Rand Paul reveals GOP lawmakers praise him for knocking Trump's tariffs, encourage him to 'keep going'

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., slammed President Donald Trump’s tariffs, claiming that some of his fellow Republican lawmakers are secretly praising him to avoid political backlash.

"The whole debate is so fundamentally backwards and upside down," Paul said on Tuesday during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "It’s based on a fallacy, and the fallacy is this, that somehow in a trade someone must lose. That somehow, when you trade with someone, there’s a loser and someone’s taking advantage of you, and China is ripping you off, or Japan is ripping you off. It’s absolutely a fallacy. Every trade that occurs in the marketplace is mutually beneficial."

He continued, "If you have a free society and I trade with you, if you want to sell me your coat and I give you $200 for it, we both agreed to it, and we’re both happy with the trade."

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Paul argued that American citizens are not trading with China, so much as they are trading with their local stores. He suggested that a flawed way to look at such transactions would be to say that one has a trade deficit with their grocery store, or an employer would have a trade deficit with one’s employees if they never buy their product. But this, he said, is misguided.

"We have to get back to the fundamentals of ‘Is trade good or is trade bad?,’" Paul argued. 

CNBC host Joe Kernen asked Paul to confirm claims that Republicans are secretly applauding the senator for criticizing tariff policy, because they are afraid of the backlash for doing so publicly.

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"It’s a quiet whisper," Paul confirmed. "And people come up to me in the hall — you know how in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ they would come up and say, ‘Who is John Galt?’, they whisper in my ear, ‘Free trade is good, keep going, keep going,' but they don’t want to say it because of the politics of it."

The senator added that whenever he posts articles in support of free trade on his social media accounts, the posts get swarmed by opponents of free trade. 

 "I get mobbed, I get what they call ‘ratioed,’ I get more comments than likes, which they say isn’t good, but we have to have this debate, and people have to understand that trade is between individuals, not countries, and it's a false accounting," he said.