Sen. Rand Paul On Opposing Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Tariffs, His Role in the Senate, Ukraine, Free Speech, and More
Glenn interviews Senator Rand Paul about his opposition to the "Big Beautiful Bill" and his role in the Senate, why Washington continues to increase the defense budget, threats to free speech, and more. ------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
been in the United States for the last 10, 11 days or so, traveling for various events and podcasts and interviews.
Some of you may have seen some of the ones I did, including the one with Dr. Carlson that was almost two and a half hours, one of our longest we've ever done, that covered range of topics that I, if you have some time, really highly recommend.
But for tonight we have somebody who is directly in the middle of two of the biggest news stories on Capitol Hill, one because he's become the primary opponent of the
And I'm talking, of course, about Senator Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky who often defends President Trump, but also, just like his father did, it's sort of the Paul brand, has very strong principles that they've held for many years that they refuse to bend or break.
In order to appease anybody or placate anybody, including in this case even President Donald Trump, as a result of Paul's opposition to Trump's bill that he's trying to get past, Trump posted some very Trumpian tweets earlier today attacking Rand Paul, saying he doesn't understand the bill, suggesting that he ought to be out of Congress.
Very possible that two weeks from now Paul will be a very vocal defender of something Trump cares about and he'll post something saying Rand Paul is one of the greatest politicians Kentucky has ever had.
But it's very Rand Paul type of politics, which I think is commendable.
And we want to talk to him about not only the reasons that he's opposing this bill, the reason is pretty straightforward.
It massively increases the debt, which is something that Senator Paul believes is dangerous for the United States, but also how he sees his role, whether his loyalty is supposed to be to the president who just got elected with a broad mandate in the United States or whether it's the people of Kentucky or his own principles and what happens when those We've covered a lot of other issues with him as well, including the neocon push for war in Iran.
And the overall foreign policy direction of the United States, whether under President Trump, it really is signifying a break from prior Administrations, we talk a lot about the war in Ukraine.
And then finally, the free speech assault that has been underway for almost five months now since the Trump administration began in the name of protecting Israel.
Senator Paul gave a very strong defense of the First Amendment last month in opposition to a new bill called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that would have expanded the types of ideas about Israel that you are now prohibited from saying in colleges.
So we examine not just the free speech issue but how Republicans have been reacting to free speech attacks since President Trump.
As always, Senator Paul is a very good guest because he speaks his mind.
You know that whatever he's saying, whether you disagree or not, he believes in.
And here is our interview with Senator Paul.
Enjoy.
Senator Paul, it's great to see you back on the show.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
I don't know if this is necessarily what we were intending to talk about when we first invited you a couple weeks ago, but now you're in the middle of the debate and controversy over the gigantic budget bill that Donald Trump and many members of Congress are advocating.
You yourself have become a vocal opponent of it.
Based on arguments that you and your Your colleagues in the libertarian movement have long been arguing that it increases the debt.
Our debt is already unsustainable.
And it's not the first time, but this is the second time that you become a vocal opponent of President Trump's, one of his signature policies, when he became a vocal opponent of his terrorist policy as well.
And President Trump, I'm sure you saw, attacked you earlier today, saying something like, you don't understand the bill, it's time for you to be removed from Congress.
I'm just wondering how you think about, in your role as a senator, The various kind of obligations that you have on the one hand to the president who was elected based on a pretty large mandate that included a whole variety of ideas about the budget and then the state of Kentucky and its constituents and then your own principles and your own conscience and how you navigate those or prioritize them in the event that they conflict.
Well, you know, I think each person in elected office is elected with their own sort of mandate or their own sort of promises.
You promise people, you tell people what you stand for.
And one of the key proponents I've talked about and stood for from the very beginning is I believe in a very limited government, a federal government that's, I used to say, so small you can barely see it.
I don't want it involved in our personal lives or economic lives.
I want a very, very small government.
But that would be a government that runs a balanced budget.
And so these are things that I've been for.
You know, from the beginning, from the beginning of my entry into public life.
So it would be hard for me to change that.
With the bill that's before us, the big, beautiful bill, what I am opposed to is primarily raising the debt ceiling $5 trillion, because the implication is if you raise it $5 trillion, that means you're going to borrow $5 trillion over the next year or two.
To put this in perspective, in March of this year, The Republicans were confronted with a spending bill.
They had to keep government open or not.
They had to keep it open at certain levels.
Interestingly, most of the Republicans in March voted to keep it open at the Biden spending levels, which is kind of ironic since during the campaign they criticized Bidenomics and Biden spending and Biden this and Biden that.
