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

"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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.