Did Senator Rand Paul call U.S. President Donald Trump "a tyrant" while speaking in Congress on April 2, 2025? No, that's not true: As the full recording of the speech shows, Paul did not even use the word "tyrant" on that occasion. His single reference to tyranny concerned a broad historical context that predated Trump's birth by centuries.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on April 7, 2025. It opened:
'TRUMP IS A TYRANT!' Rand Paul calls out Trump on the Senate floor, revealing his authoritarian regime and illegal governance!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The claim, however, was self-debunking: In the video attached to the post, Sen. Rand Paul (archived here) described himself as "a supporter of Donald Trump" and did not call the sitting president a "tyrant".
The clip was a fragment of Paul's speech on April 2, 2025. Its full recording is available on C-SPAN where it was uploaded under the caption:
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke on the chamber floor in favor of ending U.S. on tariffs on Canada, claiming it would represent taxation without representation.
Paul did begin his speech with a broad reference to tyranny, but that was said in a much larger historical context than current events, as the full recording confirms:
'Taxation without representation is tyranny,' bellowed James Otis. In the days and weeks and years leading up to the American Revolution, this became the rallying cry of American patriots. 'No taxation without representation.' The American patriots thought that a distant parliament in England, where they had no representation, had no right to tax them.
Lead Stories reviewed the transcript of the address and found no other mention of the words "tyranny" or "tyrant".
A longer quote where Paul brought up Trump's name did not include a specific sentence attributed to the senator in the post on X, either:
I am a supporter of Donald Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem. I don't care if the Republican... the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power. One person can make a mistake, and guess what? Tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work, they will lead to higher prices. They are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy. But even if this were something that was magic, and it was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a Constitutional Republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims concerning current events are here.
