Senator Tim Scott made a wild comment suggesting that his being in contention for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick demonstrates that we’re living in a post-racism utopia.
During an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends that aired Thursday, the South Carolina Republican was asked how being on the short list for Trump’s running mate made him feel.
“I think it’s exciting, no matter the outcome,” Scott gushed. “It’s the evolution of the Southern heart that we see on display, and we Southerners get so little credit for the progress we’ve made.
“The whole notion of judging a person on the content of their character, not the color of their skin has happened,” Scott continued. “It’s not going to happen. It’s not around the corner. It’s in the rearview mirror. We are living Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”
Tim Scott on Fox & Friends basically says racism is over in America: "We are living Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's dream." pic.twitter.com/W4psvsjpab
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 27, 2024
Since dropping out of the race, Scott has been desperately shilling to join Trump’s ticket as his vice president, and he has repeatedly contradicted his own policy positions so he can breathlessly repeat the former president’s campaign talking points.
Unfortunately for Scott, Trump is exactly the kind of racist he imagines American society has moved past.
Trump uses his Black friends to claim he isn’t racist, and while his campaign bragged about receiving endorsements from dozens in a group called Black Americans for Trump, the team failed to mention that a few of them were on the Trump family’s payroll. Recently, Trump has railed against so-called “anti-white racism” and claimed that Black voters will like him more because of his indictments and his mug shot, comparing his legal battles to the systemic discrimination experienced by Black people in the U.S. As recently as Wednesday, Trump literally phoned it in on a roundtable event with Black business leaders in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, recent polling found that Black voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania feel Trump should receive jail time at his sentencing in July. A study conducted in April by the Pew Research Center found that a vast majority of Black voters still identify as or lean Democratic, and 77 percent said they’d back President Joe Biden, despite Trump’s claims that Black voters are abandoning the incumbent.
During the interview, Scott also revealed that the former president had come to him in 2017 after his infamous remark on the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump angered many by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides,” despite the fact that one side was entirely neo-Nazis, including one man who drove a car into a crowd.
At the time, Scott had criticized Trump, saying his moral authority had been “compromised.”
“He wanted me to share with him my perspective,” Scott told Earhardt. “He listened, and after we finished talking, he said, ‘Help me help those I have offended.’”
Looks like that’s going really well.
