THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS IS EVIL.

Reason's Brian Doherty compares Our President with a criminal autocrat.  "The Worst Parts of Trump's First 100 Days Involved Ignoring Libertarian Principles."  That's probably true, and he's had his reservations about Mr Trump for some time.

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.

It's not so surprising when one contemplates a bad interventionist and authoritarian tyranny in the form of the Jarrett regency.

"He's had the worst 100 days any president's ever had," Biden said of his Oval Office successor.

Biden maintained he would have beaten Trump in the election, but said he accepted some blame for Trump's victory because of voter concerns about border security and the cost of living during his tenure.

"I do, because, look, I was in charge and he won. So, you know, I take responsibility," the former president said.

Every so often a senile person has a lucid moment. "Biden also noted 'liberal democracies lost' across the world, and believes they underestimated the negative impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on people's attitudes."  You think?  Maybe government is the problem.

Mr Doherty is correct that Trumpian populism is often economically illiterate and counter to libertarian principles.

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.

That's true.  But the ham-handed roll out of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency might have been the best of all possible real-world outcomes.  "[W]e're unlikely to see the Democrats swearing off their economic illiteracy and embracing Rand Paul and Thomas Massie to head their ticket or write their platform."  I added emphasis to that quote.  The support Our President continues to enjoy is transactional, but then ripping off the band-aid might be transactional.

Yes, you can use the language of the faculty lounge to lament borders as "arbitrary barriers:" and yet, "[A]ny social organization is going to have insiders and outsiders."  Those barriers are purposeful human action, perhaps set in concrete.