John Thune
John Thune, the Leader-elect of the Senate Republican Conference, is a U.S. Senator from South Dakota who has held his seat since 2005. He currently serves as Senate minority whip. Despite acknowledging that Trump encouraged the January 6 insurrection, Thune has claimed Trump cannot be held responsible for the violence of that day. As the number two Senate Republican, he worked to try to kill the commission investigating the attack on the Capitol.
In December 2020, Thune publicly spoke against continued efforts by Trump and his supporters to challenge the election results, which resulted in Trump attacking him on Twitter/X and calling for him to be primaried. Thune voted to certify the results of the election.
Thune originally endorsed South Carolina Senator Tim Scott for president in the 2024 election but switched to endorsing Donald Trump the day after Trump won the Republican primary in South Carolina.
Thune was, per reporting by PBS, among the many Republican lawmakers who “reacted with immediate fury on Thursday as a New York jury convicted former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election, speaking out with near unanimity in questioning the legitimacy of the trial and how it was conducted.” Thune said that the case was “politically motivated from the beginning, and today’s verdict does nothing to absolve the partisan nature of this prosecution.”
In Congress, Thune has voted for banning gay Americans from adopting children, for a constitutional ban of same-sex marriage, and against a bill that would protect same-sex and interracial marriages.
He also helped secure the confirmations of the people Leonard Leo hand-picked for Trump to nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court. He claimed that Republicans “had no choice” but to change Senate rules for Trump-nominee Neil Gorsuch, whose confirmation Democrats had the votes to block using the filibuster rules, although he supported Republicans in an unprecedented block of Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland’s hearings in 2016. He also voted to confirm Trump nominees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. During the latter’s hearings, he accused Democrats of a “fishing expedition” and attacking Kavanaugh’s character for investigating Christine Blasey Ford’s credible testimony about his alleged sexual assault.
Before being elected to the Senate, Thune was a Reagan appointee to the Small Business Administration, Executive Director of the South Dakotan Republican Party, and a U.S. Representative for South Dakota’s at-large congressional district (1997 to 2003).