Sen. Rand Paul said on Friday that “all hell could break loose” within Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition if the president involves the U.S. further in Ukraine, and added that his supporters who voted for him after 20 years of regime change wars would "feel abandoned" if he went to war and tried to topple Nicolas Maduro, too.
President Trump has been getting criticism from some of his supporters for vowing to release the files of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and then reneging on that promise. Paul said that the Epstein heat Trump is getting from MAGA will be nothing compared to if he refuses to live up to his “America First” foreign policy promises.
Paul told POLITICO, “It’ll be much bigger than Epstein, because Epstein — there was a segment of the MAGA movement that was concerned about it, a significant segment.”
However, “there’s an even bigger segment of the MAGA movement that is concerned with intervention overseas,” the senator noted. “And if all of a sudden President Trump becomes the president of regime change in Venezuela and giving arms and money to Ukraine, I think a lot of people will feel abandoned.”
The U.S. has also carried out strikes on boats in the Caribbean (and one in the Pacific) to supposedly combat drug trafficking killing at least 37, but also to undermine Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro who the administration sees as an “illegitimate” leader.
Is the same Trump who once attacked the Bush-Cheney administration for “lying” about the “endless war” in Iraq now in favor of American-led regime change?
And what that could mean for Trump’s base?
Paul notes that we still have unfinished business in Ukraine, which has been promised more weapons and permission to hit far inside Russia. “But if there is more money going to Ukraine, and it looks like he is coming down on the side of getting us involved with Ukraine on their side of the war [with Russia] or on any side of this war, I think you’re going to see all hell break loose,” Paul said of Trump’s base.
Paul said regime change is "not in Trump's psyche" but definitely in those who are currently advising Trump on foreign policy.
“I think that there are people around him — [Sen.] Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio — that are more inclined to believe in regime change,” he added. “And so I think those people have his ear, and so that concerns me.”
"If they get him involved in regime change in Venezuela," said Paul, "that is something that I think is inconsistent with his instincts.”
Paul is not the only MAGA supporter worried about the company Trump keeps and the foreign policy promises he might not.
Arguably no one has been more MAGA than Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told Tucker Carlson in a lengthy interview published Wednesday that the same, old neoconservative-friendly figures on the right are trying to hijack her movement, while also dismissing antiwar voices like herself.
“The Mark Levins, the Ted Cruzs, the Lindsey Grahams, they’re just playing the game, literally playing the game, and trying to tell the American people, oh no, we carry the MAGA mantle. We support the president. It’s people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others that don’t, and they’re just lying. They’re absolutely lying,” Greene told Tucker.
She said a primary reason for electing Trump a second time was for her party to further depart from the pro-war, Bush-Cheney era.
“But that’s not exactly what’s happening,” she said, “There’s a really sick obsession, Tucker, that I think everyone is sick and tired of, is the fact that American people work so hard and pay extremely high taxes for their tax dollars that have to constantly be used to sell weapons and deliver weapons and pay countries to kill people. And I can’t understand that, and people are so sick and tired of it, and the veterans in my district are sick and tired of it.”
“But for some reason, this is the continuation of what Washington DC does, no matter who’s in charge, Democrats or Republicans,” Greene lamented.
Carlson followed up. “But we’re at a pivot point where the people who cheered on the wars in, I mean, name the countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria against the Houthis, whoever they are. Those people are poised to, seem to be to, take over the Republican Party.”
“I mean, I thought the whole point of Trump’s ascendance was to change the party,” Carlson continued, “And all of a sudden, the people who’ve, for generations, wrecked this country seem on the verge of stealing the MAGA copyright, slapping it on their own polo shirts, and running the Republican party.”
“I mean, how is this happening?” he asked.
Rand Paul, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson see this shift happening, and each has been criticized by Trump for pointing out where the president has diverged from his foreign policy campaign promises, and each is also a powerful voice within the populist Republican movement that helped deliver the president the White House for a second time.
However great or small, there is a larger antiwar contingency on the American right now than at any other time this century, and Donald Trump has been the primary reason for it.
Is the president listening?
