Trump Is the Liberal Candidate

In the 2024 American presidential election, one of the two major party candidates, the Democrat Kamala Harris, was installed with zero democratic input. Her party weaponized the legal system against their Republican opponent, attempted to throw him off state ballots, attempted to imprison him, forced third-party challengers off ballots, restricted free speech, and now continue to threaten free speech.

Donald Trump won his Republican primary for president by vote, vows to protect free speech from Democrats who seek to deny it, and his top surrogates, the former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, have endorsed him in large part because they see him as a bulwark against the left’s increasing attacks on the First Amendment.

Harris has been called one of the most liberal senators in US history. If “liberal” merely means leftist, as it often does in America, there is a point.

But if we are talking about classical liberalism—which a rudimentary Google search describes broadly as “relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise”—Harris is no liberal. She and her party now actively thwart basic rights, liberties and democracy, and apparently sees nothing inherent problematic in doing so.

The greatest defender of liberalism in this election is Donald Trump.

This doesn’t make Trump a liberal. Arguably his most illiberal act was when he asked the former Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral college votes that could have overturned the 2020 presidential election in his favor. This is the stuff of dictators, and thankfully Pence obeyed the Constitution and denied his boss.

You will hear about Trump’s attempt to do this, combined with an alleged “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, from the establishment media for the foreseeable future. It’s an undeniable stain on his record and legacy.

But you will not hear about Democrats’ and Kamala Harris’s rampant illiberalism. Not from the establishment media, who see themselves as part of the same team helping Harris win in November.

As Brazil bans platforms like X (formerly Twitter), England arrests citizens for “hate speech,” social media company owners are arrested in France, Kamala Harris is definitely on the side of this trend of liberal democracies rejecting liberalism. She told CNN in 2019 that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”

“Stop” how? Who decides what can be said? Who oversees and regulates?

President Harris?

The Biden-Harris administration has already shown its brazen willingness to tamp down on and manipulate citizens’ speech, via the recent admission of Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg. Just two years ago, the Biden administration attempted to create a “Disinformation Governance Board” that would have implemented some of the “oversight” and “regulation” of Americans’ speech that Harris envisions. Harris has threatened to sic the Department of Justice on social media platforms that spread “misinformation.”

The establishment media does not even recognize these attacks on free speech as a problem. It’s not talked about. It’s normalized. Defended, even.

But Republicans have noticed.

At a campaign rally on Sunday, Trump actively took the liberal position “I will bring back free speech in America… I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.”

Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump supporter, former Democratic congresswoman, and Army veteran, says she was put on a government watchlist for speaking out against Biden-Harris. “Kamala says she believes in freedom, but I was put on a secret terror watch list after I publicly criticized her,” Gabbard wrote on X. “No one will be safe from political retaliation under a Harris administration. I put my life on the line for this country. Now the government calls me a terror threat.”

In addition to targeting citizens, the Democratic party also appears to be done, at least right now, with actual democracy—for its own nominee or any would-be challengers.


Progressive third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the independent Cornel West saw Democratic efforts to deny them ballot access despite them meeting the required thresholds. After Nevada’s Supreme Court denied Stein from being on the ballot, the progressive pundit Briahna Joy Gray observed, “As long as the Democratic Party is openly rigging the election against third party candidates, no third party voter should feel a modicum of responsibility to vote for Democrats to ‘save democracy.’”

The old ACLU-infused Democratic Party that once championed the most elementary aspects of liberalism is seemingly gone.

Still, however imperfectly, it can be found in today’s GOP. Or as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained his endorsement of Trump in early September, “The phrase ‘old-fashioned liberals’ is key. I’m one of those liberals!”

“What that term means today is nearly the opposite of what it meant to my uncle and my father,” Kennedy said. “Liberal ideals are: equality before the law, freedom of speech, pro–working class policies, transparent government, opposition to war, regulation of large corporations, clean environment, opposition to authoritarian policies.”

“With some exceptions, old-fashioned liberalism is more at home in the Republican Party now than it is in the Democratic,” RFK insisted.

He’s right. There is a Democratic incumbent and a Republican challenger in this election.

One is sticking up for liberalism.