Tim Scott Offers His Honor For a Shot at Trump’s Veepstakes
He is the most disappointing politician in America at the moment
A few days before the New Hampshire Republican primary—and a week after suspending his own campaign—South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott effusively endorsed Donald Trump for president. All this cost him was his honor.
From Scott’s perspective, it looks as if he’s played this perfectly. A few weeks ago, Trump name-dropped Scott (and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem) when asked what he’s looking for in a vice president. Oddschecker, a probability aggregator, lists over 30 potential running mates Trump could plausibly select. The fact that Scott was one of only two people Trump singled out is significant. Had Scott remained in the race longer, or delayed his endorsement, or even offered a less emphatic vote of confidence in Trump, the former president might not have given him this kind of consideration. Unfortunately for Scott, and for everyone who looks to him for political guidance, his willingness to abandon his principles and decency in exchange for a shot at a leadership position inside the MAGA cult will go down as one of the most disappointing decisions any candidate has made this entire election cycle.
Far more often than not, those who hitch their wagons to Trump end up humiliated and dispossessed. We have precious few examples of politicians with early reservations about Trump who have been able to convert abject slavishness toward him into a net positive for their careers over the long term. Even if Scott manages to crack the code and become one of the rare exceptions to Trump’s nearly flawless record of ultimately torpedoing everyone he brings into his orbit, it will likely be because he has shamefully abdicated his responsibilities as a public servant and helped re-elect an unreservedly awful and incalculably dangerous person to the highest office in the land and the most powerful position on planet Earth. So even if everything goes according to plan, even if he gets everything he wants, Scott will never be able to shake that a central part of his legacy now is this: when his supporters, his party, and the conservative movement that he is a part of needed him the most, he chose to be a Trump-enabler.
He’s not the only one. In fact, Trump has been relying on people like Scott from the moment he descended the escalators of Trump Tower in 2015.
Scott Is The New Pence
The following year, after Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president but hadn’t yet fully molded the party into his image, he announced then Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. The two could not have been further apart biographically and temperamentally. So why did Trump choose Pence? The Trump camp understood early on that he would need intermediaries to help him gain purchase with communities he had little in common with. An infinitely vulgar, thrice-married, twice-divorced New York billionaire, Trump badly needed brokers who could sell him to social conservatives in general and religious heartlanders in particular. A longshot to win the presidency, there was just no electoral path for Trump that did not include galvanizing religious conservatives to his side.
Pence had just what Trump needed: credibility on issues like abortion and religious freedom—values that, again, Trump was incapable of convincingly embodying. Prior to announcing Pence as his running mate, Trump’s efforts to fully secure the white Christian conservative vote had been hampered by his inability to fluently speak its language, such as when he declared he’d never needed to ask God for forgiveness, the most critical sequence in an evangelical Christian’s faith experience. While evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Robert Jeffress played an important role in assuaging the concerns of faith-based conservatives, since they themselves were not in the political arena, their influence could only go so far. This is why Trump brought in Pence, a soft-spoken, churchgoing Midwesterner with heaps of legislative and executive experience to stump for him. And Pence played that part to the tee, even soft-pedaling Trump’s “pussy grabbing” remarks to make him more palatable to traditional, family-values conservatives. For his troubles, Trump egged on the Jan. 6 mob chanting “hang Mike Pence.”
Trump is at a very different stage in his political career now—he’s no longer the outsider facing skepticism about his conservative bona fides, the newcomer to Republican politics needing to win over its voters’ hearts and minds. Pence and evangelical leaders did their jobs; he now has that constituency completely sewn up. What Trump needs today is something very different: he needs help with a voting bloc he’s made inroads with but doesn’t yet have. In stump speeches and at rallies, on TV interviews and on social media posts, Trump regularly boasts about the gains he’s made with Black voters. Trump won 6% of the Black vote in 2016 and 8% in 2020; in a New York Times/Siena College poll from late last year, a whopping 22% of Black respondents in six key battleground states said they would support Trump in 2024. Enter: Tim Scott, the highest-profile Black conservative currently active in Republican politics.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and senior counselor during the majority of his time in office, recently used the pages of The New York Times to advise Trump’s team to go with “a person of color” on his ticket, and specifically included Scott on the shortlist of the kind of candidate she’s envisioning. If this smacks of the same crude identity politics long pilloried on the right, that’s because it is. It assumes that Black voters reflexively judge skin color to be more important than considerations like electability, values alignment, and favorable policy proposals (Trump’s camp once believed that facilitating the release of rapper A$AP Rocky from his detainment in Sweden would meaningfully increase his standing among the Black community.) Just as offering the vice presidency to Pence in 2016 helped pull in religious conservatives, Trump likely believes Scott can do the same for him with Black voters in 2023. And he may well offer him the highest prize he has—the vice presidency—to get it. The tragedy is that it will cost Scott everything.
Faustian Bargain
There was a time, prior to Trump’s confiscation of the conservative movement, that Scott was among a cohort of politically gifted young Republicans in a Reagenite mold poised to lead the party into the future. Nearly all of them have since then capitulated to the party’s Trumpian turn to varying degrees. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s most formidable challengers in 2016, was beset during that election cycle by his past efforts at passing immigration reform—especially against a leading candidate who made immigration restrictionism the centerpiece of his platform. Rubio later embraced the Trumpian way—going from correctly appraising Trump as “dangerous” and “a con-man” to modeling his own politics after him. Nikki Haley has not assimilated into MAGA Republicanism as Rubio has, but she’s exhibited a far friendlier posture toward Trump and his approach to politics than her convictions should allow. Her commendable decision to remove the Confederate flag from state grounds as South Carolina governor nearly a decade ago has given way, this electoral cycle, to various forms of shameful downplaying of historic racism in the South. Though she has not aligned herself with the Trumpian project the way Rubio has, she had indicated she would support Trump over Biden in this year’s election if she were to drop out. Maybe she’ll rethink that pledge after Trump casitaged her husband, a major deployed in Africa, for not appearing by her side during campaign rallies. (Indeed, her most recent response to whether she would endorse Trump is her most heartening one to date: despite being a fierce critic of Biden, she declined to say that she would automatically support Trump if she were to drop out.)
