Trump now tries to co-opt the Libertarians because they are more attracted to RFKjr and in the swing states Trump can more likely bamboozle Libertarians than Greens. Because the brainworm is clearly ‘mainstream’. Also, the eternal contradiction of the US Libertarian Party has been the usual LP factions of forced-birther and pro-gun candidates who call on their conventions. In this election cycle it’s the MAGAs that have hijacked the Libertarians. Because what right-wing party doesn’t want to arm fetuses to protect women’s bodily autonomy. If anything, Trump fears an LP endorsement of RFKjr.
THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY, the largest third party in the United States and the self-described “party of principle,” announced last week that former President Donald Trump will be speaking at its national convention on May 25.
In the announcement, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, Angela McArdle, bills the move as “an incredible opportunity to advance the message of liberty,” and to “make an impact on the policy positions of a past, and possibly future, president.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has a different take, saying, “If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close. We cannot have another four years of death, destruction, and incompetence. WE WILL WORK TOGETHER AND WIN!”
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, Trumpism has little in common with libertarianism. His hostility to free trade, support for qualified immunity, continuation of overseas military action and drone strikes, and unilateral banning of bump stocks stand in direct opposition to both libertarian principles and the party’s platform.
www.thebulwark.com/…
Some Libertarian Party leaders are fuming over the party’s decision to have former president Donald Trump headline their national convention this month, with national committee members calling on the party to rescind the invitation.
Trump’s participation in the party’s national convention is a first — no current or former president has spoken at the event. It comes at a time when Democrats and Republicans worry that third-party candidates might sway an expected close contest in November. (Libertarian candidates have typically attracted small shares of the presidential vote, but in a close race between Trump and President Biden, even a single-digit percentage showing can be significant to the outcome.)
www.washingtonpost.com/…
How did Donald Trump, an authoritarian Republican whose lawyers recently argued that the president can assassinate anyone he wants without being prosecuted, end up with a save-the-date for a libertarian conference? The simple answer is that the party invited both Trump and Biden to the event and Trump was the only one who said yes. (Third-party candidates Robert Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West all previously appeared at the California Libertarian Party convention in February.) But the relationship between Trump and the current incarnation of the LP goes a bit deeper than that. As I reported in a recent story for the magazine, the party is in the midst of one of its semi-regular civil wars:
Under the auspices of expanding the tent, some within the LP—and a fair number outside of it—began clamoring for a different kind of party: more aggressive, more offensive, and more right-wing. They weren’t interested in third-place showings; it wasn’t entirely clear if they were interested in competing at all. What’s followed has been more than seven years of spectacularly messy infighting. New Hampshire was only one front of many. Across the country the Libertarian Party has been plagued by breakaway factions, leaked chatrooms and conspiracy theories, and bitter struggles over bank accounts and social media handles.
This power struggle played out across a series of larger events. After the 2016 election, in which LP nominees Gary Johnson and Bill Weld received the party’s biggest-ever vote haul, some members argued the party had sold out by hitching its brand to two Republican ex-governors (a little ironic, given the current circumstances). After Charlottesville, libertarians split over whether to condemn bigots in their midst. And during Covid, party leaders faced a vocal backlash for not protesting loudly enough against vaccine mandates and lockdowns. This culminated, in 2022, in the “takeover” of the party by a faction called the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus (named for the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises), which wanted to turn the organization into a sort of the permanent campaign for the “Ron Paul Revolution.”
It would be a bit too simplistic to say that the Libertarian Party went full-on MAGA. But the new cohort was distinctly right-leaning in some key respects. They took concrete steps to disassociate the party from its support of socially liberal policies—rewriting the platform to eliminate the LP’s longtime neutrality on abortion, deleting a pledge condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant,” and expressing support for the idea of secession. There was a sometimes virulent strain of angry anti-wokeness, and an affinity, at least in some circles, for a more nationalistic identity that rejects the free migration of people. One of the leading candidates for the party’s presidential nomination said last year that “open borders…plays into the globalist objective” to “erode the entire culture base of the United States.”
www.motherjones.com/...