Rick Scott Says He Doesn’t Want to Be Senate Leader. Republicans Don’t Believe Him.

Sen. Rick Scott’s decision to end-run Senate Majority Leader John Thune and invite President Donald Trump to an all-members lunch on Wednesday upset Senate Republicans and left many of them with the belief that he will challenge Thune to lead the conference later this year, sources tell NOTUS.

Scott, the senior senator from Florida, turned heads over the weekend by inviting Trump to the weekly Steering Committee meeting led by conservatives in the conference, without giving Thune even so much as a heads up. The Republican leader has been navigating months of tension between the president, who seemingly has no interest in making Thune’s job easy, and the small GOP majority Thune is trying to hold on to.

Scott insisted to NOTUS that he has no ulterior motive. He also said he has no intention of ever running for leadership again.

“I’ve run twice. I have zero interest in doing anything leadership in the Senate ever again. I will never run for anything leadership in the Senate ever again,” he said. “I love it when people say things anonymously and I have to respond. … I think that’s ridiculous.”

But Scott has made other moves that have raised eyebrows: He sent a letter to Senate Republicans on Monday night laying out what he believed should be their agenda for the coming months ahead of November, including passing a “clean” continuing resolution before the Sept. 30 deadline and putting the SAVE America Act on the floor — or at least “portions of it.”

“I hope we can continue to have robust conversations as a conference this week as to how we should spend our time between now and the November elections,” Scott wrote, noting Trump’s presence at the luncheon. “I hope everyone will be vocal as to what they think is the best path forward.”

Numerous members saw Scott’s invite as a direct affront to Thune’s leadership and believed Scott, who has run for the top Senate spot twice previously, may use the Trump invite and his close relationship with the president to springboard a leadership challenge.

“I don’t know how … you couldn’t see it like that. That’s how I saw it,” one Senate Republican told NOTUS. “I think it’s an undermining of our leader, quite frankly. … I don’t know why he wouldn’t have coordinated that.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said he anticipates Scott will “probably” run for Senate leader and that he personally would like to see Scott challenge Thune.

“I can’t speak for them, but I hope he does,” Tuberville said. “He’d been wanting to do it, but can he get elected? It’d be hard.”

“He threw his name out there last time. I would imagine he’d do it [again],” Tuberville added.

Scott ran against Thune and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) following the 2024 elections, but finished in third place. In 2022, he challenged Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who held the spot for nearly two decades, and lost badly.

Scott’s emailed outline of his vision for a Republican agenda was not particularly well received, especially as the continued push by Scott and other conservatives, like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, to pass the SAVE America Act has made life difficult for Thune. They want leaders to put the bill back on the floor and debate it, despite the fact it lacks sufficient support within the conference. Additionally, there’s not enough support for changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules that would be necessary to pass the bill.

A source close to Scott emphasized there was nothing in the letter the senator hadn’t said before and that running for leader next Congress wasn’t “on his mind at the moment.”

However, the source did acknowledge that the letter and the decision to invite Trump came against a backdrop of simmering tension over how the Senate is managed.

“There’s certainly frustration with some of the ways the Senate has been operating,” the source said. “The general frustration comes from Trump himself. People are gonna gripe no matter what. I think it’s just there is some general frustration from some members, they haven’t been quiet about it, but nobody has been attacking Thune.”

The source also emphasized that inviting Trump to speak at the Steering Committee lunch was nothing new for Scott, pointing to the fact that he has invited a number of Cabinet members and other senior administration officials to speak to the group.

”Any opportunity you get to invite him to lunch on a Wednesday, you’re gonna take it,” said the source, who added that other than Scott, “there’s not many people who can bring the range of people he has brought to lunch.”

Trump hasn’t been willing to take no for an answer on the SAVE America Act. Last week, he blew up Senate Republicans’ plan to quickly confirm his pick to lead the nation’s intelligence agencies and reauthorize a key intelligence-gathering tool unless senators agreed to pass the bill. Members like Lee and Scott have boosted Trump’s position.

“I think we ought to put it on the floor and announce that we’re going to debate it until it passes. Sometimes, by debating it, you can wear down the opposition. Sometimes you can find areas of compromise,” Lee told NOTUS.

Most Senate Republicans are deeply skeptical or outright dismissive of that plan, given the intense Democratic opposition to the bill. They believe the conservative senators are selling Trump and their incensed base a false bill of goods that has no chance of succeeding.

“We’re wasting time on this,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said Tuesday. “It’s like a remake of a bad movie that just keeps on getting released … it’s been an abject failure. At what point do you just stop digging a hole?”

“The idea that at some point, 10 Democrats are all of a sudden going to flip and vote for the SAVE America Act, it’s just not a realistic outcome,” Thune told reporters.

The lunch will be an opportunity for Republican senators to hear directly from Trump, however. They also hope to get more information from him about any plan to reauthorize the counterterrorism tool — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — which has gone dark for the first time since it was originally enacted in 2008.

“It will be important if it actually is a constructive exchange of different opinions, and hopefully we can all get on the same page,” Cornyn said. “Right now, we’re not in a great place.”

Scott’s denials that he wants Thune’s job ring hollow to many.

“He’s certainly pretending he’s leader right now,” one Republican operative said. “The email was very much making that case. I read it as an attempted big dicking of Thune.”

Some of Scott’s actions live long in the minds of Senate Republicans — specifically his decision to challenge McConnell only days after the 2022 midterms.

The Florida lawmaker led the National Republican Senatorial Committee that cycle, and his decision to keep the group out of GOP primaries led to a number of subpar candidates. He was also panned for his indirect call to sunset Social Security and Medicare.

McConnell was a chief critic of those moves, saying Republicans had a “candidate-quality” problem. Democrats ultimately grew their majority by a seat that cycle.

McConnell ultimately beat back the challenge with 37 votes to Scott’s 10.

One Senate Republican noted that if Scott were to run now, his support might not even get to that level.

“Let me show you how many votes he has,” the member said, holding up five fingers. “Maybe this on a good day,” they continued, holding up 10 fingers.

“It’s probably gone down since last time,” they added.