Trump 0-for-2 in Senate Appointments Since Election Day

Ohio governor Mike DeWine and his lieutenant governor, Jon Husted, who has now been appointed to J.D. Vance’s Senate seat. Photo: Paul Sancya/APPhoto

Donald Trump produced two red-state Senate vacancies in and immediately after his 2024 presidential victory. The first was his own running mate J.D. Vance’s Ohio seat, which he had occupied for just two years before getting lifted into MAGA Valhalla by Trump last summer. And the second belonged to his secretary of State nominee, Marco Rubio of Florida, who is likely to be the one Trump Cabinet member to get confirmed on the first day of his presidency.

Being the universally acknowledged Supreme Leader of the Republican Party, with any significant opposition to his leadership being all but stamped out, Trump could not let the governors of Florida and Ohio fill these vacancies without a nudge from Mar-a-Lago.

For Florida, he dropped a lot of hints that Ron DeSantis should consider choosing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump and very briefly co-chair of the Republican National Committee after what the Washington Post called a “nepotism hire.” Her residence in Florida, which began in 2022, was almost as brief as her résumé. That’s not to say she didn’t keep herself busy, as my colleague Margaret Hartmann noted recently:

Lara regularly posts videos of her workouts on social media, and in November she became the latest Trump to slap their name on a clothing brand. Lara Trump Collection is a line of American-made activewear. Actually, scratch that: According to Lara, “The LT Brand by Lara Trump Collection isn’t just activewear — it’s a celebration of strength, resilience, and patriotism.”

All righty then.

There’s no clear evidence that Lara’s father-in-law asked DeSantis to give her the Senate gig, even when he was considering DeSantis as a possible backup Pentagon nominee if Pete Hegseth’s appointment went totally sideways. But there was some lobbying from Trump-family intimates, as Hartmann noted:

Various Trump allies — including Florida senator Rick Scott, Elon Musk, and Elon Musk’s mom — pushed for Lara Trump to get Rubio’s seat. On December 9, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump spoke with DeSantis to put in a good word for Lara.

Lara added fuel to the rumors when she resigned from her RNC role on December 9, and told the Associated Press that a Senate appointment “is something I would seriously consider.”

Lara Trump ultimately disclaimed interest in becoming the junior senator from Florida but, apparently, because an appointment was not forthcoming. This week DeSantis appointed Florida attorney general Ashley Moody to the Rubio seat, which she will have to defend in a 2026 special election before serving out the last two years of his term.

Meanwhile, the president-elect involved himself in the Ohio vacancy being filled by Governor Mike DeWine — a former senator himself and not the Trumpiest of Buckeye State Republicans — rather late, with public and private exhortations that his former very friendly rival Vivek Ramaswamy would be a good choice, as the Washington Post reported:

President-elect Donald Trump has encouraged billionaire biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to consider filling Ohio’s vacant Senate seat should the post be offered to him, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private deliberations.

Ramaswamy publicly withdrew his name from consideration for the post in November, after Trump chose him to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency” panel along with billionaire executive Elon Musk. But the Ohio native has reemerged in recent days as one of the leading contenders for the Senate seat and is in advanced discussions with GOP leaders about the position, the people said.

Despite the shove, and a Mar-a-Lago meeting between Trump and DeWine, the Ohioan instead went with his lieutenant governor, Jon Husted, who will have to defend the seat in 2026, then (if he wins) again in 2028. It now appears that Ramaswamy — after he pauses to inflict as much damage on the federal government as possible via DOGE — will run to succeed the term-limited DeWine in 2026 as well.

So should we discern from two Senate seats being filled without Trump dictating the identities of the senators that he’s less powerful than we thought? Probably not. Senate vacancies are precious gubernatorial resources with enormous ripple effects through a state’s politics. DeWine doesn’t owe much of anything to Trump, and DeSantis famously performed extremely well last time he faced Florida voters in 2022. We don’t know that Trump came even close to going to the mats for Lara Trump or for Ramaswamy; both of these worthies clearly had their own fish to fry; and in the final analysis Jon Husted and Ashley Moody are very likely to become obedient MAGA vassals in the Senate. If Trump had gone wild on Truth Social about these positions, then been ignored by the governors, we’d have reason to wonder if his power had greater limits than imagined. But for now, his 0-for-2 record in senatorial kibitzing looks like a passing fancy from which he moved on.