Rand Paul Blasts 'Knucklehead' Stephen Miller

The Kentucky senator is also not a big fan of military parades, populist economics, or shredding due process.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who has been the leading GOP opponent to what President Donald Trump has branded as the "Big, Beautiful Bill," was informed by the administration that he and his family would be barred from attending today's annual White House picnic.

"The level of immaturity is beyond words," Paul told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. "I don't know if this came from the president on down, let's hope not; but if not, it's coming from these petty staffers who have been running sort of a paid influencer campaign against me for two weeks on Twitter….It really makes me lose a lot of respect I once had for Donald Trump….They have shown over the last week they don't care about my vote at all.…Instead they've decided to try to attack my character….The same people that are directing this campaign are the same people that casually would throw out parts of the Constitution and suspend habeas corpus."

That last part was a reference to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been spearheading the administration's attempts to increase immigration arrests tenfold while arguing in the process that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended." Miller has been singling out libertarian-leaning Republicans like Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) for their obstructionism, telling Charlie Kirk last week, "You will never live a day in your life where a libertarian cares as much about immigration and sovereignty as they do about the Congressional Budget Office." (Massie, too, had his White House picnic-tix withheld.)

Minutes before learning of his disinvitation (which Trump magnanimously overturned Thursday morning), Paul came on The Fifth Column podcast that I co-host, talking about his opposition to the spending bill, his attitude toward Saturday's big military parade in Washington, D.C. ("missiles and tanks in the streets just isn't a great symbol"), and "that knucklehead" in the White House who wants to suspend habeas corpus.

"Zealous supporters of the president, they're all over me," Paul told us. "If you read my Twitter feed, it's like…Haters Anonymous….I think a lot of them, frankly, are paid, but a lot of them are morons, you know, and it's hard to tell the difference."

Mocked by MAGA meme-slingers as a riot-loving "China shill" with "creepy weird noodle hair," Paul was eager to clarify both his departures from and support of Trump's deportation policies.

"It is true that I don't want to kill migrants," he said. "It's true that I don't want to kill you, even if you're here illegally; I'm against that. It's true that I don't want suspend to habeas corpus like that knucklehead at the White House wants to do. That's all true, but I'm not for an open border. I think there has to be order. I'm for more lawful immigration, but there are libertarians that don't believe we should have any borders; I'm really not one."

Paul credits Trump for having "largely controlled the border through sheer willpower and bravado," changing the situation "dramatically…since the Biden days, without any new money." And, as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, he has signaled openness to increasing border control spending, though at rates lower than the Department of Homeland Security's wishlist. (That funding gap reportedly led to a shouting match Thursday between Miller and GOP senators.)

The libertarian-leaning Republican hedged about the propriety of the president sending National Guard troops and even Marines to help enforce federal immigration law over the objection of sitting governors, saying "I'm not an absolutist either way on it."

"I've always said that police work should be done by policemen," he said. "It's a difficult job, but policemen are trained in the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, and…their rules of engagement are much different than the Army." But also: "If the mayor and the governor are saying we are going to resist the law, the supreme law of the land, and…when we arrest people who are wanted for being illegal also, we're not going to tell the federal government, even though that's a federal law, and we will try to sneak them out of the courthouse…there is a conflict, you know, and something's going to have to [give]."

As for the type of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action we've seen these past two weeks at workplaces and routine asylum check-ins, Paul predicted public support may start to sag.

"I think that…deporting folks when it gets beyond the criminal element is going to…founder a bit," he said. "I don't have a lot of sympathy for people committing crimes. They need to be arrested, and once they've served their time here, I think it's a good reason to deport [them]. But I think it changes, and the mood of the country will change, when it's somebody who's been a maid for 20 years, isn't committing any crime, and is…would probably take a work permit if she could figure out how to get [one]."

The president himself seemed to signal a change in that direction Thursday, posting on Truth Social, "Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace."

Paul may be grudgingly open to forcing National Guard troops into riotous situations, but he's no fan at all of this Saturday's big military parade in Washington, D.C., on the president's 79th birthday.

"If I say picture in your mind a military parade, I challenge anybody not to think of the Soviet Union or North Korea, because that's the only image that pops into my head," he said. "It's like, yeah, we can commemorate. We can talk about how great our military is. But you know, missiles and tanks in the streets just isn't a great symbol. A free country is a country with a limited government, and really not one predicated on a massive military."

Despite being singled out by Trump and Miller, at a time when the modern GOP has embraced explicitly antilibertarian populism, Paul seems energized by current and future GOP battles over spending, tariffs, price controls, and censorship.

"I think there's going to be a struggle for the direction of the Republican Party," he said. "The populists are…anti-Big Business, they're antimerger, they're for micromanagement of things…they hate vertical integration. And it's like, who are these Neanderthals? Vertical integration is simply a way to try to compete and reduce the price of the product by vertically integrating. It's part of the economic development of capitalism, and they want to ban it. I mean, we have these lawsuits against Google and others for selling stuff that is compatible with their other stuff. It's just ridiculous, but it comes from this populism."

Businesses in Kentucky, Paul says, have been foursquare against Trump's tariff regime.

"I meet with business all the time—small, big, medium, large—and there's a lot more friendliness coming from them than there had been in the past," he said. "So I think there could be a coalition, because libertarians are for the free market, and the free market benefits people who make good stuff and sell good stuff and convince consumers to buy their stuff. So there is a possibility for business, free market folks, free speech folks, libertarians. I think there is a coalition, and it has to be a coalition that fears the populist and sees what's going on."

"I will be, in some way or fashion, a part of that as we move forward, figuring out the direction. Where are we going to go as a party? Is populism going to win? Is it going to be Trump and J.D. Vance? Or is it going be something more to a free market side?"