Ron Paul’s 2008 Ideas Being Understood by the President in 2025 IS WILD

It's worth taking a moment to think about how much things have changed and the man who had a significant hand in his own party's evolution on foreign policy. #17

Gage Skidmore

When Ron Paul ran for president in 2008 and 2012, he boldly campaigned on antiwar themes in a Republican Party that was still very much George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s GOP.

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The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had said that the United States could stay in Iraq for a hundred years if that’s what it took, and campaigned to continue to the neoconservative foreign policy of Bush-Cheney.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, found himself in a Republican Party that was demanding fiscal responsibility in new ways through the Tea Party movement, but on foreign policy the GOP was still fairly firmly in the neocon camp.

Ron Paul told them they were wrong. He told his party it was wrong. Repeatedly. Loudly. Firmly.

That we should take care of ourselves at home and not start needless and endless conflicts across the globe. That America should seek peace, not war.

There is plenty more history, too detailed to share it all here, but nevertheless, by 2024, a different kind of Republican Party had emerged, and Paul’s movement was a part, or at the very least, a precursor to what was to come with MAGA.

Being Libertarian recently took a moment to reflect on this on X:

Donald Trump and Ron Paul are different men with differing views on a variety of fronts, but when Trump talks about foreign policy and what constitutes real national security, he often sounds like what we would imagine a President Paul would say.

The language Being Libertarian shared is not even in the same universe as what a President McCain or President Romney would have expressed. They would have sounded more like President Joe Biden or a would-be President Kamala Harris.

In 2008, it was Barack Obama who beat the Bush-Cheney Republican Party soundly running on an antiwar platform.

In 2024, it was Donald Trump who defeated a now thoroughly neoconservative Democratic Party along with the neocon establishment remnant of his own party.

Dr. Paul has long said it is the peace candidates who win.

Mocked by so many Republicans in 2008 and 2012 for being against Bush-Cheney and their wars, today Ron Paul seemed ahead of the curve.

This is something former vice presidential running mate to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Nicole Shanahan, did not let go unnoticed.

I introduced Dr. Paul at a few speeches during his 2008 campaign, and actually worked for his 2012 presidential campaign.

In those days and for some time after, we truly believed that only a President Ron Paul, or a President Rand Paul, or perhaps a President Thomas Massie, Justin Amash or Dave Smith - some uniquely principled libertarian figure - was the only chance of ever leading the Republican Party in a less interventionist direction.

Again, Donald Trump is not Ron Paul. There are things I don’t like about Trump.

This essay is not about those things.

It’s about how genuinely wild and awesome it is that Donald Trump so often promotes the foreign policy wisdom of Ron Paul. That this is what the GOP base wants and is attracted to.

That this is where the Republican Party is now. Even the most hardcore neocons have been brought to heel.

But who cares what I think.

What did Ron Paul think!