It’s no great surprise that John Thune won the secret ballot within the Republican Senate conference, picking up nearly half of the conference on the first ballot and outpolling John Cornyn on the second.

Thune has been essentially running for this job for two decades, and his role as Mitch McConnell’s right-hand man has only expanded with McConnell’s age and the health episodes that prompted him to step down. Senators don’t particularly enjoy outside pressure on their decisions (McConnell wouldn’t even say himself who he was supporting), and they didn’t warm to Rick Scott’s personality, either; he got just 13 votes out of 53 before being eliminated from the balloting.

But then, for a lot of outside MAGA commentators on Twitter and in talk radio, the campaign to promote Scott was mostly never about winning; it was about finding a new designated internal scapegoat who can be blamed for party and policy setbacks. Donald Trump and his movement can’t fail, they can only be failed — and there always has to be an internal enemy so that the failure can be blamed not on attempting unpopular or unworkable things or on poor execution, but on sabotage.

It’s healthy to be skeptical of the competence and good faith of political leaders, especially when they seem rarely to deliver what they promise, but it’s unhealthy for a movement to become so reliant on this particular form of argument that you can never afford to end the cycle of purges and mole-hunts, even in the immediate aftermath of a great triumph.

With the MAGA favorite J. D. Vance as vice president and Trump’s trusted campaign manager as White House chief of staff, the scapegoat has to be found at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and Mike Johnson now has Trump’s support and is likely to be able to hold his caucus together more to vote for things Trump asks for. Thune, coming from McConnell’s leadership team, is now the obvious choice. Building a public drumbeat against his election is a natural first step to making Thune into public enemy number one.