By Manu Raju, Alison Main and Aileen Graef | CNN
GOP Sen. Rand Paul is accusing the White House of “immaturity” and engaging in “petty vindictiveness” after he and his family were disinvited from the annual White House picnic long held with members of both parties.
Paul, a libertarian-minded deficit hawk who has been raising deep concerns over President Donald Trump’s sweeping policy bill, said his family – including his nearly six-month-old grandson — had been planning on attending Thursday’s bipartisan picnic on the White House lawn. But Paul said their invitation was abruptly rescinded with no real explanation, even as the move came after Trump and his aides have been bashing Paul over his position on the president’s bill for days.
“The level of immaturity is beyond words,” Paul said of the White House, adding that he’s lost “a lot of respect” for Trump.
“It’s just incredibly petty,” Paul told CNN outside the Capitol on Wednesday evening. “I’m arguing from a true belief and worry that our country is mired in debt and getting worse. 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.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
The move could be a risk for Trump. To pass his agenda through the Senate, he can only afford to lose the support of three Republican senators. Paul has indicted he couldn’t support the bill because it includes an increase of the national debt limit, but he’s said he’d be open to considering it if GOP leaders removed that from the overall bill. The White House and top Republicans have rebuffed Paul’s demand.
“It’s just, I think, a really sad day that this is the level of warfare they’ve stooped to,” Paul said. “But it’s also not very effective. It probably has the opposite result.”
Paul said it’s unclear if the directive came directly from the president or “petty staffers who have been running a sort of a paid influencer campaign against me for two weeks on Twitter.”
“Who knows if it came from him,” Paul said of Trump. “It could be from lower-level staff members, but these are people that shouldn’t be working over there.”
And then he took a shot at one of the most powerful aides in the White House, 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 it 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.”
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When asked if he was speaking about Miller, Paul nodded.
When asked by CNN if he believes Miller should still be working at the White House, Paul would only say: “I’m just going to leave it at that.”
“I like Donald Trump, but when they want to act this way, it’s where they begin to lose a lot of America who just wonders, ‘Why does everything have to descend to this level?’” Paul added.
Paul said that his wife, Kelley, along with his son, daughter-in-law and infant grandson were all planning on attending Thursday’s event — with some planning to fly in Thursday morning.
“President Obama didn’t disinvite us …. Biden didn’t disinvite us, and we always did this,” Paul said, noting he’s been to 10 White House picnics. “It’s the Americans’ White House. We all pay for it.”
