Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is once again dangling a 2028 presidential bid, and he is tying the decision to whether Republicans hold the line this November.
In a Wednesday interview on Newsmax’s Finnerty, Paul said he has not made up his mind. He will wait for the midterm results before deciding whether to jump in.
“I haven’t decided, but we’re going to look thoroughly at it as we see the results coming in for the midterms,” Paul said.
Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016 and folded after a fifth-place finish in Iowa, told Newsmax the GOP still needs a “free-market conservative” willing to pick a fight with the party’s populist economic direction.
“I think there needs to be a candidate that is a free-market conservative, somebody who believes that the debt is wrong, Big Government is bad, but also that we get richer through international trade and that capitalism on an international scale is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Paul said.
Then he went further.
“I think the populism of the party now is teaching something that’s an economic fallacy,” he said. “And so I think it would be a robust debate to have a free market, libertarian-leaning conservative like myself, who doesn’t think the government should own businesses, shouldn’t be involved, that capitalism should reign.”
“Capitalism made America great,” Paul added. “So, we’ll see what happens.”
Back in March, The Gateway Pundit reported that Paul told CBS he was “50-50” on a 2028 run and would decide after the 2026 midterms.
He complained then that the party’s old free-market, libertarian wing had been hollowed out and that on many days he was “the only one left for free trade” in the Senate.
Six months later, the message has not changed. Paul is still shopping the same argument: tariffs, industrial policy, and government taking stakes in private industry are a wrong turn.
He wants a primary fight over whether the Republican Party stays a limited-government, free-trade party or keeps moving in the direction President Trump has taken it.
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