By the end of next month, Florida will almost certainly have a new face representing it in the U.S. Senate. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his adopted home state’s senior senator, Marco Rubio, to lead the State Department. And one name has topped the list of speculation for potential successors: Lara Trump.
The president-elect has reportedly spoken with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about appointing his daughter-in-law to serve as Rubio’s replacement for the next two years before a special election can be held. To no one’s surprise, Lara Trump expressed interest in joining the world’s greatest deliberative body after stepping down as co-chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this week. From its founding, the Senate has been filled with nepotism and outright corruption. But the appointment of a member of the president’s own family to one of the chamber’s seats would be a wild new ethical frontier.
Lara Trump joining the Senate would be less about serving Floridians’ interests than advancing her father-in-law’s.
With its smaller membership, longer terms and nominative allusions to the Roman Republic, the Senate has always had an air of aristocracy next to the more rough-and-tumble House. The original method for naming senators only added to that impression, with each state’s legislature determining who would hold the two Senate seats in Washington. The Federalist Papers framed this method of appointment as clever way of removing senators further from the passions of popular whims while also integrating state lawmakers into the federal fabric.
The problem, though, is that wealthy candidates simply curried favor with state legislators via campaign donations and other patronage, rather than serving actual constituents. Historians agree that by the Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, corruption and bribery were rampant in determining Senate appointments. It didn’t help that the Senate itself was charged with investigating the conditions around its members’ appointments. Senators were hesitant to do so in many cases, especially when possible wrongdoing was often written off as mere rumor or accusers mysteriously recanted their claims. Further, the bar for proving bribery — for a Senate seat or even just a vote on a bill — was absurdly high, requiring both the candidate’s knowledge of any scheme and for the bribes to have affected the outcome.
Even still, a handful of instances stand out in which the conduct was so egregious as to not be ignored, no matter how much the status quo would prefer otherwise. In 1873, for example, Kansas Sen. Samuel Pomeroy gave a state legislator $7,000 in cash in his unsuccessful campaign for re-election.
By the early 20th century, a series of well-publicized corruption scandals meant that momentum for a constitutional amendment had gathered steam. After ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, senators would henceforth be directly elected by their state’s voters. But that shift didn’t mean an end to controversies over the process of obtaining a Senate seat. Ironically, one of the major concerns of the amendment’s backers — that a “millionaire’s club” was essentially buying votes with their fortunes — lingers to this day, with the main difference being just whose pockets are being lined.
The bar on this front is extremely low, but DeSantis naming Lara Trump to fill Rubio’s seat wouldn’t be the most blatantly corrupt appointment from a governor in his position. At least he isn’t attempting to cash in like disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich did when considering candidates to fill Barack Obama’s seat when he became president. Nor would DeSantis be appointing someone who may have been investigating his conduct as was suspected to be the case in 2017 when Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley named state Attorney General Luther Strange to fill Jeff Session’s seat.
It’s hard to imagine her as a workhorse of the sort that busies themselves grinding out legislation.
Lara Trump also wouldn’t be the first senator whose surname was clearly a major factor in their landing in the upper house. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., spent decades in the seat that his older brother, John F. Kennedy, vacated upon winning the presidency in 1960. Because the younger Kennedy was too young to take up the remainder of the term immediately, family patriarch Joseph Kennedy all but instructed Gov. Foster Furcolo to name a family friend as placeholder. Say what you will about Joe’s tactics, but Teddy won the seat fair and square in the 1962 midterm elections and held it until his death in 2009.
But Lara Trump joining the Senate would still be less about serving Floridians’ interests than advancing her father-in-law’s. And DeSantis naming her would more about trying to burnish his relationship with the president-elect than any specific qualifications that she possesses to join the Senate. She’s still a political neophyte, with her nine months leading the RNC largely consisting of deferring to her father-in-law’s campaign. And it’s hard to imagine her as a workhorse of the sort that busies themselves grinding out legislation. But it would immediately make her a front-runner in the 2026 special election for the final two years of Rubio’s term.
The Senate, for all its many issues, is still meant to be a serious place, where the country’s needs are considered by legislators who often outlast presidential administrations. Lara Trump’s entry into their ranks would be a toehold for her family to remain at the forefront of the MAGA movement long after her father-in-law leaves office again. And while any other generic Republican might be just as placating as her in the face of the Trump administration’s abuses of power, her appointment would be a particularly heavy blow to any guardrail against an all-powerful presidency.