A couple of weeks ago, Trump brought Scott on stage with him during his New Hampshire victory party to undergo a humiliation ritual in which he publicly mused about how much Scott “must hate” Haley since he’s chosen to endorse Trump and not her even though she appointed him to the Senate. It wasn’t a secret that Scott’s decision to endorse Trump ahead of the New Hampshire primary, the most critically important contest for Haley’s chances of overcoming Trump, was meant to assist Trump’s plot to cut her down to size. But instead of mitigating the personal fallout between the two that Scott’s endorsement would inevitably create, Trump deliberately stoked it with his remarks.
We know Trump is like this. But far more significant was Scott’s unprompted response (since Trump’s question was more rhetorical than anything): Instead of grimacing in distaste or looking crestfallen, he moved forward toward the lectern and indicated he wanted to say something. Then, turning to look at Trump face to face, and with uncomfortably deep meaning in his eyes and a broad smile, he said, “I just love you.”
Scott has learned to love Trump—a significantly different posture than appreciating things Trump has done (like appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court) but through gritted teeth the way we might characterize Haley’s stance. No, this now is love. Scott no longer merely shares a party with Trump, but an agenda. He’s no longer merely a reliable Trump ally but an enthusiastic promoter of the MAGA project. He has chosen to fully embrace, rather than heroically rail against, the person at the center of the party’s downward spiral into moral and intellectual ruin. In so doing, he’s let down everyone who has ever considered him a thoughtful conservative, everyone who has put their faith in his unusual decency and warm-heartedness, everyone who needed a defender of sane conservatism against one of its greatest corruptors ever. Whether Trump selects him for the vice presidency or not, Scott will be expected to help Trump make further inroads into the Black community, something he must know is not good for the community, just for his ambition. By choosing Trump, he has chosen himself above those he is supposed to represent.
If we situated the reaction of Republican leaders to Trump on a continuum from responsible, on one end, to disgraceful, on the other, with Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, and Liz Cheney post-Jan. 6 closer to the responsible end, Haley a little farther along on the spectrum, and Rubio far closer to the disgraceful end, where would we locate Tim Scott? One would have to say he’s now in Rubio territory or worse despite previously being dedicated to police reform, rejuvenating impoverished and underinvested areas where minorities disproportionately live, beating back indefensible judicial nominations, and supporting our allies in their struggle for freedom. All of this would have marked him as one of the good ones during the saner era of conservative politics.
Standard-fare political opportunism is one thing—but wholeheartedly, effusively, unreservedly backing a man who would burn down our entire political system if it meant he could stay in power is something entirely different. As Liz Cheney put it to her Republican colleagues who are fully aware of Trump’s disqualifying actions yet continue to support him all the same: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” I wouldn’t have said this two months ago, but there’s a good case to be made that there is no one in the entire world of politics that this is more true of now than Tim Scott.
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Excellent commentaries on Tim Scott. I must say his behaviors are even more shameful than Mike Pence in 2016. Knowing what we know now, I have little doubt that Tim Scott will do all of Trump’s bidding if Trump drops any subtle hints that he may endorse Scott in 2028.
Not only has he enthusiastically endorsed Trump, but he has fully embraced Trump's politics of baldfaced gaslighting and projection.
For instance, his outrageous statement about Joe Biden "having blood on his hands" with regard to October 7th – despite Biden being a steadfast supporter of Israel who has nonetheless been wary of enabling their extreme right wing – unlike like a certain other President we could name.
Or the utterly ridiculous assertion that on immigration, "Democrats want an issue rather than a soultion", when status quo at the border right now is clearly in Republicans' favor. I'm not sure if his remarks came before or after House Republicans tanked a bipartisan immigration bill that gave conservatives everything they could have wanted, making an abrupt about face on previous demands of new border legislation after Trump won New Hampshire and demanded they kill the legislation so *he* could have an issue to run on. All the same, the assertion made no sense beforehand, and Scott now supports Trump knowing he's guilty of the very thing of which he so vehemently accused Democrats.
Or the absolutely galling claim about there being a "separate tier of justice" for Democrats vs. Republicans, despite the reality that a) the only other Republicans who have gotten in trouble with the law were those involved with Jan 6th b) Mike Pence (remember, a Republican!) was easily cleared of any wrongdoing in his own retained documents case, and c) Trump abused the pardon power more openly and flagrantly than anyone before him, shamelessly rewarding political allies and those who acted to protect him during Robert Mueller's investigation. And this claim most likely came straight from an RNC talking points memo, as Scott wasn't the only Republican to automatically regurgitate it upon being asked about Trump's legal issues.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it shows just how much politicians like Scott, Pence, and others deserve Trump. For all of Trump's disqualifying flaws, he is one of the few Republican politicians who doesn't speak from a bulleted list of pre-ordained positions. Unfortunately he also doesn't speak from anything resembling principle or a coherent governing philosophy – outside of "air my own grievances and otherwise say whatever sounds like what people want to hear at any given moment". But it seems people prefer that to the pre-programmed Stepford Republicans who appear to have abandoned any pretense of independent thought.
Trump couldn't ask for better heads to step on in his latest climb to power.