But the spending levels they voted for in March were Biden's spending levels.
But as a consequence, in September, at the end of our fiscal year, the deficit's going to be about $2, $2.2 trillion.
So I voted against those spending levels.
But now my concern is that if we're going to borrow $2 trillion this year and they want to raise the ceiling to $5 trillion, what does that mean for next year?
I think it means they're going to borrow well over $2 trillion again next year, which to me doesn't sound like what we say we stand for.
So I'm just not for it.
Well, and just on those lines, I mean, this is an argument that I actually have been hearing a lot but don't quite understand.
And the argument has been, look, yes, you were elected to represent the people of Kentucky, but Donald Trump was represented to elect the entire country, got this mandate.
You on some level owe him some deference.
I don't recall President Trump running on a platform of massively increasing federal borrowing or the federal debt.
And in fact, his one of his principal Earlier today, Elon Musk seemed to have sided with you and essentially said that he agrees completely that this bill is, in his words, an abomination, principally because of its failure to cut the necessary spending that would get our debt lowered.
Do you think that that might have an impact in either requiring a kind of fundamental overhaul of this bill or even potentially stopping it?
Well, you know, he has a fairly significant platform.
What do they call it?
Oh, X. You know, what used to be Twitter is X. That's a pretty big platform.
So his message definitely gets out there.
And to put it in contrast, this is, I think, what is sad about it.
He gave up, you know, a portion of his life to come in, try to help the country, try to find waste and fraud and get rid of it.
So they came up with about $200 billion, give or take, but about $200 billion worth of actual savings that they found.
The new bill we're looking at has $300 billion worth of new spending for military and for border.
And so the new bill actually spends more than all of the accumulated savings that Doge found, which has yet to be codified, but the contrast between the two.
And to my mind, look, I don't believe in a wide-open border, but I also don't think that if you're fiscally conservative, you should believe in unlimited money for a border.
There is also the argument that 95% of the influx of people across the border has diminished just by the sheer personality of Donald Trump as much as anything, that maybe we don't need a wall or a fence for the remaining thousand miles.
But then they ask us for 46 billion.
At the current expenditures, that would pave or make a wall for 7,000 miles.
And some wise anchor in my caucus said, "Oh, yeah, we're going to make a fence with Canada next." And he was joking.
But the thing is, is we can't just quit being fiscally conservative when we believe in, you know, well, the government has a role in having a secure border.
It doesn't mean we should throw, you know, throw out the baby with the bathwater and just spend anything.
We still should be fiscally conservative on what we spend.
Of course, there's always the question, as you know, is, you know, I remember we spent, you know, two months focused almost entirely on Doge and Elon Musk cuts and the White House claim that he was really eliminating finally all this fat and unnecessary spending in the government.
something like, as you said, $150, $250 billion.
And in one fell swoop, President Trump announced very proudly that he wanted to have the first ever trillion-dollar military budget, which would require basically the
The question then always becomes, you know, you have your colleague Josh Hawley, a Republican, saying, I won't vote for any bill that cuts Medicaid because that is the medical program on which the people who voted us into office rely.
Do you think that a chunk of the cuts that you've envisioned as necessary to get down this national debt can be made safely in national defense, or do you think it needs to cut into the programs that all polls show Americans like most, which are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security?
I've felt from the very beginning that this bill was secretly hijacked and sometimes not so secretly hijacked by the neoconservatives who want to explode the military budget.
They care about defense contractors.
They get rewarded by defense contractors.
They really love war in a way.
They love agitation and war wherever they can find it.
And they sort of fear war ever-ending, you know, because it's this constant supply of billions and trillions of dollars.
But they hijacked this bill.
From the very beginning, that's all they cared about.
It was increasing the military levels, but they'd already gotten an increase in the military levels.
The military levels was the one thing up here that's been exempt from any kind of restraint, and then they want to add another $150 billion on top of about a 3% increase from last year.
We still spend more on our military than the next at least 10 countries combined.
It is not a small amount of money, an extraordinary amount of money we have.
Bases in 700 countries.
So there's a lot we could do on restraint.
Now, the good thing is, is that on occasion, Donald Trump really does sound like a president who believes in foreign policy restraint.
When he was in Saudi Arabia, he said the era of nation building and interfering in everybody's country is over.
And that sounded good.
And I think many of his instincts are in that direction.
But I think he has some advisers.
We won't name any names, but Lindsey Graham, that really want something different than what the president wants.
