Mises always made the case that no matter if you are philosophical about liberty, or if you are just pure utilitarian about it, that both ended up in the same place. Libertarian is optimal for social interaction, and economic prosperity.

The thing is that Trump is not libertarian at all, but he was very utilitarian, and pragmatic at problem solving. It was facilitating to watch how it seemed to want to converge onto libertarianism in several cases.

The first thing was his hires. They were shit, but looking back this makes sense. In the private sector, you want to hire people who are skilled and have a reputation in their field, because the market tends to ween out the unproductive people over time. However, in the government sector, the people who are the most parasitic tend to rise to the top. It was fascinating to watch Trump hire people with high level government reputations, like Bolton, only to slowly figure out over time that they were shit and cycle them out. Same with Fauci, who wasn't fired, but in the last year was effectively sidelined.

The second thing was all the wars. In the private sector, no actor no matter how shitty is dealt with using personal violence. It was fascinating for Trump to be under high pressures to always get into wars and conflicts only to opt out at most every chance, almost as if he was guided by his business instinct. Also, when he did use violence it was carefully minimized, like an unpopulated irrelevant Syrian target that had warning ahead of time. Or like the highly targeted assignation of Salimani, instead of a military strike on Iran. Also, when he couldn't solve conflicts like the Palestinians, he instead focused on the potential for a bunch of edge regional conflicts, and incentive cooperation via economics. It was also fascinating to watch him talk like he was escalating with North Korea, while he was really deescalating.

Another interesting thing was the pharma and medical industry. The pharma patent cartels are a disaster, and he got around this by negotiating pricing based off their lowest priced customers. It didn't get rid of the patents, but eliminated the targeted pricing power patents impose having a similar effect. Also, for years I had been saying that the government shouldn't be in health care, but if they just deregulated it, market forces alone would drive down prices anyhow and make it within reach of most everybody, just like it did for the cell phone. Well, that is exactly what he tried to do. Also, it used to be that the FDA forbid advertising on price, that was later struck down by the supreme court, but everybody in health care knew that the FDA would make their life unhappy if they did. Well, Trump got around that by requiring hospitals to make their pricing publicly available. Once again, not freedom, but very pragmatic and similar with results.

It was also interesting to watch Trump with the tariffs. Early on, Trump cut 100 billion dollars worth of income taxes, and added 100 billion dollars worth of tariffs. The libertarians were right to decry all the damage caused by tariffs on the economy, and in fact our trade deficit is not better, but the thing is tariffs are harmful and destructive, but not as harmful and destructive as income taxes.

Another thing that was interesting to me, was immigration. For all the noise about the wall, and the countries he cut off, immigration overall remained strong. A lot of the people who thought he was going to lock out the latinos, ended up disillusioned.

One part where Trump failed in a big way though was the debt and the deficit, and I think this rings to the fact that in the real estate business, low interest rates and easy debt financing are seen as beneficial, but for the economy as a whole they are a disaster.

Trump also had a lot of failures, like shutting off the USA like he might shut out one of his private companies during the pandemic. Things that make sense for a private company, can be a disaster for a nation. The point is though, not that Trump was great at liberty, but that watching somebody who was results driven run a government was just plain interesting from a utilitarian perspective.