Is the Clock Ticking on John Thune’s Political Career?

Within minutes of the polls closing on Tuesday night, incumbent Mike Rounds was declared the winner of South Dakota’s Republican Senate primary. There is a good chance that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (SD) won’t be so lucky in two years when his term ends.

That’s because it is quite possible that he will end up on Donald Trump’s enemies list by then – the same list that cost Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) as well as Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) their jobs this year.

Granted, when it comes to the president’s foes, Thune isn’t in the same category as Massie and Cassidy, who both committed what amounts to capital offenses in MAGAland. The former was instrumental in the release of the Epstein files while the latter voted to impeach Trump for staging a coup.

This caused the vindictive president to engineer their primary defeats by hand-picking candidates to run against them.

Unless Thune does something equally offensive, it’s unlikely that Trump will go after him in the same way.

However, he could end up in a similar spot as Cornyn, whose “crime” was that he didn’t embrace Trump’s third White House campaign quickly enough. This made him vulnerable to a primary challenge from the party’s MAGA flank, in this case Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who eventually earned the presidential endorsement because he was more loyal.

It’s easy to see how this could happen.

As Senate majority leader, Thune is responsible for implementing Trump’s legislative agenda. However, there are three reasons why that is not as easy as one would think in light of the GOP’s 53-47 majority.

The first is that the president’s expectations are unrealistic. For example, he wants Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act and/or nuke the filibuster. Neither of those things are likely to happen.

Secondly, quite a few of the president’s policies and initiatives are unpopular, including his tariffs, the Iran war, securing $1 billion to fund his ballroom, and the $1.8 billion slush fund he wants to use to reward people who broke the law for him. In addition, Trump also doesn’t make things easier on the Senate when he nominates partisan hacks to key government positions, such as his former attorney Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Finally, all of this is complicated by the president having alienated three of the senators who are leaving Congress at the end of the year – including Cassidy and Cornyn.

In other words, all of Thune’s problems are of Trump’s making, and, to preserve the Senate majority in the midterms, he may feel compelled do things that will upset the president, like killing the ballroom funding or the slush fund.

However, it is very possible that even that wouldn’t be enough and that the Democrats manage to flip enough seats in November to take control of the Senate. One of them, by the way, is Cornyn’s, which is in play because of Paxton winning the primary.

And, even though a midterm defeat would primarily be the president’s fault, it’s clear that he would never acknowledge that and instead look for a scapegoat: Thune.

Our guess is that he would blame the loss of the Senate majority on Republicans not passing his voter suppression bill and preserving the filibuster.

And, just as in Cornyn’s case, this would open the door for a MAGA challenger in South Dakota.

Another factor that favors this scenario is that 2028 will be the last time that Trump can really throw his weight around as president, which is something he clearly enjoys. He likes installing loyalists in key positions, and Thune isn’t that.

All of this puts the Senate majority leader in a tough spot. Continuing to just please Trump could cost Republicans the Senate; going against his wishes could cost Thune his job in a couple of years.