I think they are part of the ones who are trying to use the big, beautiful bill to get what they want, which is an exploded military budget.
I think it's such a crucial point, though, because if you propose, you know, a constituent of yours comes in a county in Kentucky and complains about a failing sewage system, and you propose, or someone proposes in the state, Renovating the sewage system, the first question is going to be, how can we pay for this?
Are we going to cut some other program?
Are we going to raise taxes?
But you say, I think we have to start attacking Iran's nuclear facilities with massive military force that's likely to provoke Middle East escalation in a regional war.
I never once heard anybody, in terms of a proposed optional war, ever ask in the media, well, how are we going to pay for that?
The assumption is, well, we just pay for our wars.
Is that something that is becoming with the kind of newer that I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for, this newer sense that we fight too many wars that harms our country in lots of ways, including financially?
Is there some at least greater resistance to this idea that we can just go headlong into endless wars without really harming ourselves seriously on the budget and on the debt crisis?
I think there is a portion of the Republican voters or the Republican primary that believes in fiscal restraint, even with regard to the military.
There's also a portion that believes in more of a realism or more restraint.
For example, you know, I never fail to remind people that everybody wants to use Ronald Reagan to their purposes because he was popular.
So the neoconservatives, they all trot out Ronald Reagan as this big interventionist and believing in all this.
But I remember a Ronald Reagan who also negotiated on nuclear arms, who believed in a nuclear free world that had a healthy...
And in fact, it sometimes takes a strong leader like that to sit down.
He sat down with Gorbachev.
And it was one of the, I think, seminal moments of the last 15 years.
And I think Ronald Reagan and sitting down with Gorbachev largely deserve a lot of credit for that.
So I think there's a couple of competing factions within the party.
Some see it on fiscal terms, but some also see restraint as a better model.
So I would compare the first George Bush to the second George Bush and say the first George Bush believed in more restraint.
Still was an interventionist, but compared to the second George Bush who was going to make The first George Bush was a little more circumspect.
So I think there is a spectrum within the party, and I think definitely many of the instincts of Donald Trump are towards restraint, and I try to accentuate that and compliment it as much as I can.
You know, I think one of the interesting parts of that Reagan history as well is that when we had the military barracks in Lebanon that got brutally attacked, 258 Marines killed, there was enormous pressure placed on President Reagan by all sorts of neocons at the time, by people in the region including Israel to go attack Iran in retaliation.
And his response instead was, I don't want to start a new war with Iran.
My question is, why do we even have that military base there?
And instead, he ordered it removed from Lebanon on the grounds that we had no interest in having a military base there in the first place.
A lot of these things get lost, and we have repeated debates.
Let me just stay on the Iran issue for a second, because it is interesting that you get criticized for opposing some of President Trump's policies, even though you've been among his most vocal and aggressive supporters on it.
An endless number of issues.
When you have people who are in our colleagues of yours, we've all named names like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham and others, who have been very open about the fact that they are basically trying to sabotage what President Trump has repeatedly said is his urgent goal of avoiding a war with Iran by reaching a nuclear agreement to the point where they're setting conditions that they know are impossible, saying they're threatening President Trump and saying we won't get your deal through the Senate for approval.
Where is this, in your view, deep in Washington, this war behind the scenes between two factions about whether we should try and get a deal with Iran or whether we should pretend to try and get a deal with Iran and then go to war with them?
Yeah, I think setting preconditions for President Trump makes it less likely that we'll get any kind of deal.
And this is not just with Iran.
saying that there will be a zero enrichment from the very beginning.
Maybe you don't get the negotiation started.
But it's also the same as us insisting that In fact, I think the only way you're going to get peace between Ukraine and Russia, if it's possible, and it's looking less likely that it's possible, is that both sides will agree to disagree on the principal matter.
Ukraine will still believe that Crimea is part of it, but it will be part of Russia because Russia physically holds it.
The same probably with the Donbass.
And you have something like Korea, where both sides still disagree, both sides still say the entire peninsula of Korea belongs to them, and yet they're at a standoff on who occupies the territory.
But it's also like President Trump's decision to have talks with Kim Jong-un in his first term.
I was for that.
Most of the neocons and most of the foreign policy establishment was against it because they wanted preconditions to be met.
Well, those preconditions had We should still be talking with Russia.
I think we should still be talking with China.
They have nuclear weapons and we are foolish to be provocative and then not have channels of conversation.
I think we should be meeting quarterly on nuclear arms.
