What the Libertarian Revolt Against Trump Tells Us

The fierce clash, with insults and insinuations, between Elon Musk and Donald Trump is the most predictable surprise since Inauguration Day. Many thought that Trump would not really impose tariffs on the entire world, as he had announced, but everyone was certain that the president would sooner or later argue with the Doge's boss. Two egos too cumbersome to be in the same room, two leaders with characters too similar to get along, two people with interests too different to march together. But it would be wrong to think that the sensational break between Trump and Musk depends exclusively on personal or character issues.

At the bottom there are different, at times irreconcilable, visions of society and especially of the economy. Which do not only concern the tenant of the White House and the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, but two souls of the Republican world: the liberal-libertarian and the Maga. The current that wants free markets and a minimal state, and the one that wants closed borders and a protector-protectionist state. Musk's attack first on tariffs, but then above all on Trump's deficit fiscal policy (the "Big beautiful bill") is the explosion of the dialectic between these two worlds, but it is only the latest phenomenon . Because so far the toughest opposition to Trump, and also more effective than that of a now anesthetized Democratic Party, has been made precisely by the liberal and libertarian galaxy. A group of activists, think tanks, foundations, politicians and intellectuals who have acted autonomously and uncoordinated against the main points of Trump's agenda. The most obvious case is that of tariffs . Many have come out against the White House's protectionist policy, but the most precise and timely analyses - reported by the main US media - are those of the Tax Foundation. It is an independent think tank, but with a conservative fiscal stance: accounts in order, less regulation, more simplification and reduction of the tax burden. For example, in 2011 the Tax Foundation supported the "Ryan plan", the plan of the Republican Paul Ryan, close to the Tea Party, which aimed to reduce taxes and the deficit through spending cuts. In 2017 it praised the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of the first Trump Administration, now the Tax Foundation continuously churns out data against the White House's tariff policy, defined as "a tax war that makes Americans poorer". And it also produces numerous analyses on the negative impact of the "big beautiful bill", Trump's deficit tax cuts package that Elon Musk called "a disgusting abomination", asking the Senate to sink it. Working in this direction on the political side is Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky who has already announced his vote against the Senate and leads the rebellion in the Republican Party that aims to sink Trump's big beautiful bill.

“ It includes the largest increase in the national debt ceiling ever recorded and will put the United States in debt by 5 trillion dollars in the next two years,” said the son of Ron Paul, the historic political leader of the American libertarian movement. “This law is anything but conservative and we should not pass it .” Rand Paul had previously come out against the tariffs, which Trump advisor Peter Navarro sells to Republicans as a tax cut: an abomination for a libertarian. “Tariffs are taxes, and the power to impose taxes belongs to Congress, not the president,” is the position of Rand Paul, who has contested the tariffs on an economic level (“they do not punish foreign governments, but American families”), on a political level (“when we imposed tariffs in the 1930s we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years”) and on a constitutional level (“the president does not have the power to impose taxes”).

This political-cultural setting is, among other things, the basis of the case that led a federal court to “block” Trump’s tariffs . That legal action was promoted by Ilya Somin, a jurist who comes from the Cato Institute, the most important libertarian think tank, founded by the economist Murray Rothbard and financed by the billionaire Koch brothers (considered a sort of right-wing George Soros). Somin is a professor at the Virginia Law School named after Antonin Scalia, for decades the leader of the conservative wing of the Supreme Court and the greatest exponent of originalism. The judges of the Court of International Trade who accepted Somin’s appeal also have a conservative background, two out of three were appointed by Ronald Reagan and Trump himself. It is no coincidence that, after the negative ruling, Trump frontally attacked Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian legal hotbed to which Republicans, and Trump himself, turn for the appointments of judges.

Intellectuals are also making their voices heard in the media landscape in the battle against Trumpism. For example, a group of economists, including three Nobel Prize winners such as Vernon Smith, James Heckman, and Robert F. Engle, as well as Deirdre McCloskey and Greg Mankiw (chief economist of President Bush), have published an appeal against the duties. The elderly Thomas Sowell, an institution of the libertarian world, the most popular popularizer together with Milton Friedman, who in February was celebrated as an “American hero” by Trump for the National Black History Month, after Liberation day in an interview with the Hoover Institution (another conservative organization) on Trump's duties said: “It is painful to see a ruinous decision from the twenties repeated”. The liberal-libertarian opposition is not limited only to economic issues, but also to civil rights, according to the cultural setting that sees economic freedom, freedom of movement and freedom of speech as inseparable. The Cato Institute, for example, released a dossier showing that more than 50 Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration to prisons in El Salvador had entered the United States legally, without ever having violated any immigration laws.

Another new opponent is Greg Lukianoff, a champion of free speech. His Fire Foundation, funded by the conservative and libertarian world, is the bête noire of liberal campuses: for years it has denounced the oppression of cancel culture and the progressive erosion of free speech in the most prestigious American universities . In the ranking of the foundation directed by Lukianoff, Harvard University ended up in last place, but when Trump withdrew funding from Harvard and imposed a ban on enrolling foreign students, Lukianoff moved to defend the university precisely to continue to defend his liberal principles: "Whatever Harvard's past failures - is the position of the Fire Foundation - no American should accept that the government punishes its political opponents by demanding ideological conformity, surveillance and retaliation against free speech and violating the First Amendment". The libertarian resistance is widespread, well-equipped and aggressive.

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