Tim Scott, The GOP's Cowardly Lion
It's like 2016 all over again—assail Donald Trump's lack of morals and accomplishments, lose, and then grovel as you endorse him
He should’ve known from the start.
No matter how many times Republicans insist otherwise, there is no getting around the fact that the party is, at its core, filled with racists. A non-racist party doesn’t choose Donald Trump twice with a third candidacy looming. A non-racist party doesn’t consistently reject Black candidates for their leading offices. The only way a Black Republican can achieve a higher position is to serve as a mouthpiece for the racist policies and politics of the party.
Clarence Thomas was, and is, one shining example of this trade-off. He’s happy to have a wonderful materially comfortable life, provided by benefactors by Harlan Crow, a billionaire so cartoonishly reminiscent of a plantation owner that you couldn’t invent him if you tried, so long as he eagerly dismantles civil rights protections against people of all stripes while nurturing a rage against other Black people because he, Clarence Thomas, was accused by white students of being an affirmative action admission to Yale. Somehow, by his tortured logic, the smears are not the fault of white supremacy and carefully cultivated systemic racism, but instead of his fellow Black Americans, because they accepted these scraps of apology from the politicians who enabled the systemic racism for two centuries. So, yes, Clarence Thomas will happily lash out from his seat on the Supreme Court at anything that hinders the unfettered political power and unearned wealth of white men, because they give him nice dinners and vacations and bought his mother’s house.
Down this well-trodden road came Nikki Haley and Tim Scott this election year. Nikki Haley is a chameleon in everything from disguising her ethnic heritage (a name change here, some light shades of makeup foundation there) to her political beliefs. On one hand, after the uprising against police murder of black men, she signed a bill as governor to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina state flag (after Bree Newsome had already been arrested and charged for shimmying up the flagpole at the state Capitol and removing that vile racist symbol herself). On the other hand, she proclaimed 48 hours ago that racism is not a systemic issue in America. Because she won’t appear on any news channels that aren’t GOP propaganda outlets, she didn’t have to face the obvious questions: If race is not an issue in America or the Republican Party, why aren’t you running with your birth name, Nimarata Randhawa? Why do you use makeup to look as white as possible, if racism is not a systemic issue in your party?
Tim Scott, meanwhile, was appointed to the Senate by Haley herself, while he was still serving his first term as a congressman, meaning that Scott went from county commissioner to U.S. Representative to Senator in a four-year span. That’s remarkable, an event that simply does not occur in American politics. After ten years of caping for Republican efforts to prevent any accountability for racist policing (all while telling stories of how Capitol Police repeatedly thought he was staff and tried to keep him out of the Senate on multiple occasions), Timmy was declared the Next Great Black Hope by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, who poured about $40 million into a super-PAC while political commentators raved about how impressive Scott is and how he could help realign politics by breaking the stranglehold that Democrats have on black voters.
Those commentators, of course, are willfully blind to Republican politics. A party dominated by the white South is never going to be free of racism or able to rise above so long as the region remains mired in old grievances and shackled to a war fought over slavery. Larry Ellison burned $40 million just as surely as any wildfire destroys a forest, because he thought Tim Scott was different. Tim Scott spoke the language of Christian nationalism. Tim Scott was a useful cover for repeatedly subverting legislation to rein in lawless police forces around America. Tim Scott was bright and intelligent and decently charismatic. In a primary field with the charisma black holes known as Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence, that looked appealing to a billionaire who wants Republican tax breaks to expand his Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth without the messiness of white supremacy and misogyny.
Sadly (for Ellison anyway), Tim Scott proved that voters in the Republican base don’t care about the content of his character. They’d rather have the racist, sexist, half-senile, Big Mac gobbling, Diet Coke swilling Donald Trump as their nominee. It was, as we all knew, all about that race. In the aftermath of that, one would assume that Scott would eventually endorse his patron, Nikki Haley, without whom he never would’ve risen to be more than another face in the crowded House of Representatives. Surely he would help boost her in her moment of need.
Tim Scott, of course, decided his loyalty was best declared by endorsing the Voldemort of politics, Donald Trump. It is, as I said up top, the act of a cowardly lion, someone who postures as a man of conviction and morals, who, like so many other “Christians,” forgets every last teaching of Jesus Christ when it comes to embracing Donald Trump’s dark, authoritarian vision of America. They’ll turn on Tim Scott one day. He won’t be the only one, of course, but he was uniquely positioned as a senator with a national spotlight to challenge Republicans to let go of their self-destructive racism and grievance politics, and not only did he fail, but he surrendered. It’s as pathetic as his political career, and his endorsement of Trump cements his legacy as a coward.