“Well, in the last year, I’ve been indicted by the government on 91 different things so if I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now,” declared then-candidate Donald Trump at the Libertarian Party’s national convention.

Political candidates say all manner of things to get elected, but Trump’s explicit pandering to libertarians was an unusual if welcome move for many in the libertarian movement. Still, talk is talk. How has Trump done from a libertarian perspective?

I’ll start with some positives.

True to his word, Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. The Silk Road was a darknet market that mainly facilitated the sale of drugs. Libertarians don’t see the use or sale of drugs as per se any of the government’s business unless and until it entails harm to others, so Ulbricht’s life sentence made him a cause célèbre for libertarians. So, point for Trump.

More significantly, Trump’s backing of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency is an undoubtedly libertarian move. While perhaps sloppily executed, the DOGE project did far more to downsize government than what might’ve happened under a Harris administration. Another point for Trump.

On a related note, via executive order, Trump instructed that for every new agency rule, regulation or guidance, 10 must be repealed. Cutting red tape and freeing the private sector from federal agency meddling is also very libertarian.

On another positive note, Trump walked back a proposed federal ban on menthol cigarettes pending before the Food and Drug Administration. Often backed by the same liberals who recognize the folly of cannabis prohibition, flavored tobacco bans open up a new front on the drug war and intrude on the personal choices of adults.

Finally, Trump has moved to wind down the federal Department of Education, a Cabinet post created as a giveaway to the teachers unions by President Jimmy Carter. Via executive order, he has also moved to encourage state adoption of school choice programs. Educational freedom is important, it’s libertarian and it’s often the antidote to badly run traditional government schools.

Taken together, these are libertarian victories that Harris definitely would not have delivered.

Now comes the part where Trump supporters will get mad at me and call me a woke liberal.

Trump’s tariffs are definitely not libertarian. Imposing crushing taxes on American businesses and consumers who want to buy goods from other countries in order to stick it to other countries is a level of economic interventionism that few self-respecting Republicans would’ve endorsed just a decade ago. Understood for what they are, a tax, Trump’s embrace of tax hikes is troubling. It’s also a blow to the world-enriching trend of freer trade around the world.

Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement is also decidedly anti-libertarian. While libertarians can disagree, the standard libertarian view of immigration is that if someone is willing to work, support themselves and live peacefully, it shouldn’t be so hard for people to come here. Libertarians also believe in the rule of law as a constraint on government power.

Trump sending people off to El Salvadoran prisons under legally questionable circumstances with little due process, deporting a 4-year old U.S. citizen with cancer and revoking student visas on political grounds is not consistent with libertarian principles.

Trump’s empowering of progressive conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to use his post as head of the Department of Health and Human Services to say odd things about people with autism, fearmonger about cell phones causing cancer and police food dyes is more bizarre than anything else.

And, solely because I’m running out of space, Trump’s expansion of financial surveillance in dozens of border counties tramples the financial privacy of law-abiding people. Does it really make sense for the feds to know about any $200 financial transaction? I don’t see how anyone can think so. All told, Trump has delivered some laudable libertarian things. But on balance, this is not a libertarian administration. For every libertarian policy win, Trump is inflicting even bigger anti-libertarian losses on people, markets and systems.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com