Republican Tim Scott continues to defend Donald Trump; this time the South Carolina Senator claimed that the criticism Trump has received for a remark made during the presidential debate on June 27 is misdirected. During a July 12 interview with The Root, Scott said that Trump was actually trying to defend his record on job creation.
According to the Huffington Post, Scott offered up a defense that when Trump said that those coming into the country were allegedly taking “Black jobs” the former president really meant that he created jobs for Black people.
“I think what he meant to say was the fact that two-thirds of the jobs he created…went to African Americans, Hispanics, and women,” Scott told The Root. “I think we should take a whole look at the picture, and I don’t think that happens.”
Scott also took aim at the media, attempting to hold publications responsible for creating a “biased” perspective of himself and the Republican Party at large.
“Whoever they [media outlets] say I am, they’re not just trying to distort my picture, they’re trying to lie about my record,” he told the outlet, before adding that it’s “incredibly unfortunate” that the media makes “Black success today about liberal success.”
Scott was not the only Black conservative to try and rescue Trump from the criticism he faced post-debate. According to Politico, Diante Johnson, the president of the Black Conservative Federation said that Trump’s “Black jobs” comment was self-explanatory.
“He meant the jobs of Black people. And we’ve been using that term for a while,” Johnson told the outlet. “It’s any job. Instead of Black people having unlimited accessibility to all types of jobs, illegal immigrants are taking their jobs from them.”
Despite Johnson’s defense of Trump’s statement, Michael Blake, the founder and CEO of the Kairos Democracy Project, placed the onus on those who believe in diversity to defend its merits from fearmongering.
“It is the responsibility for us to then tell the story of the benefits of diversity, rather than the fears of it. And the notion that those people are taking from you is a fear-only message as opposed to asking: How do we all win? When you embrace all races, we all win. We should not allow fear of the past to supersede the prosperity of the future, because we all can win.”
In contrast to Scott’s statement, however, the media is not to blame for the Republican Party’s negative reputation. According to Tasha Philpot, an assistant professor of Government and African American Studies at the University of Texas and the author of Conservative but Not Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology among African Americans, it is the company Republicans keep that has earned them a negative reception from Black Americans in general.
“Certainly, we see based on presidential approval ratings that it has not translated into support for the Republican party. And a lot of it has to do with the heightened racial tension that we’ve been experiencing over the last four years.” Philpot told the Niskanen Center in 2020.
Philpot continued, “You see a lot of racial rhetoric being used, not just among Donald Trump but other Republicans. And of course, the rise in white nationalist groups, neo-Nazis, the Klan that have endorsed the republican party and have become tightly aligned with the Republican party in the eyes of African Americans, which ultimately would prevent blacks from voting republican even if they agree with the Republican party on a number of other dimensions.”
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