Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said the Trump administration has uninvited his family, including his six-month old grandson, from the annual White House bipartisan picnic on Thursday over his opposition to the president’s budget bill.
“I think I’m the first senator in the history of the United States to be uninvited to the White House picnic,” Paul told CNN. “I just find this incredibly petty. I mean — I have been nothing but polite to the President.”
“I’m arguing from a true belief and worry that our country is mired in debt and getting worse,” he continued. “And they choose to react by uninviting my grandson to the picnic. I don’t know. I just think it really makes me lose a lot of respect I once had for Donald Trump.”
Paul has been very vocal about his opposition to the bill because of a debt ceiling increase which he said would “explode deficits.” The senator has called spending cuts in the current bill “wimpy and anemic.” But, Paul said he will “consider” voting for it if the debt ceiling increase is removed. Senate Republicans and the White House are refusing to do so.
“It’s just, I think, a really sad day that this is the level of warfare they’ve stooped to,” Paul said. “But it’s also not very effective. It probably has the opposite result.”
The Kentucky senator also accused “petty staffers” at the White House of “running a sort of a paid influencer campaign” against him on Twitter since he came out opposing the bill. He said that the decision to uninvite him from the picnic likely came from these “petty staffers” and strongly suggested it is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
“You have people that are basically going around casually talking about getting rid of habeas corpus,” Paul said. “And 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. So, I think what it tells it they don’t like hearing me say stuff like that, and so they want to quiet me down. And it hasn’t worked, and so they’re going to try to attack me.”
“I like Donald Trump, but when they want to act this way, it’s where they begin to lose a lot of America who just wonders, ‘Why does everything have to descend to this level?’” the senator said, adding “President Obama didn’t disinvite us …. Biden didn’t disinvite us, and we always did this.”
