Key Republican is missing from GOP’s Dallas convention raising questions about tensions with Trump

John Thune is set to be noticeably absent from the speaker lineup for the Republican convention in Dallas this week amid reports of a possible rift with President Donald Trump and as he is fighting desperately to protect a GOP Senate majority.

The Senate majority leader will reportedly still attend the two-day convention in Texas, which this year is also hosting a key Senate race.

But unlike his House counterpart Speaker Mike Johnson, Thune will not address the crowd of Trump supporters attending the event.

His exclusion from the lineup follows months of battles with the president, both over policy and campaign strategy. The president first flouted Thune’s pleas early in March when the Senate leader urged him to endorse Sen. John Cornyn for re-election in Texas. Trump instead first endorsed both Cornyn and his eventual runoff opponent, Ken Paxton, then picked Paxton over Cornyn in the race’s final weeks.

Since that first snub of Senate leadership, the president has spent the months that followed hammering Thune personally over the SAVE America Act, which would establish voter ID requirements. He has demanded that Thune terminate the legislative filibuster while repeatedly (and publicly) bashing the Senate leader for supposedly standing in the way of voter ID other parts of his agenda.

Trump echoed those claims in an interview published Monday with Punchbowl News, telling the outlet that if Thune didn’t act quickly, Trump will be the “last Republican president.”

In the same interview, Trump declined to explicitly endorse Thune for another term as the leader of the GOP Senate caucus, telling Jake Sherman: “I don’t want to get into that.”

“I get along with him. It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t have the votes,” Trump said of Thune. “I do have disagreements. I believe strongly in terminating the filibuster and — by the way — getting SAVE America Act approved immediately. And about 400 other things, in every hour of every day, boom, boom, boom.”

“[But] if they don’t get smart, if they Senate doesn’t get smart, I may be the last Republican president,” Trump added.

The Senate leader has publicly sought to downplay any reports of his own private frustrations with the president, and appeared alongside Trump at a “unity” luncheon in the Senate in June.

But that meeting between Trump and the Senate’s Republican caucus was reportedly tense, with Sen. Bill Cassidy angrily clashing with Trump over the Iran war and the two sides coming away yet again without a path forward for the president’s voter ID bill, which Democrats uniformly oppose.

In July, Thune and Trump once again clashed as the president demanded that Republicans cancel the August recess (on which the chamber remains currently). The president’s reasoning was the same: He still wanted votes on the SAVE America Act and a termination of the filibuster, provoking a frustrated response from the Senate leader.

“We could stay here ‘til Christmas,” said Thune. “Democrats aren’t voting for this, I’m just telling you. And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”

Taking aim at then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt after her own remarks at a briefing around the voter ID bill, Thune added: “Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats. And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone.”

The Washington Examiner reports that Thune will attend a fundraiser for Ken Paxton this week around the GOP convention, which the Texas Republican hopes will bring a wave of national Republican support for his possibly faltering Senate bid.

Thune stridently opposed Paxton during the primary on behalf of Cornyn, his close ally, and Thune-aligned PACs and the Senate GOP’s campaign arm collectively spent tens of millions of dollars to both protect Cornyn and tear down his opponent’s image.

While Thune’s absence on the convention stage could signal a continued rift with Trump, his turn to support Paxton is a sign that he isn’t giving up just yet on protecting a GOP Senate majority. Democrats need to pick up four seats to win control over the upper chamber in November.

Thune’s Senate Leadership Fund PAC previously estimated that it would require hundreds of millions of dollars to protect the seat in the general election were Paxton to be the nominee.

Paxton, the embattled Texas attorney general, is currently running neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponent James Talarico.

Paxton won his primary over Cornyn despite controversy surrounding his attempted impeachment by the Republican state legislature and his messy ongoing divorce battle from his wife, a Republican state senator.

In his interview with Punchbowl, the president warned that headwinds were working against Paxton and other GOP candidates this cycle, and blamed Thune and Republican leadership stymieing his agenda for voters being “angry” with the GOP.

“The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you,” Trump said of typical GOP voters. “They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me.”