Republican Sen. Rick Scott says he’s on a mission to help push President Donald Trump’s agenda through Congress.
‘I put a lot of effort in, and I believe in Trump’s agenda,’ the former Florida governor and two-term senator said in an exclusive national digital interview with Fox News.
Scott spoke from the sidelines of a two-day policy summit held at a hotel blocks from the U.S. Capitol that was hosted by Rescuing the American Dream, a public policy group aligned with the conservative senator.
A number of members of the Trump administration and of his political orbit, including Attorney General Pam Bondi [who served as Florida attorney general during Scott’s tenure as Sunshine State governor] were guests at the summit.
Scott noted that ‘a lot of my friends are working’ in the second Trump administration. ‘I’ve got a lot of friends there.’
The senator added that Susie Wiles, co-campaign manager of Trump’s 2024 campaign and the president’s White House chief of staff, ‘was my first campaign manager’ when Scott won the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election.
Scott, who hosts a weekly steering committee lunch for Senate Republicans, brought Wiles as the featured guest last week. This week, his guest was billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who Trump tapped to steer his recently created Department of Government Efficiency, the controversial group best known by its acronym, DOGE.
Scott, a self-made multimillionaire who’s the wealthiest member of the Senate, emphasized that ‘I’m going to do everything I can because I believe in the agenda.’ He said he’s working with his Senate colleagues as well as friends in the House ‘to get the Trump agenda accomplished.’
Scott’s recent efforts appear to be raising his image among fellow Senate Republicans.
That image took a hit after the GOP failed to regain control of the chamber in the 2022 midterms, when Scott was leading the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He also frequently clashed with longtime GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell and unsuccessfully challenged McConnell for leader.
Scott also ran for Senate GOP leader last year in the race to succeed McConnell, who stepped down. But he says he has a strong working relationship with the lawmaker who won that race, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the longtime Republican from South Dakota.
‘I think John Thune is doing a great job,’ Scott said.
Thune, who spoke at the Scott-aligned policy summit, returned the compliment.
‘The House has a very narrow majority, and it makes it challenging to do pretty much anything, but Rick has a good relationship with a number of folks in the House,’ Thune told the audience.
Thune noted that Scott, who holds a weekly dinner with House GOP members and Trump administration officials, ‘meets with them [House Republicans] on a regular basis. So we’ve got good lines of communication.’
Looking forward, Scott emphasized that in order to push the Trump agenda forward, ‘We’ve got to be very vocal. We’ve got to do op-eds. We’ve got to be on television. We’ve got to be on radio. We’ve got to be talking about why this is good for a normal person.’
Trump has been moving at warp speed during his opening six and a half weeks back in the White House with a flurry of executive orders and actions. His moves, many of them controversial, not only fulfilled some of his major campaign trail promises but also allowed the returning president to flex his executive muscles, quickly put his stamp on the federal government, make major cuts to the federal workforce and also settle some long-standing grievances.
Trump as of Thursday had signed 85 executive orders since his inauguration, according to a count from Fox News, which far surpasses the rate of any recent presidential predecessors during their first weeks in office.
‘It’s something the president has the opportunity to do, but that only lasts while he’s president,’ Scott noted, as he pointed to the executive orders.
He highlighted that ‘we’ve got to codify these things’ and ‘this country should be run by Congress passing normal laws that help you as an American citizen, and that’s what we ought to do. I appreciate what the president’s doing, but we’ve got to codify these things.’
Fox News’ Emma Woodhead contributed to this report.