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AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura


Former President Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. 

He was welcomed to the stage by Angela McArdle, the Libertarian National Committee Chair. She said that she had also invited Joe Biden to address the Convention, but he did not accept. Of course not. Joe Biden is barely able to operate with teleprompters, he could never address a potentially hostile crowd. 

Trump was willing to take on the task in the effort to reach out to libertarians. And that was quite a challenge, as some were solidly hostile, likely not happy that a candidate — other than a declared libertarian — was there. He got a fair amount of boos before he even began speaking. That didn’t make a lot of sense, to boo the major candidate who shows up and says he wants to listen to you. 

He also didn’t make them happy when he said he wanted them to work together and vote for him to stop Joe Biden (rather than voting for a libertarian). 

I have to give him all kinds of props for the effort to reach the audience. He started by calling for a moment of silence for the two Missouri missionaries who were killed in Haiti this week. 

As he spoke, the booing did go down a lot, including when Trump spoke about protecting freedoms and rights. It was a great recitation of the things he’d done to help protect freedoms, and reduce government regulation, taxes, and interference in our lives. 

He got cheers when he talked about stopping wars and not waging regime change around the world. He got cheers for talking against vaccine mandates. 

He got cheers when he said he would give power back to the states and to the people. He also got cheers when he said he would free the “peaceful” J6 people, as well as commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. Many of the people in the crowd were touting “Free Ross” signs, and they roared with approval at that. 

Ulbricht is the Silk Road founder, who was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The libertarians have championed his cause because they believe he should not have gotten a sentence like that for what he did. 

Trump kept stressing the importance of coming together to help beat Joe Biden because of the harm he was doing to the country. 

So, while I think it was a challenge, he hung in there, and I think he may have won some of them over. 

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