A few weeks ago, I tagged along at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, with Rick Scott, the Republican senator from Florida whose profile in Washington has recently undergone a dramatic transformation.
The Republican senator from Florida has just walked into the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he’s about to throw another punch in his ongoing and increasingly one-sided battle with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. The speech he’s preparing to deliver is indeed aggressive, calling out McConnell by name, enumerating a laundry list of alleged failures, and charging his own party’s leaders with “destroying our country” as surely as the Democrats. “We can’t put up with this B.S. anymore,” Scott will say, to a smattering of cheers. “I’m seeking to become the least popular man in Washington. And I’m happy to report I’m making great progress.”
Over the past couple of years, Scott has transformed from rank-and-file Republican in good standing to self-styled bête noire of the GOP establishment. It began with his stewardship of the party’s Senate committee in last November’s midterms. What was supposed to be a slam-dunk election cycle ended disastrously: Scott presided over a botched fundraising strategy, fielded a slate of awful candidates as a result of his insistence on staying out of primaries, and released a personal policy platform full of unpopular ideas that continues to bedevil his colleagues and provide fodder for Democratic attacks. (One GOP operative described it to me as “third-rail sh-t.”) When President Biden spoke in Florida in February, his team distributed copies of Scott’s plan, which they say would threaten Medicare and Social Security.
My profile of Scott in TIME is a fun, gossipy look at this enigmatic figure, examining the motivations for his shift and detailing his consequential feud with McConnell. Plus, some behind-the-scenes CPAC action:
Down a backstage hallway, at a door market VIP ROOM, Scott greets Matt Schlapp, the embattled chairman of the organization that hosts CPAC, who was recently accused of sexually assaulting a Walker campaign staffer, and Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the far-right cable channel Newsmax. Once inside, he falls into conversation with Steve Moore, the former Trump Administration economic adviser. “I’m trying to get everybody together to actually get a deal done, but nobody cares,” Scott tells Moore. “They want to just do nothing and raise the debt limit!”
Moore shakes his head in agreement. He mentions the CHIPS Act, last year’s massive semiconductor-manufacturing bill, which the Biden Administration is now using to try to get companies to provide child care for workers. “You didn’t vote for that, did you?”
“No, I fought it!” Scott says. “A year ago, my first filibuster—they were so mad. We stopped it for a year!”
Moore turns to me and points at Scott. “This guy is the fiscal conscience of the United States Senate!” he says. “But that’s not a high bar!”
The profile is here.
PLUS: I’m just back from vacation, but I heard there was some big political news while I was away? Here’s my piece for TIME on the political fallout from Trump’s recent indictment—which, I argue, could have been another opportunity for Republicans to distance the party from him, but instead served to illustrate his enduring strength, thanks to the weakness of his competitors for the 2024 presidential nomination.
If the pattern holds, the 2024 primary could be over before it has even begun, with the GOP once more dominated by the toxic demands of its chaotic leader. Polls show Trump is getting stronger: A national survey conducted by Monmouth University and released March 21 showed Trump beating DeSantis by 14 points among Republican primary voters—a reversal from December, when the same pollster found DeSantis leading Trump by 13 points. Suddenly the party appears imprisoned in a familiar trap: unwilling to stand up to its own base voters’ loyalties, and stymied yet again by Trump’s well-worn divide-and-conquer strategy.
“It is amazing to me that the party that talks about masculinity continues to belly-crawl for this man, a bully who hides behind the walls of a Florida mansion,” says Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. His former colleagues, Riggleman says, remain deathly afraid of the sway Trump still holds over many of their voters. “They have so permanently lowered the standard that we’re somehow not even talking about whether he’s guilty of using an illegal tax pass-through to pay off an adult-film star—instead, we’re debating whether the indictment is political and how it will affect his popularity. This should be about the rule of law: did he do it or not?”
Read the piece here.