When I saw the headline “Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump” atop a New York Times op-ed last Monday, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s not quite how I remember it.” Adorned with the striking image of the Gadsden flag’s “Don’t Tread on Me” snake about to get curb-stomped by an enormous black jackboot, the piece was written by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine and website Reason — where I worked as a journalist for roughly six years. (I left shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
Sure enough, upon reading the column, I discovered the headline didn’t accurately reflect Mangu-Ward’s argument. She primarily made the case that libertarians have warned for years — under presidents in both major parties — about the dangers of ever-expanding executive authority, what’s been aptly coined the “Imperial Presidency.” Rather than claiming to have specifically warned “about Trump,” the writer boasted that libertarians had long sounded the alarm over the consolidation of such power — power now being used for nefarious purposes by a president who just happens to be Donald Trump. (The Times later that day amended the headline to the less specific but more honest, “Libertarians: We Told You So.”)
I can’t argue with that. To the extent most self-identified professional libertarians warned about Trump, they warned about the awesome powers that could be abused by a generic authoritarian president from either party.
But Trump is not a hypothetical. He always told us who he was. And there are far fewer of us who took (and continue to hold) the comparatively unpopular view among libertarians and other right-of-center fellow travelers that Trump presented as a uniquely authoritarian, vindictive, racist, corrupt and lawless demagogue — of which there isn’t remotely an analog on the other side of the aisle.
The problem is that, even now that Trump has proven us skeptics right on every one of those counts, too many libertarians continue to position themselves safely in a “pox on both your houses” perch — much too nuanced and enlightened to be dragged into partisan rancor. This position is how your movement ends up conflating the tyranny of overbearing, temporary Covid policies in Democratic-run areas as equal to (or worse than) the tyranny of a secret police force acting without due process for everyone when attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, summarily executing Americans in the street and branding them “domestic terrorists” while their bodies are still warm.
The current person in power has always posed the far greater threat to liberty-for-all than any big government power-expanding jerk the Democrats could throw up there.
I don’t want to paint too broad a brush around the “libertarian” label — as many journalists, researchers and pundits who wear some version of that identifier have been consistently clear-eyed about Trump. To this day, if forced with a metaphorical gun to my head to self-identify politically, I’d describe myself as a “civil libertarian.” I’m nobody’s partisan Democrat or Blue Dog liberal.
During the first Trump administration, the “Great Awokening” and the Covid pandemic, I punched left regularly, mostly on civil libertarian grounds. I was critical of reductive “woke” racial essentialism. Of left-wing political violence. Of politically-driven Covid school closings that lasted far longer than made scientific sense. Of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ awful records on civil liberties, drug policy and criminal justice. I continue to have no loyalties to either party, though I draw the line at supporting a party that collectively debases itself to support the thoroughly disproven lies of a president who refuses to peacefully leave office after losing an election. (That one’s a dealbreaker, so call me back when Republicans are no longer doing that.)
But for the 11 years Trump has been the dominant force in American politics, it is inarguable that a great many libertarians went full MAGA (including the Libertarian Party’s own leadership during the 2024 election), MAGA-curious (critical of Trump on things like tariffs and military intervention, fine with pretty much everything else and not terribly offended by the gutter racism) or quietly adopted a kind of anti-anti-Trump bothsidesism (“both parties are bad but Democrats are always worse”).
The Times’ “told you so” op-ed strains into whataboutism when it correctly laments the jawboning of “officials in the Biden administration lean[ing] on social media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation,” but fails to proivde the important context those same platforms often effectively told these mid-level Biden officials to pound sand. And there isn’t enough space in this column to fully expound on how many more severe and overt threats to free speech Trump has promised and delivered, or how many institutions simply crumbled at his threats.
When you provide too many specifics for why the Orange Man is Actually Bad, the listener either knowingly, wearily nods or puts their fingers in their ears while chanting, “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Many of the libertarians who loudly decried Trump’s increasingly brazen racism and violent rhetoric — which slowly but surely became normalized in the MAGA movement and later the Republican Party, more broadly — were dismissed as woke-adjacent Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted snowflakes. These were the libertarians who heard Trump muse about a better America where police officers cracked heads with impunity, refer to people of certain ethnic groups as “garbage,” encourage far-right street militias like the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and took him at his word. The alternative was to shrug it all off as ephemeral noise, only of concern to panicking normie libs and a biased mainstream media.
While political tribelessness was professed, a libertarian who supported or sympathized with Trump wouldn’t raise an eyebrow within the movement. A libertarian who vociferously preferred just about any generic Democrat over Trump was often dealt with as an apostate. I’ve spoken to numerous veterans of libertarian circles who reported some form of social or professional cancellations for their anti-Trump thought crimes or supposedly exceedingly harsh tones against the Republican standard bearer. Some, like my former Reason colleague Shikha Dalmia, say they lost their jobs for going too hard on Trump. (In my experience, these are very credible claims.)
As Trump’s political star rose in the mid-2010s, the illiberalism of Oberlin undergrads’ cafeteria controversies was likely to capture the libertarian pundit’s fascination. The specific threat posed by the front-running candidate leading a movement built in no small portion on racist populism and the promise of brutal authoritarianism — less so.
Now, in 2026, it’s mundanely normal for the Republican vice president to spread inflammatory racist lies about Haitian migrants (and then declaring he’d do it again for political purposes), use historically-chilling phrases like “Somali problem,” defend Nazi group chats among Young Republican leaders, enthusiastically boost Germany’s ascendant Nazi-sympathizer party and falsely smear Alex Pretti — slain by Trump’s secret police in Minneapolis — as “an assassin.” Here are a few things I am confident would not be happening if any replacement-level Democrat were in the White House today. I don’t believe the Department of Homeland Security would be using overtly white supremacist imagery and songs in its social media recruitment posts. I don’t believe the Secretary of Defense would tell U.S. troops “your diversity is not your strength.” I don’t believe the administration would attempt to prosecute members of Congress for saying members of the military should refuse illegal orders. I don’t believe our NATO allies would be saying the international order is over. I don’t believe the president would try to block a bridge to Canada to excise concessions in his self-destructive tariff war. I don’t believe the president would try to withhold congressionally appropriated funds for necessary infrastructure improvements unless Penn Station and Dulles Airport are named after him. I’m fairly confident no Democrat’s family would be billions of dollars richer after their first year in office. I could obviously go on, but when you provide too many specifics for why the Orange Man is Actually Bad, the listener typically either wearily nods or jams their fingers in their ears while chanting, “T. D. S.” It’s critical to understand that it’s not just a matter of a bad president doing bad things with powers expanded by presidents — and pliant Congresses — of both parties. It’s that the current person in power has always posed the far greater threat to freedom and liberty-for-all than any big government power-expanding jerk the Democrats have thrown up there. It was only a minority of those who wore some version of the “libertarian” label — neither brave nor exceptional, just clear-eyed — who chose a side, rather than avert their gaze in a pose of “nonpartisanship.” A few, since politically exiled, saw the rise of Trump and with a clear voice said, “Hey, you know what? I think he and a lot of his followers mean it with the racism, violence and fascism.” Hate to say we told you so.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
