AP Claims ‘No President Since Reagan’ Has Liberty-d Like Trump

“Fact: No President since Ronald Reagan has done as much for liberty as @realDonaldTrump”

My first instinct was to write the word ‘no’ and walk away, having said all that needs to be said. My second instinct was to write the word ‘NO’ in capital letters, maybe punctuated by some choice profanities. This sentence surely isn’t a ‘fact’, and the libertarian part of me fights against absolutely everything implied within whatever Twitter’s character limit is nowadays.

If you can tell, I’m already biased against Trump. I’m embarrassed by the way he speaks, the way he conducts himself, and I’ve lost a lot of money on his tariffs to boot. I feel I can’t trust his words, his motives, or even his actions to speak the same today as yesterday, and even his supporters seem to acknowledge a constant stream of lies within some kind of 4D chess strategy above Trump’s intellect. I didn’t vote for him or Hillary, because neither deserved my vote, and had I fallen into the silly ‘lesser of two evils’ trap I’d only be encouraging the bastards.

That said, what post-Reagan President actually has done as much for liberty as him?

By plenty of metrics he’s done liberty harm. Immigration, trade, state’s rights, spending, deficits, a continuation of the Bush/Obama wars, threatening private companies… the damn wall… the list surely isn’t short.

On the other hand, he’s had major accomplishments as well. Whether he deserves credit or not, the unemployment rate (and, yes, labor force participation rate) has been positive. A good case can be made that the tax bill was a good bill. He’s slashed a lot of regulations and executive orders on his own. Just last week he signed Senator Johnson’s ‘right to try’ bill, and there’s plenty of small battles fought and won that haven’t made as much news as his twitter outbursts. And, of course… Gorsuch.

And we have to admit, better for liberty than other post-Reagan Presidents is an extremely low bar. He’s been in office for less than a year and a half.

In the first year and a half of HW’s term, he enacted gun control legislation, named Cheney Secretary of Defense, bailed out savings and loan companies, ramped up the war on drugs, attacked free speech with the flag protection act, raised the minimum wage, invaded Panama, raided Steve Jackson Games, and reneged on his no new taxes pledge.

In the first year and a half of Clinton’s term, he appointed Janet Reno, raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, killing 82 Americans, including children, lobbed missiles at Iraq, got us involved in a battle in Somalia, sent warships to Haiti under the direction of the UN, signed the Brady Bill, pushed for Hillary-care, began shooting down aircraft in civil wars in the Balkans… and that’s not even including conspiracy theories that are credible.

In the first year and a half of W’s term, he had already begun bombing raids on Iraq, we were in a recession (though this was hardly his fault), he signed the Patriot Act, set up extrajudicial military tribunals to supersede civilian courts including for Americans, signed No Child Left Behind, opened Gitmo to prisoners who could be indefinitely detained without charge or trial, deployed forces to the Philippines, and laid the groundwork for what would become the war on terrorism.

In the first year and a half of Obama’s Presidency, he broke his promise to close Guantanamo, bailed out Wall Street, expanded executive orders, started an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, bailed out AIG, appointed Eric Holder, attacked Somalia, dramatically increased regulations on everything from cars to credit cards to finance to industry, appointed Sotomayor, unemployment soared, he received the Nobel peace prize despite being the President to add more wars than any other President of my lifetime, and, of course… Obamacare.

None of this makes Trump good on liberty, of course. But he’s being compared to Presidents who were also actively opposed to liberty as a general rule. In that context, I see Austin’s statement as less of a compliment to Trump, and more of an insult to the status quo of a stream of awful Presidents in my lifetime who were so bad that one could at least conceivably make the case that even someone as odious as Trump may have even been an improvement.

Most notable to me are the things that all of the past five Presidents didn’t do (and, more importantly, what no session of Congress did under the last five Presidents). Achieving basic transparency in institutions like the Federal Reserve or the Pentagon. Breaking out of the standard of zero changes to entitlements, despite how insolvent they’ve become and despite the dangers of doing nothing in the long term. Continuing without pause on a path of military expansion, in terms of money spent, lives lost, and countries bombed regardless of who the President is or what party he’s from.

I don’t, and can’t, view Trump as anything approaching a liberty Republican from what I’ve seen, especially when his relative non-interventionist leanings didn’t translate to action once he took office. Far from being motivated by some kind of liberty foundation, he seems animated more by populism, nativism, and authoritarianism. But compared to recent Presidents, I’ve just got to ask…

What else is new?