Once in a blue moon, President Donald Trump has a fleetingly good intuition or does something seemingly good (“good” from the point of view of preserving the hope of a free society). This is part of the problem.
Consider the announced closing of the “Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights Office” in the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA Begins to Put Environmental-Justice Workers On Leave,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2025). The very name of the bureau indicates that it should not exist. Let’s forget the mystery of the “external civil rights” (perhaps related to the future civil rights on Mars?) and focus on “environmental justice.” It degrades the central ideal of justice in law and political philosophy into a faddish political pursuit.
But this does not justify fighting this unicorn or other woke ideas with similarly absurd or authoritarian approaches. Interestingly, since the electoral campaign of 2016, Mr. Trump has been undermining real justice, of which the rule of law is inseparable, whenever it appeared to conflict with his self-interest.
Different clowneries do not make a better political philosophy than wokeness. As a sample, consider the threat of tariffs against Americans (a tariff is a tax on importers), which will also harm Canadian and Mexican producers; saving TikTok after trying to ban it in 2020, and even proposing to transform it into a state or mixed corporation (see my forthcoming “TikTok, Public Choice, and the Theater of the Absurd” in the Spring issue of Regulation); annexing Greenland by force if necessary or transforming Gaza in “the Riviera of the Middle East,” despite Mr. Trump’s promise to end “forever wars.” And counting. Trump does a few good things in bad ways and lots of bad things in between. If he has any (intuitive) ideology, it is the supremacy of collective choices, especially when he is the one to make them in his own personal interest.
Federal government practice has tried to make wokeness compulsory. Now, Trump is trying to ban it, as if there were only two modes for any individual choice: compulsory or banned. (However, I have defended the case that sexual mutilation of children should be off-limits.) This approach leads to funny government rhetoric, such as his February 5 Executive Order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”: the Secretary of Education, it is said, shall promptly
prioritize Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions (including athletic associations composed of or governed by such institutions) that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.
The United States is a large, diverse country. Suppose that somewhere a private college, which nobody is forced to attend, offers mixed athletic competition. Why would the federal Big Brother object? But if both A and non-A are true, nothing can be surprising. In the department of funny things, recall what Trump said before the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2019:
We stand in solidarity with LGBTQ people who live in countries that punish, jail, or execute individuals based upon sexual orientation.
Of course, there is nothing funny in tyrants punishing unusual private sexual tastes. Such tastes should be neither forbidden nor encouraged.
The danger is that bad or incoherent intuitions and their ultimate failure will lead both bad-faith individuals and well-meaning people to reject individual liberty because they have also been led to believe, incredibly, that this is what Trump and his sycophants defend. (See my New Year post “A Dangerous Pass in 2025 and Beyond.”)
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