Rand Paul floats possible 2028 run, pushes back on Trump-era protectionism

Libertarian-minded Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is leaving the door wide open to a possible 2028 White House run.

"We'll decide after 2026," Paul said in an interview that posted this weekend.

Paul ran for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, but dropped out after a distant fifth-place finish in Iowa's Republican caucuses. He won re-election later that year in the Senate, and was re-elected again in 2022.

The senator, who for years has been a leading voice inside the GOP for fiscal conservatism, civil liberties and a non-interventionist foreign policy for America, has lamented the declining number of Republicans embracing such an agenda in a party dominated by President Donald Trump. And he's pledged to try and bring such an agenda back.

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"The most important thing to me isn't necessarily me or what my role is, but that there is someone who's advocating that international trade is good and makes us rich. That big is not bad," Paul said in an interview on "Sunday Night with Chuck Todd."

Paul argued that "the populists also want to break up big business. They want to break up Google because they're liberal or Meta because it's liberal. I'm not one of those people, but that is sort of the Trump-Vance populist wing."

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Pointing to Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who is perceived as the GOP frontrunner in the race to succeed the term-limited Trump, Paul emphasized that "there needs to be a free-market wing of the Republican Party. And I want to be part of trying to ensure that still exists."

Paul, who is a vocal GOP critic of Trump's unprecedented use of tariffs and who voted last year against the president's massive domestic policy measure because it added to the national debt, has been leaving the door open to a potential 2028 run in interviews since last summer.

"I think in the Republican Party, though, there needs to be someone representing that international trade is good for America, that we get richer and more prosperous in the world we trade," he told Kentucky's Courier Journal newspaper last July. He added that it was "too early to tell" if he would run again for the White House.

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In a September interview with Spectrum News, he said, "We'll see over time what happens," regarding another presidential bid.

And Paul, in a December interview on ABC's "This Week," said he didn't see Vance as the hypothetical heir to Trump and the 2028 GOP frontrunner.

While any decision from Paul regarding a 2028 White House run won't come until after this year's midterm elections, the senator did generate some buzz last year by making stops in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three crucial early voting states in the Republican Party's presidential nominating calendar.

"He's keeping options open and looking at the landscape," a strategist in the senator's political orbit who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely, told Fox News Digital.