On Thursday, former Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts was announced as the replacement for Sasse, who is leaving politics to serve as president of the University of Florida. Ricketts was picked for the role by the state’s current governor, Republican Jim Pillen.
Sasse has long bashed both Trump and his supporters. He was the first GOP senator in 2021 to publicly say he’d mull action to boot Trump from the White House. He also joined six other Republican senators in voting to convict the former president for inciting the Capitol riot.
Ricketts, meanwhile, announced on Thursday that he’d like to see the federal government “run like a business.”
“We need to make Washington, D.C., accountable, and ensure they are bringing the high level of services we did here in Nebraska,” Ricketts said, according to NBC News.
But even though Ricketts and Trump are both business-minded, their relationship over the years has been a bit rocky.
While running for president in 2016, Trump targeted the family of Ricketts, whose billionaire parents were reportedly big backers of an anti-Trump super PAC.
“I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me,” Trump tweeted on February 22, 2016. “They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”
After that, though, the two seemed to temporarily make amends. Ricketts, who was governor at the time, made an appearance at a 2016 rally to boost Trump’s White House bid.
Then in 2018, Trump appointed Ricketts for a role on the Advisory Committee for Trade and Negotiations and even called him a “terrific” governor.
Tensions again spiked between the two as Ricketts urged Trump last year to butt out of his state’s gubernatorial GOP primary, according to NBC. The former president ignored him and endorsed a Republican candidate who was ultimately defeated by Pillen.
Trump has also hurled the “RINO” label at Ricketts, an acronym that stands for “Republican in name only,” Nebraska’s KLKN-TV reported last May. He didn’t like that Ricketts had thrown his weight behind the reelection bid of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who had resisted Trump’s demands to aid him in subverting the 2020 election results.
Trump’s Georgia endorsee, former Senator David Perdue, wound up losing to Kemp during the state’s Republican primary.
However, the Nebraska Examiner news outlet reported last May that Ricketts qualified his relationship with Trump as “fine.”
“I certainly feel that I can pick up the phone and call him, like I did last summer,” the then-governor reportedly said at the time. “In contested primaries, people are going to pick different candidates.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s office for comment.
