We must make a choice and vote in midterm elections,” he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show this week. “I’d rather have a Republican Congress come into an empty chair and say, ‘I got nothing to do and I really wish to serve you’ or ‘Thank you very much for doing this,'” he said.
That’s unlikely to happen as Republicans face difficult reelection fights in districts like the one represented by Paul. Paul is running in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, which Trump won in 2016.
The Paul campaign is also expected to focus on Trump himself in the election, hoping to highlight his controversial comments that appeared in a 2005 video released by the right-wing conspiracy theory website Infowars.
“What I’m hearing from voters is they don’t trust Hillary Clinton and Republicans don’t trust Donald Trump,” said Brad Dayspring, Paul’s campaign manager. Dayspring, who did not say whether Paul would make an issue of Trump’s comments in the campaign, argued that the “birther” issue is a distraction from the Trump administration’s achievements.
A Quinnipiac University poll last year found that just 13 percent of voters trust Clinton over Trump.
The two candidates also appeared to be at odds on taxes, with the Vermont senator blasting the Trump administration for proposing “the biggest tax giveaway in American history,” and Paul arguing that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act enacted by Trump has done little to increase taxes.
Trump’s tax plan, like Paul’s, makes massive tax cuts and corporate tax reductions. Paul’s plan, too, cuts the top rate on income from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, but he wants to lower that rate to 25 percent. He also wants to lower the tax rate on capital gains to 15 percent from the current 21 percent.
Paul’s position on tax cuts was an issue in his Senate campaign last year, as he blasted the GOP tax plan by saying that it “gutted the wealthy while making life sweeter for the middle class and the poor.”
His opponent, incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Dayton, was among the Democrats urging Trump in the aftermath of the
