Katherine Mangu-Ward

But as I say, the piece for The Times the last couple of weeks ago, I focused on immigration and trade and speech, where

You know, Trump is kind of being the least libertarian, although quite unlibertarian in so many ways.

There's a version of this piece I could have written under the Biden administration on the other side of the equation.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the version of this piece here is libertarians have been warning you about the dangers of debt and deficit.

And that actually, frankly, you can make that argument just as well under any administration.

But libertarians have been warning you about the dangers of entitlement programs that are totally out of control.

And we've been worrying about the dangers of overregulation.

And this would be places where people on the right would be in that moment when they are out of power and predisposed to be friendly to libertarians saying like, oh, yeah, that is something libertarians have been saying.

And it is something that, you know, a kind of Reaganite conservative maybe once said, but we might have lost sight of.

Yeah.

Well, when you're in the majority, you are tempted, understandably so, to think this is where we the word mandate always gets thrown around.

Right.

Oh, we have a mandate for the first of all.

American elections in recent memory haven't given anyone a mandate anywhere.

As far as I'm concerned, they're often very close.

There's low participation.

Right.

So there's this temptation to say, like, we won the election.