Joe Rogan and Rand Paul Call Out Trump’s Fentanyl Excuse for Striking Boats as Phony

Joe Rogan and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) agreed Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s excuse for striking Venezuelan boats is all smoke and mirrors.

Paul joined Rogan on Tuesday’s The Joe Rogan Experience where the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife by U.S. forces was brought up. Paul has been a vocal critic of Trump’s actions in Venezuela, including the bombing of boats allegedly carrying fentanyl to the U.S.

According to Trump, Maduro was responsible for trafficking “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs” and fueled the overdose deaths of “countless Americans.” Critics have pushed back on this, arguing even Drug Enforcement Administration data shows virtually no fentanyl comes from Venezuela and very little cocaine comes in compared to Mexico, a country where a large percentage of fentanyl does come from.

“I had this on air from a respectable journalist the other day. She said, well, don’t you care about the kids in our country dying from fentanyl? I said, of course, I do, but you know no fentanyl comes from Venezuela. Not a little bit. Zero,” Paul told Rogan.

The podcaster agreed and argued that if fentanyl was the real reason behind targeting Venezuela, then Trump’s administration would have set its sights on Mexico instead.

“Yeah, if we were really interested, we’d be attacking Mexico,” Rogan said.

“Well, they want to do that next. They want to bomb Mexico,” Paul responded.

“Do you think this is sort of a predicate where they’re trying to set that up?” Rogan asked.

“I hope not,” Paul said, explaining he has no “love lost” for Maduro, whose election victory has long been questioned by global officials and his opposition inside Venezuela.

Maduro was originally indicted in 2020 on drug trafficking charges. He was captured on Jan. 3 and transported to New York where he and his wife were both hit with narco terrorism charges.

Rogan argued that Trump having the authority to capture Maduro is a murky idea because he can then muster up enough legal reason to capture and charge other global leaders, like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Paul said:

If the predicate is we’re going to snatch people, why don’t we snatch De Silva from Brazil? Some people say [former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro’s] unfairly in prison. Maybe true. And they say De Silva cheated in the election. May also be true. But should the president of the United States, no matter who he or she is, have the ability without a vote of Congress, the people’s representatives, to just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in? One, it doesn’t usually work. I’m hoping it’s successful here, but we’ve tried in other places. It’s one of the things I liked about Donald Trump. He was against regime change.

“If it’s about regime change, why blow up the drug boats?” Rogan went on to ask Paul.

Paul argued the administration wants control of Venezuela for its oil and “influence.”

“Because they need a drug predicate. They want to say this isn’t war,” he said. “It is kind of war, and we’re going to take people as if it’s war, but it’s not war. It was an arrest warrant. They’ve actually persuaded some otherwise good people in my caucus to say, well normally I would be against bombing another nation’s capital and removing the leader.”

The senator added that Maduro is also facing “nothing” charges on top of the drug charges.

“They’ve also indicted Maduro possessing or conspiring to possess machine guns. It’s like, what leader in the world doesn’t have bodyguards with machine guns? We have machine guns,” he said.

Rogan asked Paul to explain the “machine gun” charges, and the senator couldn’t.

“It means absolutely nothing. It’s completely insane,” Paul said.

Watch above via The Joe Rogan Experience.