President-elect Donald Trump is doing a victory lap around Washington, D.C., today, meeting with President Joe Biden and other powerful Beltway figures. Trump looks untroubled in the photos with Biden, seemingly unaware that Republican Senators are stabbing him like lean and hungry Cassius had at Julius Caesar.
Or at least that’s how top MAGA media figure Benny Johnson sees it as he raged about the GOP electing Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as Majority Leader.
[NOTE: The Republican leadership has been in Mitch McConnell‘s hands for 18 years, and MAGA may not yet have expressed enough gratitude to McConnell for squashing Barack Obama‘s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a denial of process that led to Garland being named AG under Biden, a job in which he slow-walked criminal charges against Trump.]
“What exactly the hell is going on here in the US Senate? It’s a despicable insult to the American people.”
Watch top MAGA influencer Benny Johnson losing his sh*t after MAGA candidate Rick Scott lost the race for Senate majority leader
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 13, 2024
Johnson says the Republicans who passed on MAGA favorite, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, and instead elected the “anti-Trump” Sen. Thune after what he calls “the biggest mandate of my lifetime” — those Republicans “immediately backstabbed Donald Trump with their first vote since the mandate” he claims, essentially dealing Trump a loss before he even reports back to work.
For those who reasonably see Thune as a hardline conservative that any Republican might be happy to see in the leadership role, there is a history between Thune and Trump that shows Thune having exhibited a sense of autonomy rather than a pure devotion to the former President.
It’s largely that independence that enrages Johnson, when other picks — like Scott — were sure to win higher marks for fealty.
Note: Thune’s remarks on February 13, 2021, remain a problem for Republicans who insist that Trump had nothing to do with January 6 and that January 6 was also a day of “love” as Trump has subsequently described the riots.
Thune said then: “The impeachment trial is over, and former President Trump has been acquitted. My vote to acquit should not be viewed as exoneration for his conduct on January 6, 2021, or in the days and weeks leading up to it. What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”