Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina (finally) announced his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Monday.
Scott’s interest in running for president has been a topic of speculation ever since he vowed, in 2019, that 2022 would be his last Senate race and said he wouldn’t run for governor of South Carolina. This is Washington we’re talking about, so the idea of a senator willfully fading into obscurity — particularly, this senator, who has never seen a camera he didn’t like — seemed highly unlikely.
The senator’s political profile is simple. His role in the Republican Party — as the GOP’s only Black senator — is a role commonly played by Black members of today’s conservative movement: He’s largely used to rebut and downplay allegations of bigotry lobbed at Republicans over their agenda, replete with anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman rhetoric. You could read many of my previous posts about Black men tapped to run in the Republican Party — from failed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker to North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron — and they’ll serve as a perfect primer for what you ought to expect from Scott’s campaign.
He’s known for political minstrelsy: embarrassing public acts meant to amuse white bigots and ameliorate their policies in the public eye.
Scott has given us many examples of this in the past, but the most perfect one — a video — is rather difficult to come across these days. And that’s because Republicans appear to have tried to scrub it from the internet to the best of their ability. And for good reason.
Back in 2017, as Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, they trotted out Scott to try to sell Americans on their regressive tax plan that immensely favored rich people. Someone seems to have had the brilliant idea for Scott to appear in a promotional video for Senate Republicans —…
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