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True libertarians have been a footnote in Western politics for decades now (with most incarnations even claiming the label being really somewhere along the lines of being for less economic regulation than any more mainstream group and being largely indifferent about social liberties but recognising that sometimes pretending to care - "I hear you can't get enough votes for your preferred latest surveillance bill, are you sure we can't discuss some tax breaks?" style - can spook mainstream parties into supporting economic deregulation), but it does strike me as strange that you would choose to label the core Trumpian stuff as "libertarian" when it's pretty much approaching the polar opposite (increasingly economically authoritarian now that big business is firmly Blue, and socially authoritarian in a way that only sometimes seems not so because they are up against a different group of social authoritarians and on the margin fighting against any authoritarian ruler looks like fighting for freedom). Is it just because you see continuity between edgy outgroup youths claiming to be libertarian 15 years ago and edgy outgroup youths being alt-right now?
My reading of American "libertarianism" is that apart from the small true libertarian core a lot of people describing themselves as "libertarian" were just right-wing (vaguely or strongly), but didn't share what used to be one of the most crucial components of American right-wing thought - religiousness. Since Trumpism and other nationalist/populist movements and general secularization have created more alternatives to be right-wing and not religious, former libertarians gravitate to those movements, and would probably feel them to be in some way equivalent to their own libertarianism, even if they can't necessarily fully articulate how.
My personal and most likely extremely uncharitable take was that libertarians were simply people who are aware at some basic level that the government is hostile to their interests and the interests of people who are prone to believing in libertarian ideals more generally - but they're unable to articulate this due to the complicated and arcane ways in which power is both wielded against them and used to prevent them from voicing their objections. Their opposition to government power is based on that dim understanding that government is hostile to them, and so they want to reduce the ability of the government to harm them further by simply weakening it.
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A lot of self-identified "libertarians" from the Ron Paul (appropriate enough given that I'd describe Paul as more an anti-federalist than a libertarian, even though he ran on the LP's ticket once) era were just disaffected paleocons (think Pat Buchanan) who'd lost the power struggle with neoconservatives in the 90s. Trump rolled in an more or less ran on a Buchanan style platform and ran away with that group.
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As an American libertarian, absolutely not. I hate the rise of trumpism because it's opposed to my principles in many ways
As I implicated, I'm not talking about all the libertarians, certainly not the actually consistent ones, but folks who at one time saw fit to call themselves "libertarian" despite not actually being such, at least in an ideologically coherent way, and now might or might not do so.
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I’ve always thought libertarian in practice = conservatives wanted to brand away from conservatives And things like rationalist = democrats trying to not brand as democrats
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