Senator Rand Paul was packing his picnic blanket in a huff, but Donald Trump says he’s more than welcome to join his colleagues at the White House’s party Thursday. So, who’s lying?

The Kentucky Republican told reporters Wednesday that despite his plans to take his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson to an annual White House picnic for members of Congress Thursday, he had found himself unwelcome from the festivities.

“I think I’m the first senator in the history of the United States to be uninvited to the White House picnic,” Paul said in a video posted to X by Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manriquez. “Every Democrat will be invited, every Republican will be invited, but I will be the only one disallowed to come on the grounds of the White House.”

Paul has been an outspoken critic against Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” and a strong opponent to raising the debt ceiling. He recently took Senator Lindsey Graham to task, arguing that the hawk only wanted to inflate the U.S. defense budget.

Now, he’s claimed his words have come at a cost.

“I just find this incredibly petty. I mean, I have been, I think nothing but polite to the president. I have been an intellectual opponent, a public policy opponent, and he has chosen now to invite me from the picnic,” Paul said.

“The level of immaturity is beyond words,” he said, adding that he’d been a critic of former presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Trump during his first term, but never been uninvited.

“They’ve decided they want to declare war on my family and exclude us from the White House, and I just think it’s incredibly petty,” Paul said.

But in a post on Truth Social Thursday just hours before the party, Trump claimed that Paul and his family were expected at the White House.

“Of course Senator Rand Paul and his beautiful wife and family are invited to the BIG White House Party tonight. He’s the toughest vote in the history of the U.S. Senate, but why wouldn’t he be?” Trump wrote. “Besides, it gives me more time to get his Vote on the Great, Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the greatest and most important pieces of legislation ever put before our Senators & Congressmen/women.”

It’s not clear whether Paul was bluffing, or whether Trump is pretending never to have rescinded the invite at all.

Paul said he wasn’t sure if the order had come from Trump himself or from staffers, who he alleged had been waging a paid influencer campaign against him. Paul even took a shot at White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect behind the president’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

“These are people that shouldn’t be working over there. You have people that are basically going around casually talking about getting rid of habeas corpus,” Paul said. “And the same people that are directing this campaign are the same people that casually would throw out parts of the Constitution and suspend habeas corpus.”

“So, I think what it tells is they don’t like hearing me say stuff like that, and so they want to quiet me down. And it hasn’t worked, and so they’re going to try to attack me. They’re going to try to destroy me in other ways. And then do petty little things like social occasions or whatever,” he added.

When asked if he was speaking about Miller, Paul shrugged, nodding. When asked whether he thought Miller had him uninvited, Paul said he didn’t know.

Paul told reporters he’d received no explanation for the decision. “We’re just not welcome,” he said.

This piece has been updated.

The website for Donald Trump’s green card alternative has arrived—and it doesn’t look like they spent a dime making it.

The site, which fields information for individuals interested in obtaining a $5 million “gold card,” is entirely black—save for an image of the card itself. Green cards have traditionally looked similar to drivers licenses, but if Trump’s mock-up is anything to go by, his gold card will feature his own face and his own signature on a piece of plastic that looks more like a credit card than a piece of government identification. At the top, the site says that it is “an official website of the United States government.”

Trump announced the site on Truth Social Wednesday, writing that “thousands have been calling and asking how they can sign up to ride a beautiful road in gaining access to the greatest country and market anywhere in the world. It’s called THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!”

For months, Trump and his team have pitched the “gold card” as a replacement for the EB-5 visa program, which gives foreign investors a pathway to permanent residency. But the market for the gold card would almost singularly consist of rich foreigners due to its enormous price tag: $5 million a pop.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed in March that, in just a few weeks after initially announcing the idea, the administration had already made $5 billion off the gold card.

“Yesterday I sold a thousand,” Lutnick told the All In podcast, claiming at the time that the program would launch a couple weeks from then and that Elon Musk was developing the software to handle applications for the pricy legal papers.

Lutnick explained that American billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson was the brains behind the visa replacement and had shared the details of the “gold card” with Trump over the phone. If there was an iota of truth to Lutnick’s claim, then that meant that people from around the world were willing to hand over $5 million for little more than a promise.

A new Quinippiac poll shows that a majority of Americans are opposed to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, confirming public aversion to a budget bill expected to add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, give a tax break to wealthy people and corporations, and slash critical Medicaid and food stamp programs. Almost half of all voters think Medicaid funding should be increased, not decreased.

Only 67 percent of Republicans are in favor of the bill, a by-product of the conflict between Trump and more conservative, deficit-hawk Republicans who are threatening to tank it.

Eighty-nine percent of Democrats oppose the bill, as well as 57 percent of independents.

The same poll found that majorities disapproved of Trump’s handling of a number of other issues as well, including........

© New Republic