Will Trump Back a Senate Candidate Who Called Him a ‘Loser’?

Donald Trump values loyalty as much as any Mafia boss who’s ever lived, and he has a very long memory about slights and setbacks. So he’s not strictly objective about Republican politicians seeking his support, and in the past, he’s often pushed low-quality candidates whose main credential was conspicuous Trumpiness.

To all appearances, though, Trump’s determination to keep the Senate (and its confirmation powers) in his party’s hands during the last two years of his presidency has made him a lot more pragmatic than he used to be about picking electable Republicans for the upper chamber, as Politico noted recently:

Just glance at the 2026 Senate map. What jumps out … is what’s not happening: Unlike so many times in the last 15 years, Senate Republicans are not poised to throw away winnable seats because of messy primaries and controversial nominees.

You know the roster, which probably still causes Mitch McConnell to wake up in the middle of the night: Kari Lake, Roy Moore, Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Matt Rosendale. I could go on …

[This time] the president has already endorsed, among others, Senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Jon Husted (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (W.V.) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska). This early laying of hands effectively insulates these incumbents — who hail from the pre-Trump era of GOP politics — from an intra-party threat.

Trump has also made early endorsements of strongly polling candidates for open Senate seats in Iowa and Michigan, at the potential expense of MAGA firebrands, and has refused so far to intervene in Georgia to help either of the two self-proclaimed Trump loyalists who are battling Trump rival Brian Kemp’s Senate endorsee. He also reportedly helped talk the wildest MAGA champion of them all, Marjorie Taylor Greene, out of entering the race.

But the president is facing what may prove to be an acid test of his pragmatism over Senate races. Veteran Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire is retiring next year, and Republicans would love to put that seat in play. Former flukey Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, who lost to Elizabeth Warren and then moved across the border and lost to Shaheen in 2014 before becoming Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, has been running for the seat since June. But Republican insiders don’t view him as strong enough to beat the Democratic front-runner, Congressman Chris Pappas. And they struck out earlier on luring popular Governor Chris Sununu into the race.

Republican operatives did, however, strike gold with Sununu’s elder brother, John E. Sununu (the middle initiative distinguishing him from their father, former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff John H. Sununu), who held the same Senate seat before losing it to Shaheen in 2008. He’s now the front-runner for 2026. But there’s a problem: The former Senator has said some pretty negative things about Donald Trump, and not just in 2016 (when many Republicans scoffed at him) or 2021 (after the disaster of January 6). In 2024, he not only backed Trump’s last primary opponent, Nikki Haley, but penned an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union Leader with a headline that’s hard to forget or forgive: “Donald Trump Is a Loser.” Here’s a particularly spicy passage:

He’s chased away millions of Republican voters in the suburbs and lost far more states than he’s gained. Arizona. Georgia. Colorado. The Rust Belt.

He has no chance of gaining them back — not in 2024, and not ever. Donald Trump speaks with all the bravado and braggadocio of a winner, but his record is littered with losses all across America.

Again, this was last year. And even if many New Hampshire Republicans want to forget about it, Scott Brown won’t let them. He greeted Sununu’s candidacy with this statement: “Anyone who thinks that a never Trump, corporate lobbyist who hasn’t won an election in a quarter century will resonate with today’s GOP primary voters is living in a different universe.”

So will Trump turn his back on Brown and embrace a candidate who’s called him a loser? If so, it means he’s more worried about his party being a loser in 2026, and that would be an uncharacteristic act of self-denial by this most self-regarding of politicians.