Moderate Republicans Continue to Betray Their Principles
Trump’s grip on the GOP is now total.
A few days before the New Hampshire Republican primary—and a week after suspending his own campaign—South Carolina Senator Tim Scott effusively endorsed Donald Trump for president. All it 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 Governor 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 election cycle. Far more often than not, those who hitch their wagons to Trump end up humiliated and dispossessed. But 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 is now this: When his supporters, his party, and the conservative movement 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
After Trump secured the Republican nomination for president but hadn’t yet fully molded the party into his image, he announced then-Indiana Governor 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. A 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. His 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, 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, falling in line to make him more palatable to traditional, family-values conservatives.
For his troubles, Trump egged on the January 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 with whom he’s made inroads but isn’t yet secure.
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. He 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 name-dropped Scott. If this smacks of the same crude identity politics long pilloried on the right, that’s because it is. Just as offering the vice presidency to Pence in 2016 helped pull in religious conservatives, Trump likely believes Scott can do the same with black voters in 2024. 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, when Scott was among a cohort of politically gifted young Republicans in the Reaganite 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. Rubio later embraced the Trumpian way, going from correctly appraising Trump as “dangerous” and “a con man” to modeling his own politics after him.
Similarly, Scott was once dedicated to police reform, rejuvenating impoverished and underinvested areas where minorities disproportionately live, beating back indefensible judicial nominations, and supporting our allies abroad 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.
But a couple of weeks ago, Trump brought Scott on stage during his New Hampshire victory party to undergo a humiliation ritual in which he publicly mused about how much Scott “must hate” his primary opponent Nikki Haley, who had appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012 to fill a vacant seat. It wasn’t a secret that Scott’s decision to endorse Trump was meant to assist Trump’s plot to cut Haley down to size, but instead of mitigating the personal fallout between the two, Trump deliberately stoked it with his remarks.
We know Trump is like this. But far more significant was Scott’s unprompted response. 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 no longer merely shares a party with Trump, but an agenda. 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.
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 politics that this is more true of now than Tim Scott.
Berny Belvedere is senior editor at The UnPopulist, our editorial partner, where a version of this article was originally published.
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The election, like for 2016 and 2020, is one of establishment vs anti-establishment. There are a number of so called moderate Republicans that support Trump because they have been alarmed with the actions of the establishment under Democrat control.
“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 think Liz Cheney is projecting HER situation on those that support Trump.