A Republican lawmaker thinks that President Donald Trump’s once-firm base is about to crumble even further.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that if Trump declares war on Venezuela, his “America First” supporters won’t like it.
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“Once there’s an invasion of Venezuela, or if they decide to re-up the subsidies and the gifts to Ukraine, I think you’ll see a splintering and a fracturing of the movement that has supported the president,” said Paul, the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
He added, “I think a lot of people, including myself, were attracted to the president because of his reticence to get us involved in foreign war.”
Sen. Rand Paul speaks during the confirmation hearing for Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in January. Eric Thayer via Getty Images
The MAGA movement is already starting to show cracks thanks to inflation, the delayed release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the president’s increasingly erratic behavior.
And, as Paul pointed out, Trump’s campaign promises regarding America’s involvement in foreign wars haven’t panned out. Trump said in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election that he would “fix” Russia’s war against Ukraine “within 24 hours,” but that hasn’t happened.
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Meanwhile, on Sept. 2, Trump announced that the U.S. carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a vessel that had left Venezuela and was suspected of carrying drugs. More strikes have followed in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed at least 83 people.
Although the Trump administration has claimed that the strikes targeted people bringing drugs to the U.S., it has not provided any evidence.
On Monday, the U.S. designated Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization, which the Trump administration claims is linked to Venezuela’s autocratic ruler, Nicolas Maduro.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January. JUAN BARRETO via Getty Images
Paul told “Face the Nation” that he doesn’t buy the Trump administration’s claims, and feels as if they’re “pretending as if we are at war.”
“They’re pretending as if they’ve gotten some imprimatur to do what they want,” he said. “When you have war, the rules of engagement are lessened.”
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Paul also criticized the administration for not giving Congress even basic details on the strikes — including himself, despite his Homeland Security role.
“I’ve been given zero, not one briefing because I am skeptical of what they are doing,” said Paul, who has clashed with the president over this issue before. “They don’t brief me or the general Senate at all. A few hand-selected people may have gotten a briefing, but I have not been invited to any briefings on Venezuela.”
Paul also highlighted why he finds the administration’s claims about Venezeula so dubious.
“They want to have it both ways,” Paul said. “They want to say, ‘Oh, we can just say these people are terrorists — they’re narco terrorists, so we can blow them up.’”
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“But it’s extraordinary that when some of them survive, they pluck them out of the water, they don’t prosecute them for drugs,” he continued. “They don’t collect drugs. They don’t tell us if they were armed or not. They just send them back to their country.”
“I fear that this is not going to do anything for the drug trade,” Paul later said. “But it is really going against the rule of law in the way in which we interact with people on the high seas, and it has no precedent.”
Watch the senator’s remarks below.
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