New Yorker Magazine has a fairly long article on Senator Thune in his new role as US Senate Majority Leader, as he threads the needle between leading the US Senate Republicans, and being the liason between that group and President Trump.
Regardless of the fact that it’s a somewhat left-leaning publication, they do talk quite a bit about what many South Dakotans know – that despite the trappings of office, how John at his most basic is just a good guy:
Thune, a fourth-term senator from South Dakota, is an awkward leader for Trump’s ruthless Republican Party, in part because even Democrats invariably describe him as amiable and honest. A senior Democratic aide told me that Thune is “incapable of lying.” Kevin Woster, a former reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader who covered Thune for decades, told me that the senator used to hold weekly conference calls with South Dakota journalists. When Thune tried to sell Republican talking points about the perfidy of whatever Democrats were doing, Woster recalled, “I’d ask him, ‘But, John, Republicans really did the same thing, didn’t they?,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re really at fault, too. That’s true.’ Who does that?” Before Thune became the Party leader, journalists would crowd the hallway outside his Capitol office. Unlike Mitch McConnell, the taciturn and cunning leader at the time, Thune genuinely tried to answer questions. He was seldom cutting or caustic, and rarely tossed off a memorable line that might begin or end a newspaper article. As a veteran congressional reporter told me, Thune could be counted on for a reliable “middle quote.” A Republican aide who knows Thune described him to me as hypercompetitive but also “Midwestern nice.” (“Southern nice”—like Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is the Speaker of the House—can be double-edged, as in “Bless your heart!”) Lamar Alexander, a former Republican senator from Tennessee and a friend of Thune’s, noted a contrast between him and the two most recent Majority Leaders, McConnell and the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer: those men are renowned for their guile, and “you don’t think of guile when you think of John Thune.”
and..
In a city aptly described as Hollywood for ugly people, Thune could pass for an actual movie star, with pale-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Mt. Rushmore cheekbones. Now sixty-four, he has salt-and-pepper hair that is still thick enough to part neatly on the side, and the broad shoulders, thick arms, and narrow waist of a basketball player. His morning workouts at the Senate gym are legendary. Until a recent knee injury, Thune held the informal title of the fastest man in Congress. (He has likened that honor to “the best surfer in Kansas.”) The phrases “looks the part” and “central casting” come up in nearly every conversation about him. John McCain, a two-time Presidential contender, used to joke that he would have won the White House had he looked like Thune. The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who liked to respond that McCain’s wife, Cindy, “would be happier, too,” told me that Thune “is a guy you really want to hate—so tall, good-looking, beautiful wife—but you can’t, because he is so genuinely nice.” Some journalists who cover the Capitol have given Thune the nickname Hot Grandpa.
and..
Thune is in some ways a throwback. At a time when cable-news coverage and online donations reward the noisiest partisans, he has built a reputation for quietly working in good faith with Democrats on the committees he has sat on, among them Agriculture and Commerce. Chris Lewis, the chief executive of Public Knowledge, a left-leaning advocacy group, told me that Thune opposed its positions on most issues, but called him “a straight shooter” who looked for “common ground” on such issues as rural broadband access.
It sounds like whoever wrote that wants to sleep with Senator Thune lmao
You sound jealous.