Opinion: Libertarians tried to warn you about Trump

Libertarians can be annoying, with our constant bellyaching about privacy and taxes, our obsession with the First Amendment and our fearmongering about jackbooted thugs.

But in light of how the past year has unfolded, consider cutting your friendly neighborhood libertarian some slack. After all, we did try to warn you.

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the last few months. The ownership of TikTok, Intel and U.S. Steel have all become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories represent a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government itself — abolishing unaccountable federal agencies, scaling back the administrative state, cutting spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best, and morally suspect at worst.

Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.

Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.

To see why, consider how we got here.

The Department of Homeland Security arose with very little opposition in the wake of Sept. 11, a massive new agency charged with counterterrorism that quickly absorbed a variety of functions, often decoupled from traditional oversight. The libertarians and others concerned with civil liberties (there weren’t many) who objected were accused of indulging in paranoia or siding with the terrorists.

As the years went on, Homeland Security — and especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement, within it — got comfortable operating under a series of exceptions to the Constitution, particularly concerning the Fourth Amendment and its protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Such exceptions then became the norm for huge swaths of the country. The agency operated with little transparency, entered homes without judicial warrants and detained suspected illegal immigrants without normal due process.

So it can be no surprise that ICE officers are roaming the streets of American cities today with an unclear mandate, overpowered military-style gear and a dire misunderstanding of the constitutional limits on their behavior. An ICE officer was recently caught telling a protester who tried to film him: “If you raise your voice, I erase your voice.”

In recent days, Republican politicians have largely supported these gradual incursions on the liberties of citizens. That wasn’t always the case. For a long spell, starting in the 1950s, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan championed fusionism, which yoked the defense of personal liberty to social conservatism. The federal government continued to grow in these years, but Frank Meyer, an early editor at National Review, made the case that protecting freedom was a precondition for virtue (and vice versa) and gave the right at least a vocabulary of restraint.

That relationship crumbled when many conservatives embraced a politics of emergency. “The Flight 93 Election” essay in 2016 by Michael Anton (an early MAGA intellectual and a former member of both Trump administrations) captured a new ethic: Procedure is for peacetime, and we are at war. Restraint began to look like unilateral disarmament, and libertarians’ insistence on it became inconvenient.

Trump 2.0 has made the libertarian case more obvious, even as libertarians have been consigned to the fringes. But it would be a mistake to treat President Trump as the origin of the ultra-powerful presidency. He is merely picking up the weapons that previous administrations left lying around and waltzing through the loopholes they opened.

Consider Mr. Trump’s record on free speech. For years, he has been threatening to give libel laws more bite and pull licenses from unsympathetic broadcasters. The late-September 2025 blackout of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” under pressure from a Federal Communications Commission chairman was a case study in how bureaucracies breed power. You did not have to like Mr. Kimmel’s jokes to see the worrying precedent of the possibility of state action as putting pressure on broadcasters.

Mr. Trump has a record of threatening media and platforms under various statutory and emergency authorities. He recently mused that when “97 percent” of media coverage is negative, it ceases to be “free speech.” Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to sue Trevor Noah for a joke at the Grammys while vaguely suggesting networks don’t deserve access to the airwaves — and so the cycle continues.

But the project of growing executive power has been bipartisan. On speech, officials in the Biden administration leaned on social-media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation without explicit action from the F.C.C. The Supreme Court disposed of a case, Murthy v. Missouri, challenging this “jawboning,” as it is called, leaving the possibility of backdoor censorship wide open.

The executive’s discretionary economic powers — subsidies, stakes in corporations and tariffs — have proved irresistible, too. The administration has spent billions of dollars to take ownership stakes in private companies like Intel and U.S. Steel.

And Mr. Trump’s tariffs — leveled and removed at will and without the participation of Congress, where the Constitution places the primary power — have disrupted and destabilized the global economy and undermined America’s role in it.

