Senate Majority Leader John Thune is getting a tough job done.
‘Senate Republicans have been committed to getting President Trump’s nominees through,’ Thune, who’s been on the job steering the Senate for six weeks, told Fox News in an exclusive national digital interview.
Thune was interviewed ahead of Brooke Rollins’s confirmation as secretary of agriculture, which brought to 16 the number of Trump nominees approved by the Senate.
Only 11 Cabinet nominees were approved by this date eight years ago during Trump’s first term in the White House.
And on this date four years ago, the Senate had confirmed only seven of then-President Biden’s Cabinet nominees.
Rollins’ confirmation followed the confirmations of two of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees: former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.
Gabbard and Kennedy were confirmed on near party-line votes in a chamber the GOP controls with a 53-47 majority.
‘I think that the Senate Republicans have proven that we are united,’ the South Dakota Republican said.
Thune, a two-decade Senate veteran who served in GOP leadership the past few years before succeeding longtime leader Sen. Mitch McConnell as the top Republican in the chamber, emphasized the team effort.
‘What you try and do is just try and make the people around you better,’ Thune said. ‘We’ve got a lot of talent in the Senate, people who … we want to deploy and utilize and let them use their gifts and talents [to] get things done around here that need to be done.’
The senator pointed to his father, a former college athlete and coach, who he said would advise him to ‘make the extra pass if somebody’s got a better shot. So what we’ve been trying to do is look for an opportunity to make the extra pass. And I think that it does really utilize the great talent we have here in the Senate.’
Thune says he’s been meeting ‘fairly regularly’ with the president, in person, on the phone and through text.
‘It’s a regular pipeline,’ he said. ‘His team has been really good, too, about working with our team here. I think we’ve had a very constructive working relationship. And I tell people, our incentives are aligned. We all want to get to the same destination.’
Thune hasn’t always had a constructive relationship with the often unpredictable Trump.
Trump was critical of Thune in the years after his first term and briefly considered backing a primary challenge against the senator as he ran for re-election in 2022.
Thune said that ‘like a lot of people,’ he’s had ‘differences with the president in the past.’
‘But I think right now, we understand the things that we want to get done in the course of his term and the opportunity that we have, which is rare in politics, to have unified control of the government, House, Senate and White House. We need to maximize that, and in order to do that, we’ve got to have a very constructive relationship in which there’s regular communication,’ Thune emphasized.
McConnell was the only Senate Republican to vote against confirming Kennedy and Gabbard. McConnell, who suffered from polio as a child and is a major proponent of vaccines, was critical of Kennedy’s history of high-profile vaccine skepticism.
‘I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles,’ McConnell said after the Kennedy vote.
Trump, who’s long criticized McConnell, took aim again.
‘I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is he shouldn’t have been a leader. He knows that. He voted against Bobby. He votes against almost everything. He’s a very bitter guy,’ Trump charged.
Thune, interviewed after Gabbard’s confirmation and ahead of the final vote on Kennedy, said the 82-year-old McConnell is ‘still active up here and still a strong voice on issues he’s passionate about, including national security.’
‘So when it comes to those issues, he has outsized influence and a voice that we all pay attention to,’ Thune said. ‘He’s got views on some of these nominees that maybe don’t track exactly with where I or other Republicans have come down, but we respect his positions on these, some of these noms, and I know that on a lot of big stuff ahead of us, he’s going to be with us. He’s a team player.’
Thune added, ‘I’ve had plenty of consultations with him through the years and in recent months and weeks, and we’ll continue to reach out to him when we think it makes sense to get a lay of the land that, based on his experience, he can help us navigate.’
While he’s enjoyed a slew of confirmation victories this week, Thune is realistic.
‘I feel good about how it’s gone so far, but we’ve got some really hard sledding ahead. We know that, and we just have to keep our heads down and do the work,’ he cautioned.
While confirming Trump’s Cabinet is currently job No. 1, Thune is juggling numerous tasks.
‘Obviously, most of our time has been occupied moving the president’s team and getting his nominees confirmed, and we’ll continue to do that. But as we go about that process, we’re looking for windows, too, to move important legislation,’ he said.
He pointed to the Laken Riley Act, quickly passed by the Senate and the House and signed into law by Trump.
The controversial measure, which is named after a nursing student who was killed by an illegal immigrant while jogging on the University of Georgia’s campus, requires federal immigration authorities to detain illegal immigrants found guilty of theft-related crimes.
Thune pointed out that the legislation grabbed bipartisan support, but he added that it’s ‘a bill that was responsive to the election mandate, and it was a bill that divided Democrats and united Republicans.’
He also chastised his predecessor as Senate majority leader, Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.
Thune argued that during Schumer’s tenure ‘the floor would get bogged down. You know, votes would take forever. We’re just trying to make more efficient use of people’s time and get this place kind of operating on a schedule again. We’re going to continue to do that and getting back to regular order.’