"Tim Scott is a clown, and I’m too sick to my stomach to write any more"

He's so far up Donald Trump's backside he's begun to enjoy the view

The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

• Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe

I’m not going to bury the lede on this one, so I’ll get it out of the way right off the bat: Sen. Tim Scott is a clown, a loser, and a political shape-shifter with no ideology or pride. He has only ambition, the desire to climb to the top of the mountain by any means necessary. If making that climb means stepping over the prostrate bodies of those who’ve helped him along the way…well, their utility had been exhausted, anyway, so on to bigger and better things, yeah?

It wasn’t an overwhelming surprise to see Sen. Scott standing with Donald Trump before an adoring MAGA throng in Concord, NH. He was there to bask in Orange Jesus’ reflected glory. Even since he dropped out of the Presidential race, everyone knew he’d get on the Trump Train, and there he was, smiling like a servant blissfully anticipating and attending to Dear Leader’s every need.

Except that, considering that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley appointed Scott to his Senate seat, the polite thing would’ve been to wait until after the SC primary, which Haley would’ve likely lost handily. Then, no one would’ve raised an eyebrow.

Of course, Tim Scott has never worried about doing the polite thing. He’s far more concerned with advancing his own political prospects, even at the expense of his political benefactor. The fact that she’s no longer of any use to him means that she’s also no longer of any concern.

It looks as if Sen. Scott is auditioning to be Mango Mussolini’s VP candidate. And the junior Senator from South Carolina couldn’t have played a more obsequious and obvious audition. And he used a historical reference in the most offensive and inappropriate manner imaginable.

It’s not surprising, really; this IS Tim Scott we’re talking about, after all.

Only about 15 seconds of Scott’s remarks are memorable….

“We need a president who understands the American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said, while rolling his eyes like the least dignified performer in a minstrel show.

Of course, left there, that line might have played pretty well. But there’s no way anyone with a sense of history could let that lie without response because it reveals Tim Scott as an astonishingly callow interpreter of his own people's history.

It’s unlikely that anyone in that MAGA audience recognized Scott’s reference to civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Born in Jim Crow Mississippi, Hamer spent her childhood as a sharecropper, picking cotton while living with polio. In 1961, a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her consent during surgery for a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization as a form of Black population control was so widespread it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Hamer wouldn’t discover that Black people could actually register to vote until 1962. She was 45.

From Rosalind Early’s “The Sweat and Blood of Fannie Lou Hamer”:

The next day, Hamer was on a bus with 17 other people headed to the county seat in Indianola to register. Only she and one other person were allowed to take the literacy test. They had to answer questions about the Mississippi constitution and de facto laws of the state.

“I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day,” Hamer said later. Both she and the other test-taker failed, but Hamer said she would return until she passed. It was no small task. At that time in Mississippi, if you registered to vote, your name and address ran in the paper for two weeks so the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists could terrorize you if you were Black. On their way home from Indianola, Hamer and the others were stopped by police, who said their bus was the wrong color, and fined $100. When Hamer finally made it home, the plantation owner already knew about what she’d done and told Hamer that if she didn’t withdraw her registration, she’d have to leave.

“I didn’t go down there to register for you,” Hamer replied. “I went down to register for myself.” She was forced to leave.

Fannie Lou Hamer devoted (and probably lost much of) her life to fighting White oppression. She suffered in ways few of us today could begin to comprehend. Hers is not a name White people hear taught much in histories of the Civil Rights movement, and that’s too bad because Hamer’s story encapsulates what Black Americans had to endure for their voices to be heard.

Sen. Tim Scott is a benefactor of Fannie Lou Hamer’s struggle and suffering, yet he exploits her words as if he genuinely doesn’t understand or care what they signify…and I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t. He’s so busy sucking up to Donald Trump and the White GOP power structure that little capacity likely remains for him to absorb the lessons of Fannie Lou Hamer.

It’s easy for me, a middle-class White male, to pretend I understand something about the Black experience because I was a History major with an interest in the Civil Rights era. I may have studied that time extensively, but my knowledge is intellectual, not experiential. I was never denied the right to vote, never denied a seat on a bus…frankly, I was never denied anything because of the color of my skin.

So, no, I really DON’T know. I can’t claim to have any understanding. Of course, neither can Sen. Tim Scott. The fact that he’s cast his lot with the GOP makes me wonder if he’s placed his political career over loyalty to his people (as if I don’t already know the answer).

Hamer was undaunted. She eventually passed the rigged literacy test. She paid the obscene poll tax. That still wasn’t enough. Racists, including the police, threatened, bullied, beat, and even shot at her, but they couldn’t stop her. She not only registered herself to vote but helped register thousands of Black Mississippians.

“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” she said. “But what was the point of being scared? The only thing [the whites] could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

Hamer and other activists founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, they argued that the state’s delegates were illegitimate because Black citizens were actively denied the right to vote. (No, this is not the same as what Trump tried to pull in 2020.)

