If you’re gushing support for an authoritarian leader in this precarious democracy of ours here in the United States, you’re likely to be met with a little mockery. It’s a lesson Tim Scott is learning the hard way — and he’s furious about it.
Scott’s obsequious praise for Donald Trump over the last week has earned widespread mockery. Specifically, video of him endorsing Trump with a preacher-style affect ahead of the New Hampshire primary, as well as video of Scott sidling up to Trump midspeech to say, “I just love you” after Trump had some unkind things to say about Nikki Haley. Both episodes had people clowning him online and in the press.
During MSNBC’s New Hampshire coverage, Joy Reid noted that Trump was using his victory speech “to ritually humiliate people like Tim Scott.” And Rev. Al Sharpton essentially said much the same thing on “Morning Joe” the next morning, opining that “it was humiliating to watch what Tim Scott did as a sitting senator.”
On Sean Hannity’s show Thursday night, Scott lashed out at liberals who’ve been mocking his pro-Trump performance, calling them “vile and disgusting” and claiming “the most racist [people] in the country are liberals.”
“They’re trying to make sure that any other minority who will think for themselves and consider the GOP — they want to send a message to every single one of them: ‘Step outta line and we’ll attack you, too,’” Scott said.
That’s quite a warped interpretation of what actually happened. Critics weren’t taking issue with Scott for stepping “out of line” with liberals, they were mocking him for his cringeworthy fealty to Trump and his reluctance to challenge the former president even as he suggested Scott “must really hate” Haley.
To Scott, being Black and clinging to such a man may seem like he’s stepping “out of line” in some righteous way. To many observers (myself included), it looks like he, alongside so many others, is simply bending the knee to an authoritarian bigot. Trump is a man who denounced largely Black countries as “s—holes,” accused largely Black cities of being squalid and rife with voter fraud, attacked civil rights figures, advocated for police violence and vowed to shield police from accountability for wrongdoing.
And that, at least, seems worthy of mockery.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.