As Donald Trump sinks over Russia scandal, Rand Paul skips town just to avoid meeting with him

| 7:31 pm EDT March 20, 2017
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Just how bad was Donald Trump’s day today? The Director of the FBI publicly confirmed that Trump’s wiretap claim was complete nonsense. Then he confirmed that the FBI is actively investigating the Trump campaign over its Russia scandal. And by the end of the day, after Trump flew all the way to Kentucky in a desperate bid to get Republican Senator Rand Paul to support his failing health care bill, Paul prematurely skipped town just to get away from him.

Trump raised eyebrows when he announced that he was holding yet another seemingly pointless “campaign rally” this evening, this time in Kentucky. These rallies have done nothing to stop his already weak approval rating from continuing to sink, and Trump’s rally speech was unlikely to get any camera time on a news-heavy day like this. But on his MSNBC show tonight, host Lawrence O’Donnell revealed that Trump had likely staged the entire expensive rally merely as an excuse to fly to Senator Rand Paul’s hometown in the hope of selling him on the sinking American Health Care Act.

But as O’Donnell reported, Rand Paul made a point of skipping town before Donald Trump arrived. When Paul was cornered by cameras asking him why he was leaving, he generically said that he had to get back to Washington DC. The ACHA is losing Republican support in the House by the day, partly based on the rationale that it already lacks enough Republican votes in the Senate to pass. If Donald Trump could have convinced Senator Rand Paul to support the bill, creating the hope that it just might have a chance in the Senate, it might have stopped the current bleeding in the House.

But Rand Paul clearly wanted nothing to do with any of the above. He bolted town so he wouldn’t have to meet with Donald Trump in private, and so he wouldn’t have to be anywhere near Trump’s Kentucky rally. And it likely runs deeper than Paul’s mere aversion to the AHCA. At this point Donald Trump has become so toxic over Russia that even Senators from his own party are afraid of standing next to him. Contribute to Palmer Report