She told the convention members about how she’d been unjustly arrested in 1963 and while imprisoned, she was savagely beaten.

The story of what Ms. Hamer endured is astonishing. It’s what you might expect from South Africa during apartheid, not America at any time. And yet Mississippi during the Civil Rights era was not quite like America at any time; it was something far worse.

I was led out of that cell and into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The state highway patrolman gave the first Negro prisoner the blackjack. It was a long heavy leather something made with something you could hold it, and it was loaded with either rocks or something metal. And they ordered me to lie down on the bed on my face. And I was beat by that first Negro until he was exhausted. I was beat until he was ordered by the state highway patrolman to stop.

After he told the first Negro to stop, he gave the blackjack to the second Negro. When the second Negro began to beat, it seemed like it was more than I could bear. I began to work my feet, and the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro that had beat me to set on my feet where I was kicking them. My dress worked up real high and I smoothed my clothes down. And one of the city policemens walked over and pulled my dress as high as he could. I was trying to shield as many licks from my left side as I could because I had polio when I was six or eight years old. But when they had finished beating me, they were, while they was beating, I was screaming. One of the white men got up and began to beat me in my head.

I suspect that Sen. Scott is well aware of the history of the Civil Rights era. He’s probably familiar with the story of Fannie Lou Hamer. So why is he acting as if what so many of his forebears fought, sacrificed, and even died for is no longer of significance?

Is his ambition so massive and rampant that he’s willing to allow it to override everything, including his sense of history and pride in who he is? Is he willing to sacrifice his soul and sense of self to prostrate himself embarrassingly in the hope that Donald Trump will select him as his Vice Presidential candidate?

Does the man have no shame? (Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.)

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), demonstrating how desperately he wants to be Donald Trump’s Vice President.

I don’t think there’s any doubt about the answers to those questions. He dropped out of the Presidential race and immediately bowed down before the GOP’s orange idol in an authentically embarrassing fashion.

After it was clear that Trump had won the New Hampshire primary, Sen. Scott shared the stage with Orange Jesus, smiling and clapping like an obedient and faithful servant. Sen. Scott may not have been carrying Trump’s crown and scepter, but the imagery didn’t lose much for their absence.

On December 20, 1964, Hamer spoke at a rally with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, New York. This was where she delivered the powerful words that Scott perverted.

And you can always hear this long sob story: “You know it takes time.” For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change. We want a change in this society in America because, you see, we can no longer ignore the facts and getting our children to sing, “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed.” What do we have to hail here? The truth is the only thing going to free us. And you know this whole society is sick.

Hamer died in 1977 at just 59, a casualty of systemic racism that far too many people wish to deny, but her legacy endures. My father put it best: Tim Scott is a clown, and I’m too sick to my stomach to write any more.

During his time at Charleston’s R.B. Stall High School, Tim Scott experienced racism like any other Black person in the South. And, like many other Blacks in the South, he was able to overcome the racism he experienced. He turned a degree in Political Science from Charleston Southern University into a productive political career.

In December 2012, then-Governor Nikki Haley appointed then-Congressman Tim. Scott to the US Senate seat being vacated by Jim DeMint, who retired to become the President of the Heritage Foundation.

One could say that Sen. Scott made it in a majority-White world as a Black man playing the game by the White man’s rules. That’s not to say there’s anything inherently wrong with that, of course, and Sen. Scott should be commended for working hard to get where he is…but at what cost?

During his climb up the political ladder, did he forget who he was and where he came from? Did he forget the sacrifices made by generations of Black people who came before him? By becoming a Black Republican, did he turn his back on his people?

I’m not saying that Black people have an obligation to become Democrats. That said, there’s no denying that Republicans are a profoundly racist party whose interests are deeply antithetical to those of Black Americans. Most rank-and-file Republicans believe the party (and America itself) is the property of White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. For them, there’s no place for Black people, even as a token, and Tim Scott will never be welcome in their GOP.

If Sen. Scott does become Donald Trump’s VP candidate, how welcome will he be among the deeply unrepentant racists that make up MAGA Nation? I’m guessing that the idea of Tim Scott possibly being a heartbeat away from the Presidency will be welcomed among the ignorant racist knuckledraggers who call MAGA Nation home.

I can’t speak for the folks in Sen. Scott’s home state of South Carolina, but when I look at him, I see someone who’s sacrificed his integrity and sense of self to succeed in politics…and that raises an excellent question:

Does America want someone devoid of integrity and honesty, a man who’s an ambitious political climber, possibly being a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Will he have the country’s best interests at heart…or will his own political prospects be his top priority?

That we even have to contemplate such a question profoundly disturbs me. And even considering it means Tim Scott shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. He wants it too badly, and little good can come from someone who wants to be President for the sake of being President.

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)