A Republican senator who has become a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump and his administration is considering a 2028 presidential bid, which would likely pit him against the presumed heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance.
“We’ll decide after 2026,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said in a weekend interview, adding that “without question” trust in the Trump administration is broken.
In 2016, Paul ran for the Republican presidential nomination but withdrew after finishing a distant fifth in Iowa’s GOP caucuses. Later that year, he was re-elected to the Senate and secured another term in 2022.
For years, the senator has been a prominent advocate within the GOP for fiscal conservatism, civil liberties, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. He has expressed concern about the declining support for these principles within a party increasingly influenced by President Donald Trump. He has also committed to working towards revitalizing this agenda, Fox News reported.
“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.”
2028 PREVIEW: Kentucky Republican Rand Paul signals possible White House bid, vowing to champion free trade and fiscal conservatism against Trump's tariff agenda. https://t.co/XOFKSBanfI
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) March 16, 2026
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.”
Referencing Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the latter of whom is perceived to be Trump’s GOP successor, 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, a vocal critic of Trump’s unprecedented use of tariffs and a member of the GOP, voted last year against the president’s large domestic policy measure due to its contribution to the national debt. Since last summer, he has been hinting at the possibility of a run in the 2028 election during interviews.
“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. At the time, Paul added that it was “too early to tell” if he would make another White House bid.
In an interview with Spectrum News in September, he stated, “We will see in the future what happens,” regarding another run for the presidency.
In a December interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Paul also said he didn’t see Vance as the heir to Trump or the 2028 GOP frontrunner.
Although any decision Paul makes about running for the White House in 2028 will not be announced until after this year’s midterm elections, he did spark some interest last year by visiting Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
These are three important early voting states in the Republican Party’s presidential nomination process. “He’s keeping options open and looking at the landscape,” one strategist in Paul’s orbit who spoke to Fox News on condition of anonymity, said.
Last week, Trump asked a group of donors at his Mar-a-Lago estate for their thoughts about Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, posing the question during a gathering at his Florida home.
“What do you think of JD Vance and Marco Rubio?” Trump asked, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, donors applauded loudly for Rubio. The applause for Rubio was reportedly louder than the reaction for Vance. The informal poll came one day after Trump placed Rubio prominently in the administration’s public posture.
