Donald Trump doubts DeSantis will appoint Lara Trump to Senate seat

Supporters of Donald Trump have been calling on Ron DeSantis to appoint Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, to succeed Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate. But at a press conference on Monday, Donald Trump said he didn’t think DeSantis would do so.

“No, I don’t,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago. “I probably don’t, but I don’t know. Ron’s doing a good job and that’s his choice. Nothing to do with me.”

Trump announced last month that he was nominating Rubio to serve as secretary of state in his administration, giving DeSantis the opportunity to select a successor before a special election is held for the seat in November 2026. The seat then comes up for a vote again in November 2028.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez, and James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ chief of staff, have been among the names posted in media reports as potential appointees for the seat.

Lara Trump served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee with Michael Whatley from March of this year to last week, when she announced that was stepping down. She told the Associated Press in an interview that she was open to filling the seat if DeSantis were to appoint her.

“It is something I would seriously consider,” she told the AP. “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t know exactly what that would look like. And I certainly want to get all of the information possible if that is something that’s real for me. But yeah, I would 100% consider it.”

Hype

Lara Trump’s candidacy has been hyped and promoted for weeks by some of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in and outside of government, such as Sen. Rick Scott, Pinellas U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, and Elon Musk.

She has served as a television producer and was involved in Donald Trump’s previous presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. In 2021, she briefly considered running for an open U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina before deciding otherwise.

“People talk about nepotism,” Donald Trump said on Monday about Lara. “She could have run for the Senate in North Carolina. Tedd Budd [who did run and win the seat in 2022] would be the first one to say and he wouldn’t have run. Nobody would have run, and she just said, ‘No, I want to really focus on my children.’”

Trump moved on to discussing Rubio, perhaps his most conventional Cabinet nomination, which has received relatively positive media coverage.

“Now, Ron is going to have to make his [selection], because Marco has been really a star. Already. And we haven’t started. But we see signs already from some people very early, we see signs of stardom, and Marco has done incredibly. He’s sort of born for it. It was such an easy decision. The Marco decision was such an easy — but he leaves a vacancy in Florida and Ron is going to have to make that decision. And he’ll make the right decision.”

Push for Hegseth

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump was considering replacing Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News anchor and his choice for defense secretary, with DeSantis. But that was when Hegseth’s nomination appeared to be in so much trouble that he might have to withdraw amid damaging news reports about alleged excessive drinking and sexual assault surfaced.

Since then, however, Trump and his closest supporters have come out strongly in backing Hegseth to get before the Senate for a confirmation hearing sometime in January or early February.

In an interview with CNN last week, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said one reason that Trump had doubled down in terms of his support for Hegseth was that there was little support for him to nominate DeSantis.

“What changed was a couple of things. One was … Trump could not find a single person in his orbit, or even really outside of it, who liked this idea of making Ron DeSantis — the governor of Florida — the defense secretary choice,” Haberman said.

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