Buck up, libertarians! I know we just danced with yet another national plebiscite, and voters didn’t partner with the “abolish the government” wallflower. Instead, the unwashed and unread masses punched the ticket once again for a master-overlord to tax us, jail us, push us, spank us, silence us, and remind us that any punitive measures are deployed for our own good.
But fear not! Or, since all is relative to the libertarian nous, fear a little less. Point those haughty chins of yours high. Or, if too much scrolling has permanently malformed your cervical so you feel brain-tearing pain to lift your visage parallel to the ground, prop your mandible up on a stack of Böhm-Bawerk’s business-cycle trilogy.
The point is: it’s time to celebrate like it’s October 24, 1978, when Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law. The libertarian moment has finally arrived! And it’s not draped in celebratory black and gold, like a liquor-soaked, weed-smoked, coke-sloped Pittsburgh Steelers victory parade. Rather, it comes defiling in, hay foot by straw foot, basked in a vermillion glow. And it’s only a decade late—much like libertarians’ incorrigible arrested development.
Donald Trump recaptured the presidency with a campaign of amped up America Firstism that was more heterodox, contrarian, anti-establishment, and testosterone-pumped than his first winning run. Pitching the same paradigmatic platform as before, with walls, tariffs, Christmas trees, and tiny American flags for all, Trump wasn’t as pinioned by cuckolded Chamber-of-Commerce types, whom he leaned on to translate Washington’s insular mores and ways. This time, there was no need to genuflect before the McConnell machine or the combed-over Republican National Committee; Mitch decided to ditch DC earlier this year, Trump’s daughter-in-law assumed co-chairmanship of the elephant braintrust in March. Our walking Grover Cleveland butter mold didn’t even deign to participate in the perfunctory Republican primary debates, so sure he was of his plebeian popularity. It was a smart call. Trump dispatched easily with more orthodox rivals like Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and that timeshare sales guy lookalike from North Dakota. When it was time to pick among the gulping chum vying for the vice presidency, Donald reverted his “The Apprentice” character, ignoring consultancy advice to cozy with swing-state moderate, and elevated the only elected man in Washington who can reliably quote philosopher René Girard and probably knew someone in high school who OD’d on Oxycontin.
Trump bested all the regime threw at him, including federal charges and lax Secret Service protection, pulling off an upset in a sui-generis manner: his way. And what was one of Trump’s first official directives? One guaranteed to draw a salty tear from David Frum’s crusted eye: bidding sayonara to neocons!
“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump pronounced on his Truth Social account. Mere minutes after the posting, a shrill cry shot up the Potomac River. The piercing bawl wasn’t recorded, but residents in north Virginia suburbs say it emanated atop the Raytheon tower in Rosslyn. Others whisper of a bloodier shrill originating somewhere in the vicinity of Boeing’s Crystal City headquarters. There are even scant rumors of a gentleman in a three-piece tailor-made suit sitting forlorn outside the Pentagon’s Concourse gate, brandishing an open bowler, meekly holding a sign that reads “Orange Man Put Me in the Poorhouse.”
Two of Trump’s most saber-swaying advisors in his first administration are hereby barred from reenlistment. Pompeo was Trump’s CIA director-turned-Secretary of State, who parlayed his military macho-ism into essaying to ventilate Julian Assange. Haley, who served as prattler to the United Nations, is, in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s razor formulation, “Bush in heels.”
There’s not thatch-roofed mud shack in all of South Asia that Pompeo and Haley haven’t drooled over JDAMing. Now they won’t get the chance to send U.S. “advisors” (read: troops) to skirmish with Kalashnikov-toting hajis in the Hindu Kush mountains.
Pompeo and Haley weren’t the only hawks Trump clipped: Liz Cheney, daughter of Darth Vader, was smited. The Harris campaign, ostensibly run by Democrats, thought it wise and stately to feature fCheney fille as a surrogate. Dick Cheney’s Harris endorsement was also touted. To whom was the Cheney family’s sanguine blessing aimed? Certainly not the vast sweep of America, tangible towns full of offline people who hold concrete concerns and a decent memory of GWOT ineptitude. The Northrop Grumman board may have been impressed, but not the inconspicuous littles who decide elections. Kicking Cheney keister should, in a just world, earn Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, if the snotty Norwegians would drop the liberaler-than-thou conceit and give a lutefisk about global concord.
A disclaimer is needed, if only because libertarians are ideological perfectionists. No, Donald Trump, who reverizes out loud of carpet-bombing drug cartels on the U.S.-Mexico border, is no peacenik. He didn’t win the presidency chanting kumbaya as white doves soared softly overhead. The foreign policy team he’s so far floated, namely Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, and John Ratcliffe as Spook-in-Chief, isn’t about to swap their rifles for olive branches. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin won’t be extended gold-fringed invites for Big Macs at the White House. This won’t be a Charles Lindbergh Administration.
Libertarians should nonetheless rejoice. The chances of bulldozing Tehran to erect a Des Moines of the MidEast are low. The Cheney chimera has been slayed. Pentagon brass are shaking in their sheeny oxfords. Trump may have a domestic industrial agenda, but the gears of the Washington machine are greased by warmaking.
To butcher the famous Bourne quote, the health of the state ain’t ethanol subsidies.
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