocon pals. Try it! There really are other, better ways.
Koch-style libertarians (anti-war, anti-regulation, in favor of drug legalization, etc.) weren’t in much of a position to advise better ways this time around, though, since Trump very explicitly posted back around the time of the election that he’d learned his lesson and wouldn’t have anyone from the Koch network in his second administration. It shows! If there was one lesson to be learned from the 2016-2020 period, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “Get rid of the libertarians.” It’s not as if government had gotten too small, hands-off, and inoffensive.
Similarly, though I’m more concerned about liberty itself than about nominal libertarians, it was surely a bad sign that Trump reneged on his very public vow to the Libertarian Party to put libertarians in his Cabinet. RFK doesn’t count, despite his own brief, equally tactical, flirtation with the LP. Trump 2 showed far more resolve over the past two years when bashing libertarian-leaning Members of Congress—whatever their flaws—who tried to hold his feet to the fire on various spending and military issues, like Thomas Massie. Trump always puts loyalty (to him) and party unity above common sense.
Tariffs are taxes. They take money out of private hands and put it in government hands, just as surely as communist revolutions and regulatory seizures do. What was a troubling economic footnote to Trump’s strange, crank thinking in his first term came back to haunt us with a vengeance come last year’s grotesquely-named “Liberation Day” of tariff hikes—with April 2, 2025, a day that should live in economic infamy, capping 100 days of rapid, fevered executive orders almost none of which shrank government despite their symbolic shock value. May his tariffs, not to mention ongoing massive debt and deficit-spending, inspire disillusioned free-market conservatives to become full-fledged libertarians, the way Nixon’s ignorant abandonment of the gold standard inspired the creation of the Libertarian Party in protest.
During that same 100 days last year, the Musk-advised Department Of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) was the one part of government battling to shrink the rest of the bureaucracy (haphazardly or not), and it was largely ignored by Trump and Congress afterwards, not to mention openly despised by much of the population.
Trump may always have been nuts, but the second term saw a dizzying upsurge in him publicly toying with even more authoritarian ideas including, lest we forget, his lust to annex Greenland to the north (not to mention Panama and other southward places), possibly warring on Denmark(!) in the process. Perhaps he relished the thought of a two-front war with them and Canada. Remember the days when the right resented and worked to tamp down the world’s fears that we’re unstable conquerors? Seizing Greenland and fighting Denmark wouldn’t help, to put it mildly.
Through it all, his tweets/truths got more insane than they used to be, if that’s possible, and you needn’t be a censorious leftist to think it just isn’t funny anymore.
Trump gets talked about as if he’s libertine enough to resemble a libertarian, but libertarians don’t murder boats full of people just for selling, transporting, or using drugs. The key is for citizens to be freer, not just for the jerk in charge or his family to be freer.
Undoing years of nuance, many Trump followers increasingly showed over the past two years that they are in fact racist, not just chafing for more race-neutral laws or uninhibited online discourse.
Trump’s about-face on exposing the sexual/financial/political corruption of figures including Jeffrey Epstein is indicative of problems in our system so deep that neither his fellow Republicans nor, despite some opportunistic noisemaking, the Democrats will ever address them. (And the more politicians talk about UFOs, the more even the most mystical Americans think it’s all a hoax to cover up government drones, kidnappings, and energy weapons projects, perhaps especially when UFOs are seen over presidential golf courses, as in Trump’s day, and presidential ranches, as in George W. Bush’s day.)
While some presidents mellow in their second terms, Trump grew more indulgent with the provocateurs among his allies, including the handful of bitter-enders among the right-leaning podcasters and New Right cretins. Never again. Let them flex all they like, it is high time to shun them, even while plotting other avenues of resistance to the new Democratic Congress.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey