Rand Paul Forced to Explain to JD Vance That Abitrary Killing Is Bad

The Trump administration’s blatant disregard for human life has put Republicans in a tough position.

The U.S. military’s decision last week to kill 11 people aboard a small Venezuelan boat that American officials alleged contained drug shipments has sparked fights within the conservative party. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for one, said earlier this week he felt compelled to address the attack, particularly after Vice President JD Vance praised the unconstitutional killings.

Paul doubled down Tuesday. In an interview with Fox News, he was forced to explain why killing people without evidence, warrants, or oversight would seed “chaos” as a federal policy, particularly as dozens of boats off of U.S. coasts are stopped, boarded, and searched everyday.

“The reason we board them before we blow the crap out of them is some of them don’t have drugs,” Paul said.

“Think about it this way. This is how people don’t quite get this. Let’s say there’s a house in your neighborhood and they’re all selling fentanyl, and thousands of people are dying, and you’re just so mad,” he continued. “Do you go over there and just kill them or burn them? No, you go to a judge and you get a warrant and you do that. We have an interdiction program.

“We’re talking people speeding along off of Miami. Are we going to just simply blow them up? No, we’re not. I mean, if we were, that would be extraordinary. That would be extraordinary to blow up ships,” Paul said.

In an X post on Saturday, Vance wrote that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” In a follow-up post, the vice president suggested that the action had protected U.S. citizens from the “scum of the earth.”

When a political commentator noted that killing citizens of another country without due process is a war crime, Vance simply retorted, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

President Donald Trump finally decided to step out in Washington, D.C., to prove how safe the city was and was immediately called “the Hitler of our time” to his face. 

On Tuesday night, Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and other Cabinet members pulled up to Joe’s Seafood, an upscale surf and turf restaurant about a block from the White House.  

The motley crew was both booed and cheered lightly as they entered the restaurant. 

“I wouldn’t have done this three months ago, four months ago, I certainly wouldn’t have done it a year ago,” the president told reporters outside the restaurant. “This was one of the most unsafe cities in the country. Now it’s as safe as there is in the country.”  

Once they got inside, they were met by a group of activists from women’s antiwar group CODEPINK.

In the video, the activists can be heard chanting “Free D.C., Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,” while Trump and his Cabinet stand across the room, trying to ignore them. Then Trump comes to the table and stands directly in front of them, smiles wryly and tilts his head, then waves his index finger in their direction as if to say, “Get ’em outta here.” 

 “What do you want your legacy to be?” one woman asked Trump. 

Security began to attempt to herd the women out. They continued to yell directly in the faces of Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth. “All right, time to go!’ security told CODEPINK.

“He is terrorizing communities in D.C., he is terrorizing Gaza, and communities all over the world. To Puerto Rico, to the Philippines!” they said. CODEPINK later put out a press release taking responsibility for the action.  

“Two years into genocide, Gaza is under evacuation orders, Puerto Rico and Venezuela are in the crosshairs, and the Pentagon proudly calls itself the Department of War. Trump looked us in the eyes, and we made sure he would never dine in peace while communities are under siege,” an organizer wrote. 

Trump has been making ridiculous statements for weeks about how everyone in the city was just too afraid of crime to dine out at night before his federal takeover. Now, as he shows how safe it all is by driving barely a block away from the White House, community members have made their dissatisfaction known. 

And regardless of what he says, most D.C. residents report that they don’t feel safer seeing guys in military gear with machine guns on the Metro. 

As for Gaza—Trump has doubled down on U.S. fealty to the Israeli war machine as famine tears through the region. Just yesterday, Israel bombed a neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, in an attempt to kill Hamas leaders, a shocking move of aggression against another close U.S. ally in the Middle East. 

All of that came to a head last night before dinner. But it didn’t seem to disrupt his Cabinet’s appetites much. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who was also in attendance, said the food at Joe’s was “phenomenal.”

The House Oversight Committee’s Monday release of Donald Trump’s disturbing 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein has sent GOP lawmakers reeling.

Some have unquestioningly swallowed the White House’s dubious denials of its authenticity. Some even suggest it was somehow planted by the Biden administration.

Republican Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, for his part, expressed his interest in examining the signature on the letter. But when faced with a hard copy, he refused to look.

In a Monday interview aired Tuesday evening on CNN’s Laura Coates Live, reporter Manu Raju asked if he had seen the letter.

