It’s a Thursday night in late July, and Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown — lead singer of Scott Brown and the Diplomats — is belting out classic rock covers on a stage at Wally’s, a seaside bar in Hampton, New Hampshire. Brown is 6-foot-2 and angular. He’s 67, but his biceps bulge from a sleeveless denim vest. His jeans are tight, his voice is deep. “I feel like makin’ love,” he sings, “feel like makin’ love … to … you.”
His words are, it seems, a siren call to the smattering of mostly middle-aged women who’ve migrated from the bar toward the stage, to dance in their beach sandals. “The more you drink, the better we sound,” Brown tells them — and then dives into a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”
During a break, I meet Elizabeth Furbush, a New Hampshire real estate agent whose Scott Brown and the Diplomats T-shirt is Sharpie-signed by the man himself. “Rock On,” reads the looping script. “He’s so down to earth,” Furbush gushes. “He’s not one of those uppity, better-than-you-type politicians.”
Sixteen years ago, Brown cashed in on his charm to work a political miracle. Running as a Republican in Massachusetts, he won the U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy for almost half a century. Driving around the state in his signature green GMC pickup truck, dressed in a worn barn coat, he sold himself as a “regular guy.” When he arrived in Washington, chiseled, lean and bristling with bro energy, he constituted a sort of one-man revolution. He called himself a “Scott Brown Republican” and proudly proclaimed he was the “most bipartisan senator.” His 2011 memoir, “Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances,” was a best seller.
It was the early days of the first Obama administration, and no one could see the coming Trumpist storm — the seething resentment toward democratic institutions, the animosity directed at trans folks and immigrants. Being Republican back then didn’t entail allegiance to a cult of personality. You could get elected as a sunny, affable GOP centrist — and Brown was just that.
Now Brown is trying to recapture some of his former magic. He is seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in New Hampshire, running against another former GOP senator, John E. Sununu, in Tuesday’s primary. The winner is likely to face Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in November.
Brown trails Sununu by 40 points, but when I set out to write about him, I figured that even in losing, he could accomplish something big. New Hampshire has a long and curious tradition of politicians losing an election but still hatching a revolution. Think Barry Goldwater in 1964, Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and Pat Buchanan in 1992. All three came up short in the New Hampshire presidential primary yet managed to lay the groundwork for movements that changed history.
I wondered if Brown, in his own way, could prove to be a similar figure — a fearless, independent-minded politician with nothing to lose who could sketch a vision for a future Republican Party that finally breaks free of Donald Trump’s toxicity. There were hints that he could play this role. He still labels himself a “Scott Brown Republican,” and in February, after Trump endorsed Sununu, Brown declared that he alone would be able to tell the president, “No, sir.”
The more time I spent with him, though, the more my hope for a Brown-led Republican revolution curdled. I came to see that such a revolt may not be possible in 2026 — not for Scott Brown and probably not for anyone else. In fact, far from being a tribune of a different, better Republican Party, Brown is something else entirely: a one-man embodiment of the fraught position where Republicans find themselves in 2026, locked in a destructive embrace of Trump with no real way out.
***
John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Gavin Newsom: There’s a combination of good looks and alpha-male charisma that seems to reliably translate to political success. And Brown has it.
He was raised in working-class Wakefield, Massachusetts, largely by his mother, a waitress who partnered with a series of men, among them a truck driver who threatened to kill Brown. Young Scott rebelled. He grew his hair long. He played with matches, once accidentally igniting a blaze that started a small forest fire. He shoplifted often: Black Sabbath records were expensive back then.
But he was a maestro on the basketball court, with a jump shot so sweet that he would in time earn the nickname Downtown Scotty Brown. And thanks in part to the stabilizing influence of his grandparents, he was book smart. In 1977, he got into Tufts, where he co-captained the basketball team. He next joined the National Guard and went to law school at Boston College.
Was Scott Brown fit as a young buck? Hoo boy! In 1982, Cosmopolitan magazine named him “America’s Sexiest Man,” after his sister nominated him. A centerfold photo captured a completely nude Brown artfully draping his palm over his nether regions.
Over the next decade, Brown modeled for several clothing brands. He met Gail Huff, a model and TV reporter who’s still his wife 40 years on, and he burrowed into a National Guard career that would ultimately last 35 years.
But why would such a handsome devil limit himself to obscure military service? Brown’s destiny was politics. He became a Massachusetts state representative, then state senator, before running for the U.S. Senate, in a 2010 special election to replace Kennedy.
He campaigned as a moderate. He was pro-choice but backed conscience-protection exemptions for health care providers. On his campaign website, he supported “reasonable and appropriate development of alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and improved hydroelectric facilities,” but he stood firmly against a wind energy farm on Cape Cod.
