Trump Gets Endorsement From Leader of Senate Campaign Arm

Laura Litvan, Gregory Korte and John Harney
·3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump has been endorsed by Steve Daines, who’s leading the Republican effort to retake the Senate in 2024, a significant step in Trump’s quest to become his party’s standard-bearer for the third time.

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The Make America Great Again PAC, which is associated with Trump, made the announcement in a one-sentence statement on Monday night, and quoted from a New York Times report that Daines, Montana’s junior senator, had made the endorsement earlier in the day on a podcast with Donald Trump Jr.

“The best four years I’ve had in the US Senate is when Donald Trump was serving in the Oval Office,” Daines told the younger Trump on the podcast, citing tax cuts, Supreme Court nominations and conservation legislation.

“He’s got one more thing that we’ve got to finish up, and that is, let’s finish building the wall, and let’s finish securing our southern border to protect our communities,” Daines said. “For these reasons and many others, I’m proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president of the United States.”

The former president last week surprised some political observers by gaining expressions of support from several Republican House members from Florida, where Ron DeSantis, considered his chief rival for the Republican nomination, is governor.

Yet this latest endorsement marks a breakthrough for Trump because it comes from the chairman of the influential National Republican Senatorial Committee and a member of the leadership team of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been at odds with the former president for years.

McConnell rebuked Trump after the Capitol insurrection in January 2021 and has blamed the party’s losses in 2022 Senate races on some of the candidates Trump enthusiastically promoted. Trump, however, tried to shift responsibility for the losses onto McConnell.

A spokesman for McConnell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Daines’ move and whether he knew of it in advance. The senatorial committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night.

Daines made the endorsement as President Joe Biden prepares to announce that he’s running for reelection, perhaps as soon as Tuesday morning.

Trump has already picked up endorsements from nearly a dozen Senate Republicans, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mike Braun of Indiana, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. A handful of freshman Republican senators who benefited from Trump’s endorsement in last year’s elections also are behind him, including JD Vance of Ohio and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

Senate Democrats have a whisper-thin 51-49 majority in the chamber that includes the backing of the three independent senators who caucus with their party.

There will be 34 Senate seats on the ballot in 2024, 20 of them now held by Democrats, plus three seats held by independents that include the hotly contested seat of Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Also, three Democrats are up for reelection in close races in heavily Republican states that include Ohio, West Virginia and Daines’s home state of Montana.

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