On May 25, Donald Trump will give his first party convention speech of 2024. It will be at the Libertarian National Convention, not the Republican National Convention.
In a statement released by the Libertarian Party, Trump urged Libertarians to join ally with him: “We all have to remember that our goal is to defeat the Worst President in the History of the United States, BY FAR, Crooked Joe Biden. If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close.”
Trump will speak at the party’s convention at the Washington Hilton one day before the Libertarian Party delegates choose their presidential nominee. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, will also speak to the convention and has offered to debate Trump there.)
Trump will not be the Libertarian nominee; according to the party chair, the bylaws wouldn’t allow it. “And while Kennedy said last month, “We won’t be running Libertarian,” presumably, he is not being picky about his invitations these days.
But the party could well nominate Michael Rectenwald, a former self-described “communist” and New York University humanities professor who swerved right, quitting the school being disciplined for what he considers a string of “anti-P.C.” provocations, among them his speaking invitation to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The 65-year-old is the most Trump-friendly of the announced Libertarian Party candidates and, as its nominee, he could be Trump’s wingman, taking aim at President Joe Biden and defending the GOP’s far-right flank.
Trump has an incentive to infiltrate the Libertarian Party and depress its vote total. Biden’s 2020 margin in three swing states—Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—was smaller than the vote for then-Libertarian presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen.
But what incentive do Libertarians have to help Trump? Why would the Libertarian Party, long a thorn in the GOP side—for example, forcing runoff elections in Georgia and helping Democrat Jon Tester eke out Senate wins in Montana—give one of the least libertarian Republican nominees in American history their coveted platform?
Trump has already mutated the ideological DNA of the GOP, turning the Reaganite party of strong defense and limited government into a party of Putinphiles and protectionists. Is he now warping the philosophy of a second political party, one premised on individual liberty, into a vehicle that winks at authoritarianism?
In a literal sense, the takeover of the Libertarian Party has already happened. At its party convention two years ago, members of the self-described “radical libertarian” Mises Caucus—named for Austrian School Economist Ludwig von Mises—won the top party posts. Mises members argue the party “los[t] its way” by impure former Republican officeholders like former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson as its 2016 presidential nominee and former Representative Bob Barr of Georgia. But not every Libertarian Party member agrees. As Reason magazine explained, “The caucus’s official platform is plumb-line libertarian, but its foes say that too many Mises Caucus members and fans downplay libertarian positions that might offend the right, are intentionally obnoxious and bullying, and are often racist.”
Mises members also take a more restrictionist stance on immigration than traditional libertarians, even though the group takes its name from Ludwig von Mises, a founder of the Austrian school of economics that advocated free markets and minuscule government intervention and influence the economists, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. While the Cato Institute, the longstanding Washington, D.C.-based libertarian-ish think tank, wants deregulated markets, including labor markets, with a freer flow of workers across borders, Mises’s members, including Rectenwald, speak of “private property rights” as the reason to deny entry to uninvited immigrants.
Mises leaders wax friendly to Trump. Angela McArdle, the new Mises-affiliated party president, recently said, “Donald Trump is a much better person and president than Joe Biden.” Rectenwald applauds Trump’s attending the convention, posting on X, “It’s an opportunity to interact on the same stage with a candidate from a dominant party” and “TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] is for the faint of heart. I’m not afraid of Trump.”
Not all Libertarian Party presidential candidates are as welcoming. According to The Washington Post, four others are publicly critical of the decision to invite Trump to the convention.
Who has the upper hand? Has Trump effectively taken over the Libertarian Party as he did with the Republican Party?
Chris Powell, the chair of the Oklahoma Libertarian Party, doesn’t think so.
“My sense is the rank-and-file is pretty displeased,” he told me this week, with the Trump and Kennedy invites. “It’s a little bit like going around at the mission to take up a collection for Elon Musk. Why are we helping these people that are our opponents and have resources that dwarf ours?”
Powell doesn’t think Rectenwald “has a very good chance of being the nominee” but does not predict who will be because “there’s not really a frontrunner.” No former state or federal officeholders are in the running. All he can say with certainty is, “We’re going to have a contentious convention.”
(Johnson, the former two-time Libertarian presidential nominee, once said Libertarian conventions attract some “really wonderful, well-meaning, well-spoken people … and then people that are just batshit crazy.”)
Powell suggests that the Mises leadership of the party is at an end, partly because the rank-and-file are frustrated by “reduced membership” and “reduced fundraising.”
“My expectation,” previewed Powell, “is that we’re going to have significant turnover in leadership at the convention.”
If so, the Libertarian Party will have done a better job preserving its intellectual integrity than the Republican Party.