“I have not,” Burlison replied. “But I would love to see it, like, matched with his handwriting. It just is really, really, um, wild.” (Despite the Trump administration’s claims, the signature on the 2003 letter is a perfect match for contemporaneous examples of his handwriting.)

As the representative answered, CNN reporter Manu Raju produced a printed copy. “Here’s the letter.”

Looking down, Burlison said, “Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really—I don’t want to see that,” chuckling.

The Missouri representative’s ignorance-is-bliss reaction recalls that of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who, when asked about the letter and whether he wants “to learn more about Trump’s relationship and friendship with Epstein,” answered, “No. I want to have [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel in next week, where we’ll ask him about all kinds of things.… I haven’t seen it. Don’t buy it.”

Missouri Republican state Representative Tony Harbison rebuked his party on the state House floor for choosing to submit to President Trump’s gerrymandering demands rather than address the actual problems of their constituents.

“The needs are heavy, the list is long. Our plate is full of things that we need to be doing for the people of this state, and this ain’t one of ’em,’” Harbison said on Monday. “I thank you for your time, Mr. Speaker.”

The room immediately erupted with applause.

Even still, the House on Tuesday voted to pass the redistricting effort after Republican Governor Mike Kelhoe called the legislature back at the behest of Trump. The gerrymandered congressional map will now head to the Senate, where Republicans also hold the majority.

The House proposal would split the Democrat-held 5th congressional district into three districts, giving Republicans a 7-to-1 advantage heading into the 2026 midterms.

State Democrats have condemned the move.

“The Missouri GOP is aiding and abetting the systematic destruction of our democracy by an authoritarian regime led by a geriatric conman who knows the only way he can win is to cheat,” House Minority Leader Ashley Aune told The Missouri Independent. Democrats and Missouri NAACP have also argued that it’s unconstitutional to draw congressional maps before the completion of the next census.

Harbison wasn’t the only Republican against the gerrymandering decision, either. Several Republicans came out against it, including Speaker Jon Patterson.

“Unfortunately, it’s not ethics.… It’s not morality. It’s definitely not liberty. It’s just political power,” said Republican Bryant Wolfin. “There’s certainly nothing conservative about ignoring the moral implications of our actions.… Morality is not defined by what is legal. Morality is not defined by what you can get away with.”

The Republican-led state Senate is eager to get it over with and get good news back to Trump in D.C.

“The map and the initiative petition reform measures will strike a huge blow to progressives and their efforts to turn Missouri into California,” Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin wrote Saturday on Facebook. “We are not California. We are not progressives.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unleashed an angry, nonsensical tirade Tuesday claiming that she’d never said the Jeffrey Epstein files were a “hoax.” 

Actually, she’d said it less than 24 hours before.

On Monday, Leavitt published a statement claiming that Trump had not drawn the crude picture on the birthday note to Epstein, or signed it, writing, “This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!” 

But speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing the next day, Leavitt fumed when asked to explain her claims undermining the Epstein documents. 

“You said the Epstein documents are a hoax the Democrats are perpetrating against the president,” reporter Maggie Haberman of The New York Times asked. “You said he didn’t sign that check, that he didn’t sign the birthday card that he allegedly signed. So, what is the theory, since these documents came from the Epstein estate? Who is, I guess in your view, faking these documents?” 

“I did not say the documents are a hoax,” Leavitt snapped. “I said the entire narrative surrounding Jeffrey Epstein right now that is absorbing many of the liberal cable channels on television is a hoax, that is being perpetuated by opportunistic Democrats—” she ranted.  

“What exactly is the hoax?” Haberman pressed. “I’m just trying to understand what’s fake. What’s fake is not the documents?”

“The hoax is the Democrats pretending to care about victims of crime, when they do not care about victims of crime,” Leavitt explained. “When they have done nothing to solve crimes, when they have done nothing to lock up child pedophiles and child rapists across the country, and when they are now using victims as political props, to again, try and smear the president of the United States—” she went on, lost in the spiral of her own semantic spin.

It seems that by contrast, Trump is not even pretending to care about the victims of crime. Last week, the president described calls to release the documents from survivors of Epstein’s abuse as a “Democrat hoax that never ends.” 

Spin aside, Leavitt seems to know that there is nothing fake about the government’s documents on Epstein—but that conviction doesn’t extend to the ones that might incriminate her boss.