The Florida governor is notoriously hard to read, and his closest allies are keeping their cards close to the vest.
Donald Trump’s decision to tap Florida senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state means two-term governor Ron DeSantis will soon pick his replacement — empowering one of the president-elect’s former foes to make a big splash in his home state.
Rubio was reelected in 2022, meaning whomever DeSantis appoints to replace him will serve until 2026, when a special election will ensue to determine who holds the seat for the rest of his term until 2028.
Trump world is pushing for DeSantis to tap Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, wife of the president-elect’s second-eldest son who served as a high-profile campaign surrogate for the GOP ticket this cycle. She has publicly expressed interest in the seat, and her list of backers now includes Senator Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Senator Katie Britt (R., Ala.), and Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.).
“What will be interesting to watch is how much influence the Trump team is going to have on his decision, because obviously they’d want him to pick Lara,” says Representative Greg Steube (R., Fla.). “I don’t have a relationship with the governor,” he added, “so I don’t have any idea what he’s going to do.”
A Lara Trump appointment to Rubio’s seat would mean that a member of the president-elect’s family would have eyes and ears inside the U.S. Senate as GOP lawmakers privately negotiate how to get the president’s agenda across the finish line.
Tapping the president’s daughter-in-law could indeed serve as an olive branch from DeSantis after their nasty GOP primary fight, which ended in defeat for the governor. The governor has worked to smooth relationships in Trump world ever since, immediately endorsing the former president after suspending his own campaign and later fundraising for him in the final months of the race, as NR reported over the summer.
Florida Republicans suggest DeSantis may have other ideas. “The rumor mill is that they’ll appoint somebody close to him and then he’ll run for that in ’26 when he’s out of the governor’s mansion,” Steube says.
Another leading candidate who has emerged in DeSantis’s orbit is his current chief of staff and 2024 presidential campaign manager James Uthmeier. Florida lawmakers nod to speculation that DeSantis could tap Uthmeier to fill the seat until 2026, when the term-limited governor could then run in the Senate special election as a springboard to potentially run for president again in 2028. But DeSantis’s own political plans beyond the governor’s mansion remain a mystery after his unsuccessful 2024 primary run. And it’s far from clear that after serving as chief executive of Florida, the former congressman would want to return to Washington to even briefly serve in a legislative body of 100 lawmakers.
Florida sources sour on the likelihood that DeSantis will tap himself or his wife, Casey, for the seat, and a person familiar with the matter tells National Review that DeSantis has expressed numerous times that he is not interested in running for the U.S. Senate — either appointing himself or running for it.
There’s also talk among Florida politicos that DeSantis may tap someone like Florida’s Republican attorney general Ashley Moody or Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez for Rubio’s Senate seat to create a high-profile vacancy for his own chief of staff.
“No decisions have been made at this time,” DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin said in a statement to NR. “The Governor and First Lady are on a trade mission to Italy and will be back in the U.S. next week.”
The governor is notoriously hard to read, and Florida lawmakers remain in the dark about what their governor will do.
The Lara Trump consideration comes as some tensions remain between DeSantis and Trump world, including the president-elect’s 2024 campaign manager and soon-to-be chief of staff Susie Wiles, the longtime Florida operative who helped fuel DeSantis’s rise but was later banished from the governor’s political operation.
Florida Republicans in Washington are waiting with bated breath to see what the governor will do. “I’ve seen all kinds of names” floated to replace Rubio, says Representative Scott Franklin (R., Fla.), who adds he’s “not sure” what DeSantis will do. “I think it may come down to what his intentions are beyond Tallahassee, if he intends to come serve,” he said. “He might appoint somebody as an interim seat-holder with the expectation that they don’t run again” in 2026.
Rubio’s still-unknown replacement will join a slate of other fresh faces next year in Florida politics, including whomever replaces soon-to-be national security adviser Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) — a current congressman who, like Rubio, is expected to sail through a Senate confirmation hearing — and Representative Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), who resigned from his seat after being tapped by Trump to serve as attorney general and is expected to face an uphill battle to confirmation.