Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN
Wed December 3, 2025
In an
interview with Reason magazine two weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul suggested that congressional Republicans were uncomfortable with much of what President Donald Trump was doing. But the senator said they were too “afraid” to do something 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 said.
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 specific species of Republican that is increasingly willing to squeak quite loudly: the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican.
In the House, it’s been Rep. Thomas Massie, who was instrumental in forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. And in the Senate, it’s increasingly Paul saying what he suggests his colleagues really think.
Paul has occasionally clashed with Trump since he first became president in 2017 – and notably declined to endorse him in 2024. But the clashes are coming faster these days, particularly as the president has taken steps that are decidedly big-government and un-libertarian.
Paul appears less content to merely express opposition and more willing to do so with gusto.
A case in point came on Tuesday. Paul didn’t just raise questions about the administration’s second strike on an alleged drug vessel — and whether that might have constituted a war crime, as some
other Republicans have. He actually 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 said. “So as a country, we’re just going to let people lie to us, to our face?”
Even before the September “double-tap” strike came to light last week, Paul was unvarnished in his review of the administration’s
already legally dubious initial strikes on the suspected drug vessels.
In October, he went so far as to call them “
extrajudicial killings.”
He added two weeks ago 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 top Republicans punted by claiming ignorance about the situation or simply said Trump has the legal power to do it. Few have been willing to contend with the morality of it or the apparent hypocrisy of lodging the pardon even as Trump threatens to strike other countries to combat drug-trafficking.
But Paul said 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 said of Hernández. “And he gets a break.”
When Vice President JD Vance in September called the boat strikes the “highest and best use of our military” and shrugged off those labeling it a war 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 recently accused a half-dozen Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behavior, punishable by death” after they urged service members to disobey illegal orders, some Republicans gently suggested the president’s response was overwrought or ill-advised. But Paul called it “
reckless, inappropriate, irresponsible.”
And there’s plenty more where this came from:
In other words, Paul has hit on most of the big recent controversies. While other Republicans strain to avoid weighing in, he doesn’t really hold back.
So, why Rand Paul?
It likely owes to many of the same factors that made Massie such a forceful and resilient Trump foil in the House. When you come up in GOP politics as a libertarian, it suggests you hold principles near and dear. (The easier course, after all, would be running as a more standard-issue Republican.)
But perhaps more than that is the fact that Trump seems to have run counter to these libertarian and small-government principles more than he has before. While he appealed to the national Libertarian Party for support during the 2024 campaign, he’s hardly governed like it.
The boat strikes aren’t the administration’s only affront to due process, after all; it has also deported people to a foreign prison and elsewhere without hearings and moved to deport legal immigrants for pro-Palestinian speech.
Trump’s efforts to wield the heavy hand of government against institutions, colleges, the media and others are also decidedly un-libertarian.
Indeed, Trump’s second term seems to be largely about amassing power in the executive. It’s not difficult to see how that could rub a libertarian the wrong way.
Whether this libertarian resistance will ultimately matter, remains to be seen. But we’ve already seen in the House how people with hard-right credibility speaking their minds can move the needle — both with Massie and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia on the Epstein files, although the latter has since announced she’s not running for reelection.
We’ve seen in polling that some on the right have had concerns with what Trump has done, and Massie and Greene put a face on that.
In the Senate, it looks like that’s falling to Paul.
