House Speaker Mike Johnson sometimes can’t get President Trump off the phone. The calls can come in the middle of the day — or the dead of night — or even after hourslong meetings at the White House, the Louisiana Republican often tells associates.
But across the Capitol, the same can’t be said for the other top GOP leader: Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
It can be days, if not weeks, that Thune doesn’t hear from the president. Thune instead mostly learns about Trump’s latest grenade roiling the GOP agenda or the broadsides directed at the Senate majority leader himself from Truth Social and the media.
During the latest high-stakes stretch in the Senate, with Trump’s own Cabinet nominee in trouble, the president’s election-year agenda teetering and a huge Iran funding bill in doubt, Thune told CNN he hadn’t spoken to the president in nearly two weeks. The split between the two has only widened since Trump moved to take out fellow Republican, Sen. John Cornyn, in his primary in May, and as the president has loudly insisted that the Senate nuke the filibuster — a demand the GOP leader has repeatedly rejected.
“With me, it’s more on an as-needed basis,” Thune told CNN when asked about his conversations with the president as of late.