This triangulation proved sufficient to win over about a fifth of Massachusetts Democrats, and when he landed in Washington, he rewarded these voters by showing independence. He voted against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and defended Massachusetts’ embrace of gay marriage as a “states’ rights issue” even as he opposed legalizing gay marriage nationwide. He broke from his party to back a START treaty that was part of President Barack Obama’s attempt to ease Russia-U.S. tensions. And he was one of only a few Republicans to support an overhaul of Wall Street rules that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Nevertheless, he was in deep-blue Massachusetts, and in 2012, he lost his reelection bid to Elizabeth Warren. The next year, he moved to New Hampshire, where in 2014 he ran for Senate against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. He lost — though only by 3 points.
Within two years, a very different outsider-populist was the face of the Republican Party. Trump named Brown ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, where he says he conducted diplomacy by asking Kiwis he didn’t know to come over for barbecues.
Sometimes his frat house approach backfired. At a 2017 Peace Corps event in Samoa, he told a waitress serving his table that she “could make hundreds of dollars working” in the hospitality industry in the United States. The State Department investigated and counseled Brown on standards of conduct for government employees. Still, just before he left New Zealand in late 2020, his band played before 15,000 concertgoers at a festival called Beervana.
Over the past six years, Brown has been a little at sea — scrambling between various projects with vigor. He has ridden his bike 150 miles a week, competed in 50 or so triathlons, made myriad trips to the beach with his four grandkids, served for seven fleeting months as the president and dean of New England Law Boston, and spent four years as a coach, transforming the hopeless girls varsity hoop squad at Amesbury High School in Massachusetts into one of the state’s top 20 teams. The school’s track coach, Ernie Bissaillon, told me he was so impressed by Brown’s restless energy that he began calling him Scooter.
Then, early last year, Shaheen announced she would not seek reelection — and Scooter felt summoned to try for the Senate again.
***
My first campaign stop with Brown is in Trump-friendly Belknap County, which sits mid-state. On a Saturday night, I’m standing in the county’s ruby red epicenter, at a barbecue honoring the late Harry Bean, a beloved, Harley-riding New Hampshire state legislator who died in February, at 71, after a long career fighting against abortion access and for gun rights.
A crowd of 80 or so Republicans has gathered in his vast barn this evening, and the vibe is decidedly not centrist. A Gadsden flag hangs from the rafters, alongside another flag proclaiming “God, Guns, Guts.”
Brown arrives in a modest black Buick sedan. (The green pickup truck is no longer.) He mingles. He shakes hands, vigorously. He leans in to listen, and he comes off as beneficent.
John E. Sununu is not in attendance. Brown has suggested that John E. is coasting on his family name: His father, John H. Sununu, served as New Hampshire’s governor in the 1980s, and John E.’s brother, Chris Sununu, just spent eight years in the same post, leaving in 2025. John E., whatever his other advantages, is definitely not Scott Brown-approachable. (He ducked my interview request, and his staffers ignored my ask for his campaign schedule.)
When the mingling ends and the political speeches begin, Brown takes a seat in a folding chair and listens. The evening’s messages are 100% MAGA. A candidate for U.S. representative, Melissa Bailey, fondly gives her own summary of Bean’s economic views: essentially, let’s stop giving money to lazy people who don’t work. When New Hampshire Executive Counselor Joe Kenney stands to speak — with a miniature American flag tucked, pole and all, into the brim of his cowboy hat — he mocks a group of protesters he’d just run into. “They looked like a bunch of dirty people that were homeless,” Kenney says. “Unshaven, not well dressed, unkempt. They don’t represent America.”
In short, it ain’t Massachusetts up here, and if a politician wants to ingratiate himself to the GOP jefes who dominate our state legislature, talk of bipartisanship isn’t going to get the job done.
Brown, like previously independent-minded Republicans everywhere, has proved himself remarkably willing to adapt to the 2026 context. The politician who once stood up for gay rights while in the Senate has now made an anti-trans stance central to his campaign: At a later appearance, he’ll fret that a “young girl” might find herself in a locker room “seeing a guy shaking his Willy Wonka around.”
In recent years, he has publicly cheered the Cabinet nominations of Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has embraced Trump’s tariffs. And in a February 2025 interview with Sean Hannity, he walked back his 2021 assertion that Trump “bears responsibility” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “I was wrong. And I apologize,” he proclaimed before saying of Trump, “I wake up every day thinking how lucky we are that we have him.”
When asked at a debate with Sununu to name an issue on which he parts with Trump, Brown focused on an absurdly small one: the president’s push to make Canada the 51st state.
At the barbecue, when it’s his turn to speak, he rails (of course) against “men and boys in women and girls’ sports.” He also notes that “many of you already have my personal cellphone number,” and that one of the reasons they might be calling is “because you’re getting screwed by the IRS or the EPA.”
***
Four days later, I get one-on-one time with Brown, in the back of Concord’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. Our talk, 18 minutes long, is scant on nourishment and oddly tense. I feel like an exam proctor bombarding Brown with questions he’d rather not deal with.
Who are his political heroes? “Ronald Reagan is certainly right up there, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington. … Certainly their legacies are second to none.”
What does it mean to be a Scott Brown Republican? “I’m independent. I don’t owe anybody anything. And I read the bills, see how they affect our state, country, debt and deficit, and vote.”
