The Worst Parts of Trump's First 100 Days Involved Ignoring Libertarian Principles
Trade and immigration are areas where Trump operates most like a criminal autocrat.
Before the 2024 election, I wrote about the perplexing phenomenon of libertarians who enthusiastically supported Donald Trump for president, given his anti-libertarian and authoritarian temperament, his being "fanatically against free trade," and pushing a "short-term promise to assault and kidnap and ship out millions of residents who have harmed no one's life or property, and in doing so destroy huge chunks of America's productive economy, disrupting the lives of the other millions of legal citizens who hire them, work for them, depend on their services, or rent and sell to them."
How Trump's administration has misgoverned in its first 100 days, with his most destructive abuses arising from his rejection of core libertarian principles about trade policy and immigration, the movement of goods and people across arbitrary government barriers, demonstrates why trying to supposedly balance those ferociously anti-libertarian tendencies with his acceptably libertarian ones (a stated commitment to shrinking size and cost of government, through Elon Musk's efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, have delivered less than promised, are rife with reporting errors, and seem to be aimed not at making government any more sensible or useful so much as scoring institutional points against the administration's perceived leftist enemies) leads to accepting near complete collapse of any meaningful distinctions between the U.S. government and the worst economically interventionist and authoritarian tyrannies.
Trump's rejection of libertarian verities, particularly as set forth in the works of the great classical liberal economist and libertarian movement founding father Ludwig von Mises, has caused severe and likely lasting damage to the U.S. economy and is causing cruelly destructive harm to many humans who have caused no harms that a libertarian should recognize as harms.
Trump the Tariff Man
As Ludwig von Mises put it in his exposition of his political philosophy, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, "The theoretical demonstration of the consequences of the protective tariff and of free trade is the keystone of classical economics. It is so clear, so obvious, so indisputable, that its opponents were unable to advance any arguments against it that could not be immediately refuted as completely mistaken and absurd….The outcome of protectionism is…always a reduction in the productivity of human labor" and thus a reduction in human prosperity.
It's very on-brand for Trump to seem utterly ignorant of this and pursue higher and wider tariffs, for a whipsawing variety of reasons, most of which seem reducible to an ignorant chip on his shoulder, leading him to believe everyone else is ripping him/America off in some ill-defined way by selling and buying goods from us (yes, sometimes through tariff barriers, which are bad for them and us, just as ours are bad for us and them).
Trump's wide-ranging tariff moves, though how they will end up specifically applied moving forward is still uncertain (which is a big part of the problem), are, predictably, crippling small businesses, tanking stock markets, influencing looming supply chain disruptions and goods shortages as imports might fall by as much as 20 percent, and causing even big-business donors to the GOP to note with alarm that Trump's moves may have made America, not closer to Great Again, but "20 percent poorer" with its effect on costs to American consumers and businesses. And no, there's no countervailing bright side in sight (unless Trump just backs down on the whole thing and declares victory after getting some tariffs of other countries lowered somewhere).
Bad policies have bad aftereffects; his moves predictably generated announcements of planned tit-for-tat moves from trading partners, harming at the same time their own consumers and the U.S. businesses who want to sell to them and generally reducing worldwide prosperity. Food, implements we use to cook food, clothing, electronics, cars, and car parts are all apt to get much more expensive for Americans unless Trump gets us decisively off his maddeningly erratic tariff wheel of misfortune. As Eric Boehm reported this month at Reason, manufacturers surveyed by the New York Federal Reserve "expect to see fewer orders, longer delivery times, declining inventories, and lower levels of employment. About the only lines in the survey that are pointed upward are the expectations about prices."
Some companies will just avoid selling in the U.S. market entirely. And, predictably, creating a system such as variable tariffs with huge advantages to some and disadvantages to others, all operating at the whim of one mad monarch, likely illegally in violation of Congress' responsibility over tariffs, is building a lot of new swampland in D.C. as businesses and industries vie for influence to save themselves from, or harm competitors with, Trump's trade damage.
Nor is there any reason to believe in the short or even long term that the panicked throwing of tariffs against the wall to see if they will stick will achieve an alleged goal of making well-paying manufacturing jobs a near-dominant part of the American economy again (as steel workers here are already being laid off for lack of sufficient demand and actual existing domestic manufacturers are hobbled near to death by Trump's feckless tariffing). Regardless, the administration crows about making life harder and more expensive for all Americans for some phantom future benefit.
Trump's understanding of what he's even doing is deficient, including thinking his tariffs will be taxing and thus raising the price of the illegal fentanyl he fantasizes is flooding the United States from the north,
As Mises often emphasized, one dumb intervention leads to another, including plans for more federal aid to farmers whose ability to sell overseas will be harmed by predictable tariff retaliations, and more menacing aftereffects as Trump thuggishly tried to strong-arm American automakers into not raising prices in his new tariff regime (even as he makes their parts more expensive).
A core libertarian insight is that the values, abilities, and desires of others—their supply and their demand, in economics lingo—are most fully and coherently expressed in a world where the violent barriers (and yes, a tariff is a tax which is a violent barrier) to other people making the choices they see best fit are minimized or eliminated. This principle has baked into it awareness of the bad outcomes Trump is seeing from his tariff-y flailing: intelligent plans impossible to make, costs rising, and opportunities for humans to better circumstances for others even as they better their own made more difficult or destroyed.
