Trump faithful are out for blood after Rick Scott lost Senate majority vote

Top figures in the MAGA world complained Wednesday that their candidate for Senate majority leader, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, failed to pass the first round of voting.

The angry took to social media and their podcasts to whine and even threaten to oust Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — who was elected to the Senate presidency in a secret vote — if he doesn’t comply with all of Donald Trump’s demands .

“If he doesn’t support President Trump in the next 30 to 45 days to fill President Trump’s Cabinet, we will remove him,” Charlie Kirk told Real America’s Voice, referring to Thune.

Of course, Kirk has no actual authority to remove Thune from Senate leadership. However, the right-wing activist and founder of Turning Point USA has a significant following in the MAGA world.

So does former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who hosts the daily podcast War room– was also praised for Thune’s victory. After it emerged that Scott had lost, he stated clearly on his podcast: “Victory is not ours. I don’t care how you dress it, that’s not it.”

Others who complained about Scott’s defeat included Rogan O’Handley, the right-winger who runs the pro-Trump X account “DC Draino,” which has two million followers. “Every senator who voted for Rick Scott should publicly acknowledge this,” he said. “Then we can find out who the people behind it are.”

O’Handley added in a separate post: “MAGA is p—ed.”

Ryan Fournier, the 28-year-old who founded Students for Trump, called the Senate leadership’s outcome “ridiculous.” Right-wing influencer Savanah Hernandez even suggested that senators who didn’t vote for Scott should somehow be removed from office.

“We need to know which senators voted for Thune and Cornyn,” Hernandez wrote to her 600,000 followers on X. “The American people wanted Rick Scott in office, and we made that clear on November 5th.” That was one extremely important vote and the senators who voted against Scott must be removed.”

Conservative activist Joey Mannarino agreed, writing, “If we find out you didn’t elect Rick Scott as Senate Majority Leader, we will hold you accountable with all our might.”

Thune, 61, is a former Trump opponent who defeated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the second round of the leadership election. He will now assume the post that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) held for nearly two decades.

Thune’s victory suggests that Trump’s hold on Republican lawmakers may not be as ironclad as he had hoped. While Thune and the president-elect appear to have largely repaired their relationship, Thune famously said in 2020 that Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss to Biden would “go down like a shotgun blast.” Trump responded by calling him a “RINO,” which is an acronym for “Republican In Name Only.”

Trump, who needs the Senate majority leader’s help to get a number of presidential appointees confirmed, has never publicly endorsed or commented on Scott’s leadership bid. However, people close to Trump like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made it clear that the MAGA movement wanted Scott in this position.

The secret voting process means we will likely never know exactly how each senator voted. However, some expressed their stance before the vote, with Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) each supporting Scott.