Whether we have an agreement or not, whether we get to an agreement, simply to have those discussions between our scientists, between the men and women who count up all of the nuclear arms, we need to be having those discussions.
And it's a mistake to grow so far apart that we don't.
And with regard to Taiwan, I think if we quit trading with China, that's the day that China will invade Taiwan.
I think it's the opposite of what they think.
They think we're going to teach China a lesson by not trading with them.
I think they'll learn the lesson that if there's nothing left to lose, that they might as well invade Taiwan.
I think they don't invade Taiwan because in one reason they fear loss of our trade.
So all of these areas are areas where the neocons have inserted themselves and I think are going to make diplomacy much more difficult.
There's some speculation.
I don't think entirely unfounded.
I think you can point to some data points that support it, which suggests that the neocons in Washington have lost some weight and influence with President Trump.
You know, the kind of firing of Mike Waltz being just a symbol of that, but much more so President Trump's actions in ending the bombing of Yemen without really consulting the Israelis, going to the Middle East without the Israelis.
Several other actions as well, and of course pursuing the Iran deal over the Israelis' objections.
And then I have other people who have studied the neocons for a long time and the kind of structure that they've created, a very effective one, who say, no, that's way overstating the kind of breach that has taken place between these two camps.
I think Iran really, at least for me, I don't know if you agree, but is the ultimate test case at the moment for whether we end up in a bombing campaign with them or not, or an actual deal that both sides sign.
Do you think that because of President Trump's seemingly almost instinctive aversion to full-on neocon doctrine, his dislike of people who just want to go to war casually, that they have lost some influence as compared to, say, the last couple of decades when they've always reigned supreme no matter which party wins?
You know, I think when you look in at a lot of the different foreign policy decisions of President Trump, you can see evidence of restraint and then you see exceptions.
And often Iran is an exception to restraint and often Israel is an exception to restraint.
I would say, though, that the fact that he is having conversations and wants to have conversations with Iran is a good sign and a good step forward.
I think that...
You know, time will tell, but there are many people, you know, the people writing letters saying that it has to be zero enrichment are trying to sabotage the discussions before the discussions begin.
I will say it's a valid criticism that the agreement under Obama was a nuclear agreement, appeared to work and appeared to lower enrichment, but it didn't appear to deter Iran from conventional sort of funding proxies and proxy wars.
So really the ultimate piece with Iran has to offer a carrot.
The carrot is trade and normalization of our behavior with them, but really I think it has to be bigger than just us and them.
So I think ultimately the grander peace plan maybe isn't just the U.S. and Iran.
Maybe it's the U.S.-Iran.
The Gulf Sheikdoms, as well as Israel.
Now, that becomes more complicated because there's so many moving parts, but ultimately that's what you want, is not just no enrichment or less enrichment.
What you really want is to stop all the different Sunni-Shia battles throughout the region.
All right, the time we have left, I want to ask you about what I think was going to be when we kind of arranged with your staff to have you on a few weeks ago.
The first question, I think it was what prompted us to reach out to you or vice versa, was You had given a speech about free speech and the dangers of censorship about a month ago in the Senate, and we had you on our show several times, a lot of other people on the show several times during the Biden years, where we all talked about the extreme dangers of these new forms of censorship descending from the Biden campaign, certain kinds of speech becoming, even though way, way far away from being illegal, nonetheless repressed in all sorts of bureaucratic and even legal ways sometimes.
You were essentially arguing against a bill that the Trump administration had backed, that members of both parties had backed, that you felt was the same type or strain of censorship, if not a worse kind.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
And in general, how do you assess the Trump approach thus far to issues of free speech, which he also did center in the campaign?
Yeah, I think you're talking about the anti-Semitism bill that came forward.
And so the thing is, is things come forward, and most civilized people, mature people, would say, well, it's terrible to hate people because of their race.
And if there was a sense of the Senate to say to hate people who are Jewish is wrong and that anti-Semitism is wrong, everyone would sign on, including myself.
I'm not for judging people according to race.
But what they wanted to do was this definition from the International Holocaust Commission.
And in it, it lists examples of what might be antisemitism.
and it says that if you refer to Israel as a racist state, that would be anti-Semitism.
And the question I ask, and I don't say it to be funny, Well, that would be a country based on race.
Would that be a racist state?
So would we be forbidden from having this discussion right now about what Netanyahu's opinion of whether only Jews would vote or whether Arabs would vote?
I know some Arabs do vote in Israel, but many on the West Bank don't.
But some of the settlers on the West Bank do.
But those are discussions of policy and what should happen.
