• Elon Musk and other MAGA figures are embarking on a new fight: who will be the next Senate majority leader.

• They support Senator Rick Scott over Senators John Thune and John Cornyn.

• It all depends on Scott’s loyalty to Trump. But it is unclear whether this will succeed.

As President-elect Donald Trump is now on his way to the White House, his allies are setting a new goal: to appoint a loyalist as majority leader in the Senate.

In front of Mitch McConnell long-awaited retirement of leadership, the Republicans are ready to choose a new leader on Wednesday of this week. They will decide between Senators John Thune of South Dakota, John Cornyn of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida.

Many of Trump’s most vocal online allies have made up their minds. They want Scott, and over the weekend, right-wing media figures began lobbying for him.

Tucker Carlson written the that Scott is the “only candidate who agrees with Donald Trump.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that “Trump’s entire reform agenda” would be “shaky” if Scott were not elected. This adds to a group of hard-line conservative senators and MAGA-aligned outside organizations who are loudly declaring their support for the Florida senator.

Then there’s Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman who spent more than $119 million to get Trump elected and who been by his side these last few days. After executing a survey that Scott won easily, Musk supported him, argue that the next majority leader “must respond to the will of the people.”

“With Elon Musk’s support, we hope President Trump will come out strongly in favor of Rick Scott since he is the only choice who has consistently been loyal to the MAGA agenda,” a Senate Republican aide told Business Insider .

This will show Trump’s influence in the Senate.

Trump has not yet endorsed any candidate, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on whether he would do so. It would be a risky proposition: Thune and Cornyn, who both served as McConnell’s lieutenant, have long been considered frontrunners for the job.

If Trump loudly supported a candidate, and that candidate lost, it would be an embarrassing note to begin his second term. So for now, Trump is playing a different game, leveraging his influence thus far to force each of the three contenders to comply with his demands.

Sunday, Trump declared that all nominees must agree to allow “vacation appointments,” which would allow him to legally appoint people to positions without needing immediate Senate confirmation. In a few hours, the three candidates repliedundertaking in various ways to satisfy this demand.

“Without vacation appointments, it will take two years or more to confirm the new administration!” Musk chimed In.

Suddenly, a relatively sleepy race built on low-key relationship building and promises of modest institutional changes is about loyalty to Trump, at least in public.

Thune and Cornyn have done things in the past that Scott’s allies are now capitalizing on to portray them as disloyal to MAGA. Both men publicly express their desire to have a candidate other than Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. Thune himself called Trump to withdraw from the race in 2016. Cornyn helped navigate a major gun control bill in 2022 following the Uvalde shooting in his home state of Texas. And both supported aid to Ukraine, while Scott did not.

Spokespeople for Thune and Cornyn had no comment for this story.

But the race won’t be decided by base GOP voters. It will be decided by the 53 GOP senators and senators-elect who will make up the party’s majority in 2025. The vast majority of them have not publicly declared who they will vote for, and they never will have to – the Voting is by secret ballot. Historically, Trump the influence is less pronounced when it comes to Capitol leadership elections.

Scott might also have trouble convincing his colleagues. He was president of the Republican Senate. field arm in 2022, when the party had a bad cycle, and he only won by 10 votes when he challenged McConnell that year. Some senators could also react badly to the online pressure campaign that is starting to take shape.

“They’re trying to intimidate us. That’s not how these elections are run,” one Republican senator said. said anonymously Punchbowl News.

Read the original article on Business Insider