In an interview with Reason magazine two weeks in the past, Sen. Rand Paul recommended that congressional Republicans had been uncomfortable with a lot of what President Donald Trump was doing. But the senator mentioned they had been too “afraid” to do one thing about it.
“Even with the tariffs, you know, the farm-state senators will all privately tell you, ‘We are free trade, and this is killing our farmers,’” Paul mentioned.
He added: “What Founding Father would ever have imagined a Congress with no ambition? Completely without ambition. Feckless. Completely without principles. And afraid of their own shadow. Afraid of their own president. And unable to even squeak.”
But there is one very particular species of Republican that is increasingly prepared to squeak fairly loudly: the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican.
In the House, it’s been Rep. Thomas Massie, who was instrumental in forcing the discharge of the Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata. And within the Senate, it’s increasingly Paul saying what he suggests his colleagues actually suppose.
Paul has sometimes clashed with Trump since he first grew to become president in 2017 – and notably declined to endorse him in 2024. But the clashes are coming quicker as of late, notably because the president has taken steps which can be decidedly big-government and un-libertarian.
Paul seems much less content material to merely specific opposition and extra prepared to take action with gusto.
A working example got here on Tuesday. Paul didn’t simply elevate questions in regards to the administration’s second strike on an alleged drug vessel — and whether or not that might need constituted a struggle crime, as some other Republicans have. He really accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of lying about the situation.
“Do we think there’s any chance that … the secretary of the defense did not know there had been a second strike?” Paul mentioned. “So as a country, we’re just going to let people lie to us, to our face?”
Even earlier than the September “double-tap” strike got here to mild final week, Paul was unvarnished in his evaluate of the administration’s already legally dubious initial strikes on the suspected drug vessels.
In October, he went as far as to name them “extrajudicial killings.”
He added two weeks in the past at Dartmouth College: “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
After Trump this week pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug-trafficker, some high Republicans punted by claiming ignorance in regards to the scenario or just mentioned Trump has the authorized energy to do it. Few have been prepared to deal with the morality of it or the obvious hypocrisy of lodging the pardon whilst Trump threatens to strike different nations to fight drug-trafficking.
But Paul mentioned it put the “craziness” of the administration’s efforts “in stark relief.”
“You could literally probably say he’s been responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of deaths for what he did,” Paul mentioned of Hernández. “And he gets a break.”
When Vice President JD Vance in September known as the boat strikes the “highest and best use of our military” and shrugged off these labeling it a struggle crime, Paul blanched.
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” the senator wrote on X.
When Trump just lately accused a half-dozen Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behavior, punishable by death” after they urged service members to disobey unlawful orders, some Republicans gently recommended the president’s response was overwrought or ill-advised. But Paul known as it “reckless, inappropriate, irresponsible.”
And there’s a lot extra the place this got here from:
-
Paul was the lone GOP holdout towards Trump’s large coverage invoice and the GOP’s latest authorities funding efforts over spending issues. He mentioned at Dartmouth that he voted towards the coverage invoice “because there has to be somebody left in the Republican Party that thinks deficits are a problem and that we shouldn’t spend so much.”
-
“I think the [Republican] party has become more a party about loyalty to one person, and I think that it is a problem,” he added.
-
He mentioned throughout a latest look at Brown University {that a} commerce deficit, which Trump has used to justify his tariffs, “is a statistic that means absolutely nothing.” He mentioned of Trump’s views on free commerce: “You can’t make America great again if you don’t understand what made America great in the first place.”
-
Paul has wagered that the boat strikes may very well be a pretext to go to war with Venezuela, which he opposes and has labored with Democrats to attempt to rein in Trump’s powers on.
-
He recommended Trump’s bailout of Argentina may very well be a “deal-breaker” with the MAGA base. (Indeed, a latest Marquette University Law School ballot confirmed 79% of Americans and a whopping 67% of Republicans opposed it.)
-
He has additionally strongly criticized Trump’s military parade, his administration’s efforts to apply pressure on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, and Trump’s “lawfare” towards his political opponents.
In different phrases, Paul has hit on a lot of the large latest controversies. While different Republicans pressure to keep away from weighing in, he doesn’t actually maintain again.
So, why Rand Paul?
It doubtless owes to lots of the identical elements that made Massie such a forceful and resilient Trump foil within the House. When you come up in GOP politics as a libertarian, it suggests you maintain ideas close to and pricey. (The simpler course, in any case, could be working as a extra standard-issue Republican.)
But maybe greater than that is the truth that Trump appears to have run counter to those libertarian and small-government ideas extra than he has earlier than. While he appealed to the nationwide Libertarian Party for assist through the 2024 marketing campaign, he’s hardly ruled prefer it.
The boat strikes aren’t the administration’s solely affront to due course of, in any case; it has additionally deported folks to a international jail and elsewhere with out hearings and moved to deport authorized immigrants for pro-Palestinian speech.
Trump’s efforts to wield the heavy hand of presidency towards establishments, faculties, the media and others are additionally decidedly un-libertarian.
Indeed, Trump’s second time period appears to be largely about amassing energy within the govt. It’s not tough to see how that might rub a libertarian the mistaken means.
Whether this libertarian resistance will finally matter, stays to be seen. But we’ve already seen within the House how folks with hard-right credibility talking their minds can transfer the needle — each with Massie and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia on the Epstein recordsdata, though the latter has since introduced she’s not working for reelection.
We’ve seen in polling that some on the best have had issues with what Trump has accomplished, and Massie and Greene put a face on that.
In the Senate, it seems to be like that’s falling to Paul.