Senator Rand Paul stood before the Capitol Hill TV cameras on Wednesday to complain—at length—that he was no longer invited to this year’s White House picnic.
“The level of immaturity is beyond words,” Paul told reporters, adding that the move to withdraw his invite was “just incredibly petty.”
Paul said his invitation was pulled in retaliation for his refusal to support Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” He said he would consider voting for the GOP’s budget if the debt limit portion was removed, but that is unlikely to happen by the time the Senate votes on it.
Seven minutes of Rand Paul being big mad about Stephen Miller uninviting him and his six month old grandson from the White House picnic over Paul’s support of habeas corpus. pic.twitter.com/wsSnKPzbnj
— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) June 11, 2025
“I’m arguing from a true belief and worry that our country is mired in debt and getting worse,” Paul said. “And they choose to react by uninviting my grandson to the picnic. I don’t know. I just think it really makes me lose a lot of respect I once had for Donald Trump.”
Paul said the move wouldn’t make him come around.
“It’s just, I think, a really sad day that this is the level of warfare they’ve stooped to,” the Kentucky Republican said, apparently unaware that there are far more serious disputes raging across the country.
Paul said he was unsure who made the call to disinvite him and his family. It could be Trump or “petty staffers who have been running a sort of a paid influencer campaign against me for two weeks on Twitter,” he said, before taking aim at Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
“You have people that are basically going around casually talking about getting rid of habeas corpus,” Paul said.
“And the same people that are directing this campaign are the same people that casually would throw out parts of the Constitution and suspend habeas corpus. So, I think what it tells is they don’t like hearing me say stuff like that, and so they want to quiet me down. And it hasn’t worked, and so they’re going to try to attack me.”
Paul pointed out that in his time in the Senate, neither Presidents Obama nor Biden disinvited him to the bipartisan gathering on the South Lawn, which he had been planning on attending alongside his wife, son, daughter-in-law and six-month-old grandson.
The invite revocation may have also been spurred by how Paul broke with Trump on another issue: Saturday’s $45 million military parade in Washington, D.C., which is supposed to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary but which conveniently falls on Trump’s birthday.
“I’ve never been a big fan of goose-stepping soldiers in big tanks and missiles rolling down the street,” Paul explained this week. “So if you asked me, I wouldn’t have done it. We were always different than the images you saw of the Soviet Union and North Korea. We were proud not to be that.”
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