Something amazing happened on Saturday.
For the first time in American history, or at least the first time in memory, the presidential candidate of a major political party addressed the convention of a rival political party and asked his audience for their support.
READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: No, Bill Maher Is Not Your Friend
So far as your author can tell, that has never happened before. But Donald Trump did it. He went to Washington and spoke to the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday, delivering a 34-minute speech in front of a boisterous, semi-friendly, somewhat unruly crowd, and, while he didn’t quite win them over, Trump seemed to have given the Libertarians something to consider.
They invited him to speak. They also invited Joe Biden, whose presidency has to be the single most anathematic to libertarianism in American history. Of course, Biden didn’t show up. Trump did.
And Trump made a pretty good case for Libertarians — and small-l libertarians — to support him.
“If I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am one now,” he joked, talking about the 91 counts of lawfare indictments Biden and his allies in the justice system have cooked up in South Florida, Atlanta, Washington, and New York.
Trump is more practical than libertarian tastes would have him be. That’s because we don’t live in a libertarian age. You can’t abide by old libertarian tropes when the opposition has completed its march through the institutions and has corrupted Corporate America, the entertainment and news media, Big Tech, the social media platforms, and the educational system. Acting as though the political institutions shouldn’t be used for corrective action when monopolistic private companies actively in service to a fascist identity-politics movement are engaged in open censorship and discrimination simply means standing aside while our culture — the only culture that makes libertarianism possible in the first place — is lost.
Everybody knows this. Most libertarians — and Libertarians — know it, too.
That didn’t stop many of the conventionaires in Washington from booing and heckling Trump on Saturday.
But a funny thing happened over the course of the 34-minutes-plus Trump spoke to them. That crowd noticeably warmed up to Trump over the course of his speech.
Much of its text was borrowed, interestingly enough, from this publication. Last week Deroy Murdock, writing in these pages, argued that Trump’s record as president was a major success from a libertarian perspective and that he’s worthy of the Libertarian Party’s nomination. Murdock talked about Trump’s tax cuts, his ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, his refusal to initiate any foreign wars, his large-scale deregulation, criminal justice reform, school choice, and other efforts to shrink the size and scope of the federal government, and Trump referenced those things and others. (READ THE PIECE: The Libertarian Case for Donald J. Trump)
Trump promised to include Libertarians in his administration, including a Cabinet seat.
He even promised the crowd that he would commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the proprietor of the anonymous trading network Silk Road who is now serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Tucson (incidentally, if I’m not mistaken, that’s the same federal prison as Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd despite the latter having died from a fentanyl overdose; Chauvin was nearly stabbed to death there several months ago) for, according to the federal government, facilitating the sale of narcotics through the network.
That was a hit with the conventionaires. Not enough to sway the Libertarians to back Trump, though.
Perhaps he told them a bit too much truth.
Trump suggested that if the Libertarians want to win, they will join his coalition. Otherwise, they would have to remain satisfied with the “3 percent” the party gets every four years. That generated boos from the crowd.
He later acknowledged that he couldn’t accept the Libertarians’ nomination even if he got it, because he’s the GOP nominee, and there is exclusivity.
And the Libertarian delegates ultimately nominated a gay activist and woke Obama supporter named Chase Oliver, a divisive figure even within the party’s ranks who claimed a goal of getting 2 percent of the vote nationally this fall.
This is Chase Oliver, the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party.
He supports:
▪️The woke agenda
▪️Transitioning children
▪️Masks & mRNA gene therapies
▪️Exposing minors to drag queensHe doesn’t support:
▪️Scientific evidence
▪️Anti-woke libertarians like me pic.twitter.com/GPI4buUrgc— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) May 27, 2024
“I’m ready to continue to be a fly in the ointment of the two-party system,” he said, after calling Trump a “war criminal” and saying that he “deserve[s] to be shamed by everyone in this hall.”
Oliver won the Libertarian Party’s nomination with 64 percent of the vote on the seventh ballot after his chief competitor, former New York University professor and anti-woke author and podcaster Michael Rectenwald, dropped out. Some 36 percent of the delegates voted for “none of the above” instead of Oliver. That was seen as at least partially a nod to Trump, though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also involved in the nominating process.
Oliver represents the Libertarians moving to the left, and he also likely represents the sawing-off of just under half of that party. Rectenwald was the choice of the Mises Caucus, a faction of the Libertarians who represent a more classical liberal worldview. It was the Mises Caucus who had invited Trump to speak at the convention.
And with Oliver as the nominee, it’s very possible that Trump might have gobbled up the votes of those Libertarians who lean a bit to the right and aren’t fans of Oliver’s “armed and gay” shtick.
We’ll see about that. We’ll also see whether Oliver doesn’t do damage not just to the Libertarian brand but to American politics as a whole.
“I’m ready to continue to be a fly in the ointment of the two-party system,” Oliver said.
Except that isn’t Oliver’s record. Two years ago, he ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, and the 2.1 percent of the vote Oliver pulled in created the runoff without which Herschel Walker would have beaten Raphael Warnock. In other words, Chase Oliver played a massive role (maybe as big a role as Mitch McConnell!) in making Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader.
That’s the problem with the Libertarian Party. It isn’t a viable political party capable of driving competitive numbers even despite the dysfunction and failure of the GOP and the Democrats to govern successfully for the majority of the past 35 years — and that tells you it isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Chase Oliver, who brags that he’s “armed and gay,” might very well be the driver of an even worse performance by the Libertarians this fall.
He trashed Trump’s appearance at the convention. He’s now going to attempt to do to Trump what he did to Walker two years ago.
But things aren’t the same. Trump is actively campaigning for the votes of Libertarians, and, as Murdock says, he has a case to make to them. If nothing else, Trump deserves credit for making that case, just as he made the case to the at least 10,000 people who gathered to hear him in the South Bronx. He’s extending an olive branch and attempting to unify Americans against Biden.
And if that means he gets some booing and heckling, it’s not the end of the world. For all the Democrat cackling about Trump’s speech, one thing was glaringly obvious, and telling — Joe Biden was nowhere to be found on Saturday.