Aside from Canada, are there other prominent Trump positions he opposes? “Let’s talk first about John. John and his family have never supported the president, and as a matter of fact before the last election he wrote a big op-ed calling him a loser. … The whole family — the father, Chris, John — they never supported the president. There’s a history there. Whereas I have [supported the President]. I was the first mainstream guy to endorse him.”
Other topics where he disagrees with Trump? “If we’re going to put 50,000 troops on the ground [in the Middle East], we need to get congressional authority.”
What does MAGA mean to him? “Listen, I’m a Scott Brown Republican. I have a lot of MAGA support. … I want America to be great. I’ve always wanted America to be great. … To talk about America First and buying American, supporting America, that it’s better than the alternative, for sure. I supported the president. I was one of the first mainstream people to do it. And I think he’s doing some really wonderful things and, I think, things that he could probably use some help on and guidance. And I wish him well.”
Again: Any other topics where he parts with Trump? “I already gave you a couple of pretty big things.”
Does he feel like he’s moved from the centrism of 2010 to Trumpism in 2026? “I’ve always had my positions, centrist. I’ve always had these positions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, war. [In the Senate] I voted with my party 83% of the time.”
What does he think of traffic stops by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents? (In July, in Biddeford, Maine, less than an hour from Brown’s home, Colombian national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was fatally shot in an ICE traffic stop.) “Obama was the deporter in chief. It was OK under him. That’s how it would work. You just send two ICE agents, grab them and you get rid of them. But now because it’s Trump they don’t cooperate. They notify people. It’s very violent and ugly.”
In talking to Brown, I struggled to discern any strong principles anchoring his ambitions. To me, it seemed that he had shucked his old centrism without any apparent angst — as though it were a pair of cheap socks he no longer needed — and replaced it with an array of cruel, Trump-inflected views. It all felt so hollow, and it left me disquieted: If you’re going to arrive at political positions that cause hardship for others, you should, I think, at least have a rationale.
When I spoke to Chris Galdieri, who teaches political science at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, he too was struck by Brown’s lack of substance. “I’m not really sure what his campaign is about,” he told me. “Having the relationships is a good start, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily going to win you a primary when you’ve got the Sununu family and Donald Trump on the other side of the ballot.”
***
Politics aside, I like Scott Brown. He’s personable. When he writes to me after I watch his band play, he says, “I saw you nodding your head in a few of those songs, so you must’ve liked it.” Later, in another email, he demonstrates that he sees me not as the media but as a unique human with his own passions and idiosyncrasies. At one point, I’d mentioned to him that I too am an aging athlete, a diehard cyclist, so he sends me a photo of himself on his bike. He’s alone on the open road in the photo, bent low over the bars, toiling away in a triathlon. “Here I am,” he says, one bike guy to another, “with my girlfriend.”
The attentiveness Brown brings to his interactions on the campaign trail is real. And it isn’t lost on voters. “You’re honest. You’re true to the core,” a supporter named Barry Nilson tells Brown in Concord. “I want to suggest your special interest is the people in New Hampshire.”
Encountering such personal enthusiasm for Brown, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching someone with magnetic charm and virtuoso people skills throw everything away to serve a callous god. And why? Why the continued fealty to Trump, even in the face of likely electoral ruin? The truth is, we could ask the same question about the entire Republican Party in 2026 — lemmings, all of them, jumping off cliffs.
As I was finishing this piece, I made one last attempt to sort out the mystery of Brown’s MAGA-ward shift. I emailed Brown and expressed my disappointment that the 2010 version of him had now largely vanished. Why, I asked, had he aligned so closely with Trump this time?
“Two different elections,” he responded. “I have always called balls and strikes and when I agree with them, I say so. When I disagree with them, I say so. I’ve done the same with past presidents.” He added, “I didn’t get [Trump’s] endorsement because I call balls and strikes. It doesn’t really matter to me. I will just do my job and represent the people of New Hampshire as the only independent candidate with no ties to special interest.”
When Brown steps out of the Concord VFW hall, though, the people of New Hampshire barely register his presence. Here he is, a onetime U.S. senator, striking and towering, striding Main Street in the state’s capital city. Yet those who cross his path are just peering into a phone or sipping an iced drink.
If Brown were standing up for something during his campaign — if he were leading a revolution — it’s likely folks on the sidewalk would take notice of him. They might even rush up to plead for a selfie. But the Trump-friendly rhetoric he’s mouthing renders him indistinguishable from the larger morass of Republican politics. It plays well among some very conservative voters, sure, but in the everyday world, it’s just white noise.
At one point during our interview, I had asked Brown whether there was a political campaign that stood out as a template for his own. “Yeah,” he replied, “2010 Scott Brown taking on Martha Coakley. Down 41 points, winning by 6.”
I wish it were true that 2010 was his model — that the previous version of Brown had shown up in 2026. Lord knows the Republicans need some alternative to Trumpism. It certainly would have been good for America if he’d chosen to run such a campaign. It probably also would have been better for Scott Brown.
Bill Donahue is a writer in New Hampshire.
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