These Days Before the Vote: "Freedom from Interference"
Whitewater, Wis. — This sunny and warm Saturday afternoon in Wisconsin continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing, each day before the November election, a principle or position on which our liberal democratic tradition rests.
So a libertarian looks at the world and expects that he or she will be free from coercion by state or community. It's a conception of negative liberty, a presumptive liberty that holds what others may not do: a sphere in which a person is free to form beliefs, speak, worship, associate, and make decisions about his or her own life. What can I do freely and peacefully without someone stopping me?
A free society maximizes this sphere of liberty so much as possible for the individual — for all individuals equally without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or orientation. Authoritarian populism — as expressed this decade in America as MAGA — seeks to reduce this sphere for the movement's supposed enemies through imposition of state power.
MAGA is an American authoritarian populist movement that expands on historical targets, defined mostly by race, to identify additional enemies by creed, ideology, gender, or orientation. Add all these targeted groups up, and it becomes clear that MAGA is a minority movement seeking to establish a herrenvolk state. (Authoritarian populism would be a rejection of a free sphere of choice for peaceful individuals regardless of the number of its adherents — it's simply true that its claims to speak for 'the people' are both wrong and exaggerated.)
While Donald J. Trump's physical decline and senescence grow more evident each day, he was a threat to liberty even when healthier. There is a reason some number of libertarians became — and remained — Never Trump men and women: they believed truly and faithfully in libertarian principles.
Trump was as wrong in 2016 as he has been in 2026. He's simply more reprehensible as he declines, and in that decline more dangerous to peaceful people's exercise of liberty.
Trump has expanded the reach of the state by removing restrictions on immigration arrests at schools, churches, and hospitals. See Rebecca Santana, Trump Administration Throws Out Policies Limiting Migrant Arrests at Sensitive Spots Like Churches, Associated Press, January 21, 2025.
He has imposed sweeping import tariffs, waging a trade war with all the world, using taxes to interfere with Americans’ choices about what to buy, sell, and import and with business trading relationships. See Paul Wiseman, Trump disrupts global economic order even though the US is dominant, Associated Press, April 9, 2025. This needless, wasteful, and ignorant policy costs our own people (and people elsewhere) billions in stalled commerce and ruined business relationships.
He has federalized and unleashed the National Guard against our own people, deploying troops in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago during immigration protests, and bringing military force into disputes about civilian policing and public assembly. See Gene Johnson, Trump wants to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago and Portland. Can he do that?, Associated Press, October 7, 2025.
Trump has issued an order ending collective bargaining for employees at many federal agencies, restricting individual workers’ ability to act together over the basic working conditions of their employment. If a worker, any worker, cannot form an association to bargain against government, then his or her rights have been greatly curtailed. Anyone, anywhere, at any time should be free to form an association to argue against government policy. See Darlene Superville, Trump signs executive order to end collective bargaining at agencies involved with national security, Associated Press, March 28, 2025 ("[a]ffected agencies include the Departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Justice and Commerce and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security."). 'National security' becomes a pretext to restrict the sphere of discussion and bargaining.
He has restricted transgender and nonbinary people’s choice of passport gender identifier, thereby placing the government’s classification ahead of the individual’s natural choice of identification. The courts have wrongly affirmed these actions. See Lindsay Whitehurst, Supreme Court lets Trump block transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers, Associated Press, November 6, 2025.
These Trump administration transgressions against individuals' legitimate spheres of action and thought are only a few of many more. They and many more justify seeing Trump as an adversary of negative liberty.
He was this way, by the way, long before his current term. Those of us who have remained libertarian through these difficult years have always seen Trump for what he was.
