Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul stated that it “boggles my mind to think that anybody in the Tea Party, the movement I came out of, could really be supporting Donald Trump” who “is not a conservative” and “supposedly supported President Obama in 2008” on Wednesday’s “Kilmeade & Friends” on Fox News Radio.
Rand began by saying it was “disappointing” that fellow candidates Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz were going to miss that days vote on Syrian refugees.
Rand stated, “I think Donald Trump’s still got a long ways to go to convince many of us that he’s a conservative. He supposedly supported President Obama in 2008. He supported the single-payer system. He supported higher taxes, gave money to [Sen.] Harry Reid (D-NV), gave money to [Rep.] Charlie Rangel (D-NY). So call me a conservative, a Tea Party conservative, that’s not really convinced that Donald Trump is a conservative. In many ways I think he may be a fake conservative, because he supports the abuse of eminent domain, he built his business model on the government taking peoples private property and giving it to him. I really — it still boggles my mind to think that anybody in the Tea Party, the movement I came out of, could really be supporting Donald Trump.”
He added that Trump’s claims that highways couldn’t be built without eminent domain isn’t what the discussion is about. And “There’s a little bit of a difference between highways and casinos. The other thing is, is you know, I was there at the beginning of the Tea Party. We were mad about bailing out the big banks in New York, and he supported that. So, he’s also supported the concept of a single-payer, the government being in charge of the healthcare. So, I really that he is not a conservative. And you know, we put out a post today trying to contrast the limited government tradition, you know, conservatives — this goes way back, this even goes back to the Magna Carta of trying to limit the power of the king. In many ways, Donald Trump is the opposite. He says he’s smart, give him power and he’ll fix everything. But many of us are conservatives because we are suspect of power. We want to limit power, even from good people, even if he turned out to be a benevolent authoritarian, we wouldn’t want so much power to be gravitated into the hands of one person.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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