And I don't know that they really could be decided.
One of the other things, and this is what I thought was kind of a little humorous, is they said that generalizations about Jews would be considered to be anti-Semitism, and Do you know that most of their jokes are about generalizations about Jews?
And I said, I know for a fact that not all Jews are funny.
And so Bernie Sanders was there, who is Jewish, and who agreed with me on this.
And so I said I wanted to enter into the record.
The names of 479 Jewish American comedians who I believe had made generalizations and remarks about Jews as a class of people.
And I was worried that these comedians would someday, you know, no longer be allowed to perform.
And this isn't an idle point.
I mean, people like Jerry Seinfeld, who just happens to be Jewish, won't perform on college campuses because people have lost their damn sense of humor.
Most jokes are about generalizations.
They're about making fun of characteristics that don't apply to all people and you apply them to every person in that category to make a joke, for goodness sakes.
But this is a serious business and I don't want to involve the Department of Education and police from the federal government going to colleges.
And arresting people for things like generalizations.
The other one that was ludicrous from it was, if you claim that the Jews killed Jesus, and it's like, well, But for goodness sakes, if you read the Bible and you believe it, it did say some Jews killed Jesus.
And can we not have a discussion?
You know, I mean, it'd be kind of crazy to say, oh, people can't read certain portions.
Christians can't read certain portions of the Bible because that would be considered anti-Semitism.
But this is not a very mature discussion.
It's a bunch of people Right, and the interesting thing is, under these provisions that they want to incorporate into law, but also college hate speech rules, and this is the last question.
The irony, of course, is that you can say the United States is a racist endeavor.
You can say Peru or Indonesia or China.
You just can't say that Israel is.
Or you can generalize about white people under these standards.
So it is clearly content-based, but beyond the kind of frivolity or the irony of it, I've heard libertarians talk about this for many, many years before I even realized it, is that I've watched conservatives for the last eight years vocally and vehemently object to exactly these sorts of kinds of bills.
We have to protect black people from racially insensitive comments through censorship bills, trans people, immigrants, women.
And all of these were rejected outright.
Like, yeah, you might find those ideas or those jokes or whatever deeply offensive, but the danger of allowing the government to regulate that speech is so much more dangerous and contrary to what our country has been standing for.
There have been some conservatives, not just you, who objected, but by and large, obviously, a lot of the support is coming from the Trump White House.
How is it that you explain that?
I mean, because sometimes for me, I think, yes, we're all hypocritical.
are not perfect machines of consistency, but to spend so many years running around vehemently bashing the table about the evils of censorship, only to then support bills that, on their face, are designed to restrict certain ideas from being expressed without punishment, seems so hard for me Is it just they're trying to curry favor with interest groups or is there something else deeper there?
I think many people don't even read the bills.
Many of the people up here say, oh, anti-Semitism.
I don't want to be on record as being opposed to anti-Semitism.
Oh, my goodness.
And so they run immediately to sign up and co-sponsor it.
And then I have conversations in the cloakroom with these people.
I'm like, oh, I didn't know that was in there.
But then some of them need cover, too.
And it actually is comforting when I can read of a conservative Christian or a pastor who's read this and also says, well, Of course, we think that Israel and the Jews are the chosen people, but this isn't right to forbid this kind of speech because it might forbid something that we actually read in the Bible.
You know, we look for those voices to try to get people to think beyond, you know, I would be opposed to it because I think it's government overreach.
But we look for voices like that that are reasonable and rational to try to let no conservatives that, yeah, you can.
And so what they did to the bill is they heard us and they put a little statement in there saying nothing in here can be contradictory to the First Amendment.
And I said, well, everything in here that is in the definition is contradictory to the First Amendment.
You can't just say all this stuff that contradicts the First Amendment and say, oh, yeah, but we're going to obey the First Amendment.
Thank you very much.
And case settled.
And then they tried to say, oh, it was just about actions, you know, preventing Jewish students from going across campus.
And I say, I'm not...
I'm absolutely fine.
You can't do that.
I'm fine with removing people who put a tent up in a public area if there's a rule against a tent being there.
If you pay and it's a university and the university says no tents, there's no tents, no matter what your issue is.
But that has nothing to do with speech.
And that had nothing to do with the bill as well.
You know, I kept hearing, oh, no, we need this bill.
These students are rambunctious.
And you read the bill and you kept trying to tell them, no, this bill has nothing to do with protests.
It's purely about political speech.
Well, I'm going to have to run, but I appreciate the conversation.
