We’re now less than three weeks from Inauguration Day, and libertarians are anxious. On the one hand, the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office represents the fulfillment of much of what they’ve been preaching for many years in terms of free markets and lower tax rates; on the other, it’s a threat to their very core beliefs about individual freedom and government overreach.

The foundation of libertarian ideology rests largely on two premises: first, that maintaining more individual freedom is an inherent good and should be the ultimate objective of every policy, and second, that government interference in the economy is generally bad and should be avoided. Libertarian economists argue that markets are most efficient, and can do the most good, when the government takes a laissez-faire approach, as any government action is likely to cause unintentional harms—something known as the cobra effect. They are free market absolutists and civil liberty absolutists.

So what, then, are they to make of a president-elect who vows to lower corporate tax rates yet threatens to raise tariffs, will seek to abolish vaccine mandates while imposing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal dietary beliefs on food producers, and will reduce the government’s regulation of the economy while jeopardizing free speech?

For many libertarian leaders, both within the Libertarian Party and among the ranks of the literati at the Cato Institute who serve as the movement’s intellectual base, Trump’s autocratic tendencies overshadow his preferences for deregulation and lower taxes. Yet Trump and RFK Jr. succeeded in driving a wedge in the party and culling votes from its nominee, Chase Oliver, who, despite campaigning in all 50 states, failed to get half of 1 percent of the vote in 2024.

“There’s a division here,” Oliver acknowledged to me recently. “Some people in our party leadership think it’s better to kind of be the J.V. league for the Republican Party and be a feeder league for them and try to play in concert with the two-party system.” Yet he notes that the Libertarian Party was founded for a reason; it........

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