What is it with ‘Republicans’ from Kentucky? Rep. Thomas Massie just signed on to a bill with left-wing Dem Ro Khanna to impeach Attorney General Pam Bondi over the redacted Epstein files. Finally-retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell is certainly no fan of the president. And now Sen. Rand Paul is upset with Trump – again – over the president’s decision to exercise his role as commander-in-chief.
Paul used a Sunday appearance on ABC News to lob predictable attacks at Trump and Vice President JD Vance, once again siding with legacy media narratives over a Republican administration confronting real-world threats.
Sitting down for a friendly one-on-one with ABC anchor Andrew Sorkin, Paul criticized the administration’s second seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker, questioned U.S. strikes on ISIS targets in Syria, and cast doubt on Vance’s future political ambitions—sniping from the sidelines as the White House moves aggressively to reassert American strength, deter adversaries, and restore order after years of foreign policy drift.
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“I consider it a provocation and a prelude to war,” Paul said regarding the operation to seize sanctioned oil. “It isn’t the job of the American soldier to be the policemen of the world. I am not for confiscating these liners. I am not for blowing up these boats of unarmed people that are suspected of being drug dealers. I am not for any of this.”
Paul went on to state that Trump’s Venezuelan policy was a departure from his past positions: “Donald Trump was against the Iraq war – against the regime change there. Now his administration is calling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. They should be a little more understanding that that term…has come to represent basically falsehood in intelligence.” He added: “I sure hope we don’t go to war with Venezuela.”
Well, first of all, there is no indication – yet – that Trump wants war with Venezuela. But he does want the flow of drugs coming from Venezuela into the U.S. to stop. And he is ready to enforce, as commander-in-chief, sanctions against countries who have been sanctioned by the U.S., unlike the previous administration. So there’s that. There’s also this: The fentanyl Venezuela and the Mexican cartels are running into our country are killing 100,000-plus Americans per year – and the deadly drug is also being manufactured with ingredients shipped in from China.
The conversation then shifted to Syria, where President Trump announced military strikes against ISIS targets following the tragic deaths of two U.S. service members in an ambush. Paul once again pointed out that this action seemed inconsistent with Trump’s foreign policy approach during his first term.
“You know, it’s hard not to want to hit back when they kill some of our own. But I would like to go back, really, to the first Trump administration when he said he didn’t want the troops there,” Paul stated. “There’s like 900 troops, maybe 1,000, maybe 1,500. They’re not enough to fight a war. They’re not enough to be an effective strategic force. What they are is a target and a tripwire.”
When asked about recent endorsements of Vice President JD Vance from Secretary of State Marco Rubio by Erika Kirk, Paul played the ‘cantankerous Kentucky Republican’ again and made clear the VP would not be receiving his backing—publicly distancing himself from the administration’s emerging 2028 standard-bearer:
I think there needs to be representatives in the Republican Party who still believe international trade is good, who still believe in free-market capitalism, who still believe in low taxes. See, it used to separate conservatives and liberals that conservatives thought it was a spending problem. We didn’t want more revenue. We wanted less spending.
But now all these pro-tariff protectionists, they love taxes. So they tax, tax, tax, and then they brag about all the revenue coming in. That has never been a conservative position. So I’m going to continue to try to lead a conservative free-market wing of the party, and we’ll see where things lead over time.
Paul isn’t wrong, per se, but he’s preaching to the wrong choir. Sure, those used to be hard-and-fast conservative positions, but two things can be true: Trump’s America First populism, whereby he’s trying to right the wrongs commited against our country for decades by our ‘friends’ who took economic advantage of us can also be the right thing to do – and still be ‘conservative.’
Kentucky is a red state. Trump won it handily three times. If anyone appears to be ‘out of touch’ with today’s populist conservative America First positions, it’s Paul & Co.
