Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was a guest on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily, where he joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle in critiquing the legacy media’s coverage of the 2016 election.
“You know, I think they’re so openly partisan that I can’t even hardly turn on CNN in the morning, that they’re going on and on about potential conflicts of interest,” Paul said. “Not that they’ve said this is a conflict of interest. They just go on and on and on, so it’s clearly a partisan network, and there’s no news.”
“During the campaign cycle, they must have spent hours of media time talking about how, ‘No, Donald Trump really wasn’t against the Iraq War because he nodded his head one time during an interview with Howard Stern on a question with the Iraq War,’” Paul recalled. “What they missed by doing that, by being so partisan, what they miss is, there really was a substantive difference between Trump and Clinton on the Iraq War, regime change, and nation-building.”
He noted that “Trump has reiterated, as recently as in the last week or two … that we don’t have enough money to build nations overseas; we need to rebuild our country.”
“He’s talked about infrastructure here, and this is a profound difference between him and Clinton because you know Clinton kept talking about how she was still for regime change in Syria, getting rid of Assad. She was for regime change in Libya, and Trump was opposed to that, but the media – because they’re so partisan – never, ever got to that substantial point because they were too busy trying to point out, ‘Oh, we got Donald Trump because he did say at one time he was for the war.’ When in reality, what made the most difference was that he learned the lesson that the Iraq War was a mistake,” Paul said.
He said that Trump “won on a different kind of message” and hoped Trump would fill his administration with “people who are consistent with the kind of message he ran on.” He cited Betsy DeVos as a “good pick” for secretary of education, and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as a good choice for Health and Human Services secretary.
Paul said one of Trump’s first tasks should be repealing the “job-killing regulations” put forward by President Obama, which are “chasing American companies overseas.”
“I’d like to see us repeal a hundred regulations in a hundred days, if we could,” he said. “Some of these things can be done by executive order because President Obama put them all in place by executive order. So as much as I’m not a fan of a big, powerful presidency, I am a fan of the presidency undoing the power grabs that the previous president did, and I think they will. All the signs we’ve been hearing is that he’s going to be bold and decisive, and that he will get rid of these job-killing regulations.”
Paul stressed that “lower taxes and less regulations” would be key to making America a competitive business environment and preventing companies from moving jobs overseas.
The Senator was humorously frank when Boyle invited him to offer some party-rebuilding advice for the Democrats: “You know, being a partisan, I hope they keep doing what they’re doing because it certainly isn’t working.”
“They keep re-choosing leaders from decades ago,” he noted. “Nancy Pelosi’s been in charge for decades now. She’s been part of the extreme liberal wing of the Democrat Party that is really the wealthy elite. These people are disconnected from the working class. They probably don’t know anybody that’s ever gotten their hands dirty. If they keep appointing and having their leadership be the wealthy elite, I think their disconnect with the American people will only grow, and hopefully those of us who want more freedom to go back to the individual and to the states, I think we’ll keep winning as long as they keep the old elite guard in place.”
Paul said the Republican Party has taken the lead because it has “connected the working class to the small businessperson, to those who are American business versus people who leave us and go overseas.”
“I’ve always said that that’s when we become the dominant party, and that’s when we connect the worker to the boss, and say, you know what, we’re not going to have a shrinking American pie. We’re not going to have a smaller economy where you have to grab yours before somebody else grabs their share. What we want is an expanding American pie, where workers and business owners and everyone is enjoying a bigger slice of the pie because the economy is growing,” he said.
“I think we can grow like crazy,” Paul predicted. “We’ve been limping along under the Obama economy at like maybe 1 percent growth, if we’re lucky. If we really do cut taxes, if we cut the corporate income tax and cut the regulatory burden, this economy is ready to really grow and create millions of jobs. So I think you’ll see not only a transformation of the political landscape, but I think we’re poised to see a transformation of our economy, where we could really be a vibrant nation that leads the world in job creation.”
He advised his fellow Republicans to be on guard against the “giddiness” that can come when a single party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, and to remember what the party stands for.
“We are a party that not only believes in lower taxes and less regulation; we’re a party that believes, and says we believe, in balancing the budget,” he noted. “No matter who proposes it, I’ll continue to be an advocate for balancing the budget. I’ll continue to be somebody – and I may be alone in this – but I won’t vote for budgets that never balance. We’re going to have a fight early on in January. People want to repeal Obamacare, and so do I, but I want to repeal it passing a budget that actually is a fiscally conservative budget that balances. Right now, the tussle in the Senate is, people want to pass any old budget, whether it ever balances or not, whether it’s fiscally conservative or not. They just want to get it done because they’re going to then use that to repeal Obamacare.”
“I’m a physician. I hate Obamacare. I want to do anything we can to get rid of it. But at the same time, I’m not willing to vote for a budget, even if it’s a Republican budget, that never balances and is not fiscally conservative,” Paul declared.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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