Trump's Anti-Immigration Mania
Trump's legally indefensible summoning of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act has generated headline after headline of people denied their chance for fair legal hearings, the administration defying court orders to stop and insisting they'll continue to do so, all allegedly justified by vague assertions of "national security."
Frequently there's no documented proof and denials from family that the people being shipped to a cruelly oppressive Salvadoran prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, from which no one is reported to ever have been released, are the criminal Venezuelan gang members the administration assures us they are. (One witness on one of the flights to El Salvador reports men being coerced to sign declarations they were Tren de Aragua.) People are being kidnapped and imprisoned, with having tattoos often the beginning of their detention and interrogation in torturous circumstances in El Salvador. This includes Frengel Reyes Mota (who was shipped off just before a hearing in which he might have been able to prove his right not to be locked away forever) and Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who the feds admitted was shipped off by mistake but refuse to do anything even in the face of multiple court orders to get him out of Salvadoran lockup). Trump insists he wants to start doing the same to citizens as well—because if he can get away with the clever notion that once they are in Salvadoran custody U.S. courts and rights are out of play, why not try to solve all his perceived crime problems that way?
Even many residents outside a paranoid fantasy penumbra of Venezuelan gangs/"invading armies" are being illegitimately messed with in the name of immigration control. We see teen German tourists arrested under unpleasant conditions and deported; American citizens stopped and cuffed; working green card holders with an American daughter waylaid at an airport and denied his medicine, leading to hospitalization; multiple wives or fiancées of American citizens with no criminal records being deported; a Georgia barber who came here as a toddler from Liberia detained for many months with no hearings over a burglary conviction the state had already pardoned him for; prosecutions for child sex abuse dropped against a company that will be helping the administration corral immigrant children; 2-year-old citizen children deported without procedure; an anti-Putin Russian biomedical researcher working in Boston who was denied reentry for having frog embryos for research on her person and has been detained for months; an H-1B visa-holding working medical educator and kidney specialist at Brown University summarily shipped off to Europe; a Canadian trying to enter with an already approved work visa instead being locked up in cruel conditions for over a month.
Yes, anti-Trump animus, as well as how much stress his own administration is putting on these punishing "accomplishments" against immigrants, is doubtless making immigration enforcement nightmare stories more widely reported than they were under previous administrations. This whataboutism doesn't change the fact that Trump's strongly anti-immigrant administration is doing all this awful stuff, and mostly asserting it need answer to neither courts nor the American people with specific information about what they are doing and why. Thus his administration is the one it's salient to excoriate now regardless of how much excoriation was or wasn't heaped on previous such crimes from earlier administrations.
Trump's anti-immigrant mania bleeds over into abuses of free speech in America, as we see immigrants such as Mahmoud Khalil being tossed into custody during a warrantless arrest essentially for disagreeing with U.S.-supported Israeli attacks on Gaza; "counterterrorism czar" Sebastian Gorka suggesting merely disagreeing with our current Gestapo-like shipping of unconvicted people to foreign torture chambers is itself a punishable crime for citizens; emails sent to noncitizen students, often based on reviewing their social media, advising them to leave after revoking their visas for opinions Trump doesn't like; and people being denied entry for having items on their phone indicating disagreement with the administration. This hostility to visitors has, predictably, led to an over 10 percent drop in tourist visits, and the loss of the income to American businesses that would have accompanied those visits.
Whether or not the victims of this tyranny are citizens, our government just should not have the power to punish or harm anyone merely based on their political beliefs. Trump's immigration mania has also led to intimidation of judges (via arrest) who are accused—lamely—of impeding deportation attempts, although she guided and released the immigrant in question into a public hallway with federal agents present.
As, per Mises, one illegitimate intervention creates the incentives for the next one, the attorney general believes per a March 14 memo that in pursuit of suspected Tren de Aragua members, residences and workplaces in which an agent has "reason to believe" such a person is present can be invaded without a warrant, despite the Fourth Amendment.
If Trump believes—and he does believe, as does his attorney general—that his gestapo has the legal right to kidnap someone and ship them out of the country and out of reach of courts with no hearing, no appeal, and no judicial review to investigate whether they are indeed in the class he says he's limiting this power to, that means he claims he has the power to do that to anyone. That's the purest and most sinister tyranny imaginable—linked directly to his 180-degree turn from core libertarian principles.
As with trade, what's at stake is not merely an academic philosophical concern, the "violation of libertarian principles." What it means to violate libertarian principle is to commit outrages like above—to claim the right to take human beings' bodies and send them somewhere they don't choose to be, whether a Salvadoran gulag or just a country where they are threatened or have no human connections. So it is not surprising that the actions Trump has taken that have caused the most damage to prosperity and people's ability to make a living peacefully satisfying other humans' needs, or caused the most physical misery to people not proven to have committed any actual crime against person or property justifying it, are the ones most directly opposed to libertarian principle.
