Rather, it has turned his fellow senators against him.

Hey, have you heard the news organically on every conservative’s mind today? Yes, Senator Rick Scott is running for Senate majority leader to replace Mitch McConnell. You know Rick Scott, right? That’s right, the charismatic powerhouse of Florida, best known for his resemblance to the Giant from Twin Peaks and his disastrous tenure of the NRSC during the 2022 cycle, where he recruited the most pathetic slate of statewide failures the Republican Party has seen since the days of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Well, he’s running for Senate majority leader now, and is trying to win it the dumbest way possible: by riding an online groundswell of “popular demand” to elect him, as the man who has publicly promised to be Trump’s most loyal MAGA soldier — even to the point of selling out the Senate’s own institutional prerogative to advise and consent in judicial appointments.

My opinions on this matter as policy are almost completely aligned with those of Charlie Cooke, who wrote earlier today on the matter of abusing the reserve appointments clause to stuff positions full of unreviewed judges and officials. All I would add is that he neglected to mention the most likely reason why Trump wants the new Senate leader to yield its institutional power to him: because Trump plans on installing several people who would be utterly unconfirmable, even by the Republican majority as it stands. (While MAGA readers may thrill to that idea, anybody with a lick of common sense understands this to be a recipe for disaster, scandal, and political apocalypse.)

That’s as may be; all that matters for present purposes is that Scott has designated himself the “MAGA candidate” in the race against two “Establishment” candidates in Senator John Cornyn (Texas) and Senator John Thune (S.D.), and because the online grift cycle runs eternally on the right just as it does on the left, that meant that influencers took their cues from various celebrity Trumpers — Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Charlie Kirk et al. — and have thus swooped down like an army of roaches to capitalize.

First, Elon Musk — a man who, I might remind you, owns Twitter/X and recently invested heavily and personally in a Trump victory — ran a Twitter poll asking who should be majority leader. This poll — of Musk’s online followers as well as God knows how many spambots — showed the Tucker-approved Scott winning with 65 percent. Now it is being circulated by others (including Musk himself) as vindicating Scott in an ironclad statement of the People’s Will, rather than the stupidest internet poll on the face of the earth.

Things really exploded, however, when legendary internet plagiarist Benny Johnson leaked a transparently phony “secret whip count” of the leadership vote, suggesting ominously that Scott was in third place — but within striking distance, if you all get outraged on Twitter and click your heels together while wearing these ruby slippers! That his preposterous whip sheet had John Thune voting for his opponent John Cornyn and ultra-conservative Jim Banks of Indiana voting for Thune did absolutely nothing to inspire confidence for careful readers, but it achieved Johnson’s only goal: making him a driver of the “conversation” for another hour or two. I wouldn’t worry about it too much — Johnson probably lifted it from someone else’s fake count anyway — were it not for the fact that Johnson’s phony numbers predictably caused a flood of harassment to swamp the offices of every senator who was “revealed” as a Cornyn or Thune vote.

It may not be Scott’s fault personally; perhaps his fans are just too overly enthusiastic. But it’s no way to make friends in the Senate conference, and according to Politico this obnoxious outside pressure campaign has had the same effect that Jim Jordan’s did during his ill-fated campaign for speaker of the House last year: It has turned his fellow senators against him. What nobody — not Elon, nor the masses of angry voters deluding themselves that they have any right to an opinion on the matter — is that the Senate votes in secret for a reason. (You will notice the House leadership vote is public.) This is because the Senate has always been the upper chamber, the intentionally slow-moving and deliberative one, insulated from either popular or executive-branch pressure because of their lengthy terms. (Until the 17th Amendment, the vast majority of senators were appointed by the party that controlled their legislature rather than submitted to the vagaries of a popular vote.) The senators properly understand their job is not to select a firebrand who will rush headlong into one defeat after another — Rick Scott has been notoriously poor when it comes to counting votes — but rather hold together a functioning conference. Those who think their job is to serve red meat to the online MAGA masses at the cost of productivity misunderstand what politics is about.