While libertarians were hardly alone in championing free trade, what we have been hollering for years is that tariffs are and can only ever be taxes on Americans. To treat them as leverage, war by other means or simply a sign of the president’s displeasure is to fundamentally misuse and misunderstand the nature of a tariff.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared his tariffs a success, despite evidence that they are largely paid for by American consumers and businesses rather than foreign producers. A recent study found that roughly 96 percent of the tariff burden falls on U.S. importers and buyers and only about 4 percent is absorbed abroad.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs depend on a legally dubious claim that trade deficits and ordinary commerce constitute a national emergency, allowing him to bypass Congress under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. (Jimmy Carter once invoked it to freeze Iranian assets.) Mr. Trump’s tariffs are not an aberration so much as the latest example of how emergency powers, once normalized, become a standing invitation to rule by fiat.

One thing immigration, speech and trade have in common is that in recent American history, the power to control each of them has settled into the hands of the executive. There are many reasons for this: grasping presidents, cowardly congressmen afraid to do their jobs and a belief that norms rather than law or structures would be adequate to constrain that branch.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the limits of the president’s control over tariffs and executive agencies. In the agencies case, Trump v. Slaughter, the justices are now considering whether to cut back or upend Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent insulating “independent” agency heads from at-will removal by the president. If the court collapses that wall — in part under a resurgent theory of the unitary executive — even more of the executive branch will sit directly in the president’s hands. The libertarian prescription, now and always, is to scale back the size and scope of the federal government. Devolve power to states and individuals. Cut spending. And rebalance power away from the executive branch.

One might think that, say, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is exactly the sort of thing libertarians would applaud. But if the changes are at the instigation of an overpowered executive and are easily reversible, they do not actually achieve a sustainably smaller, stable government.

New reporting shows that DOGE didn’t save much money. No amount of firings (even if they withstand court challenges) will solve the problem of federal overreach if all the commissions, agencies and laws remain in place.

Is there a coalition for true restraint? Glimpses exist on both sides: A few conservatives still talk about narrow delegations of authority and clawing back tariff and emergency powers. Some progressives remain allergic to authoritarianism on speech, and many more are energized by the showdown in Minneapolis.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, leads the bunch in standing up to the overpowered executive, along with occasional support from Representative Thomas Massie, also of Kentucky. Among Democrats, Representative Ro Khanna of California and Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Ron Wyden of Oregon show glimmers of libertarian instinct from time to time. But the pickings are slim.

The good news is that Americans are increasingly waking up to the dark reality of our overbearing federal government. A Gallup survey released in October 2025 found that a record-high 62 percent say the federal government has “too much power,” up from 51 percent a year ago and the highest since the question was first asked in 2002. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say government is too powerful.

Similarly, Americans of all stripes have turned dramatically against Mr. Trump’s ICE enforcement actions. There could be — a libertarian can still dream — a grass-roots movement to shrink government that doesn’t end up co-opted by one of the major parties, as the Tea Party was.

Examples of the rollback of federal spending and authority are quite rare, but they do exist. The post-World War II era, for example, was an astonishing lesson in the government giving up power and shrinking in size once an emergency passed.

But this glimmer of hope is faint. Far more salient are the ways in which America may yet diverge further from the libertarian path. One as yet not fully explored avenue is the power to make war. While Mr. Trump’s interference in Venezuela (and Iran, and Greenland) is already the stuff of isolationist nightmares, the president has not yet fully exploited the limits of his war powers.

Here again, for decades, Congress has abdicated its role as the body that can declare war (while lavishly financing the capacity), preferring to grant sweeping emergency powers to the president and then leave them in place indefinitely. Instead of a winner takes all approach to power, it’s time to consider working toward a system where there is much less power for the winner to take. No one wished events would prove libertarians wrong more than libertarians themselves. There’s nothing more annoying than an “I told you so.” But if more Americans are now ready to limit power before it is abused again, they are welcome to join us.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor in chief of Reason. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.