When it comes to Ron Paul's feelings about Donald Trump, he has made it quite clear what he thinks in the past:
Sorry...Trump's Not Really An Outsider https://t.co/9TXSltEFMM pic.twitter.com/gH4BgrZL4u
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) March 21, 2016
As Paul added, Donald Trump is shrewd and really wants to sell himself as an outsider. He understands how to stir the many people who are unhappy.
In case this was not clear enough, Paul then also said that he could not support Trump as the republican nominee, and therefore he would not vote for Trump.
So is there a candidate that Ron Paul would support?
The libertarian former presidential candidate gave a partial answer when he told Larry King that he feels a "kinship" with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, noting that the two occasionally agree on some policies and oppose favors to the corporate world.
"We’re both against corporatism. We’re both against the special benefits to big business," Paul said in an interview on Politicking with Larry King.
"His answer to that wouldn’t always be the same. Mine would always drift to the free markets. His would drift to ‘well we need more government to redistribute wealth,’ but we could both attack subsidies to business or the military industrial complex," he continued. “In that sense, there is a kinship."
An odd pair, to be sure: a libertarian sharing a "kinship" with a socialist, simply because both are against corporatism and the MIC. Curious to say the least. Almost as if the two, while on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, have a common enemy in what some would call creeping fascism.
Paul, a Libertarian who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, also touted the relationship between Libertarians and progressives. "I think you can come together without compromising just because we overlap. That to me would be a much better coalition," he said.
The kinship stops here though and as a reminder, Paul hasn’t always offered praise to the Vermont senator. During an interview in March on CNN, Paul vowed that he wouldn’t back Sanders’s presidential bid and likened him to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
"No, because he’s an authoritarian,” he said when asked if he’d back the independent Vermont senator on “CNN Newsroom." “He’s just a variant of Trump. Even the things I worked with on Bernie, some of the foreign policy, he’s a part of the military industrial complex.”
Sounds somewhat contradictory with his previous statement, although in this presidential race where every candidate's opinion changes on a daily basis just to appease whatever crowd is listening on that day, it's easy to get confused.
As for Trump, Paul's opinion remains unwavering. "I was very explicit about that. I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump," he said on CNN. "If you can't stand any of them and you happen to be a dedicated progressive, you ought to make your vote count and vote for the Green Party and if you happen to be a libertarian, vote for the Libertarian Party.”
He has also blasted Trump’s proposal for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"I think it sounds like theft," he said in April on Fox Business Network’s “Kennedy." "And I think it sounds like something illegal. I think it sounds like it's immoral."
Perhaps, but at least for now, that's what a great number of Americans want, and that is precisely what Trump has promised to give them.
//www.ora.tv/embed/0_4ha04281bc6j