Tim Scott has spent years humiliating himself in public with such discipline and consistency that ignoring him has started to feel professionally irresponsible. Of all the Black MAGA loyalists I have watched debase themselves for a pat on the head from Donald Trump, Scott has always occupied a special, fully furnished corner of my contempt. He is not the most shameless Black MAGA figure I have ever covered, but he is close, and what separates him from the rest of the field is his absolute inability to recognize when his humiliation is complete. When Trump needled him on a debate stage about supposedly hating Nikki Haley, Scott interrupted a live broadcast to shout, “I just love you,” to a room full of laughing reporters. Not “I support the president.” Not “we have a strong relationship.” “I just love you,” like Trump had returned from war and Tim was about to sprint across a meadow in slow motion with his arms extended. Trump stood there looking less like the object of Scott’s affection than a man silently calculating whether Secret Service could remove a sitting senator for making him uncomfortable.
When Republican whisper campaigns started speculating about his sexuality, Scott produced a fiancée straight out of central casting, introduced her at a primary debate, dropped out of the race, endorsed Trump and announced his engagement two days later. He was married before most people finished asking questions about the timing. And through all of it, he has performed a strained, compensatory masculinity with all the natural ease of a middle-school drama teacher playing Stanley Kowalski after watching half of A Streetcar Named Desire on YouTube. Every smile is too wide, every declaration is too emphatic and every appearance feels like Tim Scott trying to persuade America—and possibly Tim Scott—that Tim Scott is one hell of a man. For the most part, he has escaped my wrath. That ends today, because this morning on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker conducted what might have been the single most embarrassing interview of Scott’s career. Considering this man’s résumé includes publicly declaring his love for Donald Trump and then remaining in politics the following day, that is not a small achievement.
Welker opened by asking Scott a simple, fair question: Should the NRSC pull ads claiming Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has terrorist ties when there is no evidence tying El-Sayed himself to terrorism? Scott did not answer it, presumably because answering questions requires more than opening your mouth and allowing Republican talking points to tumble down the stairs. He pivoted to claiming that El-Sayed had family members who “helped resource Osama bin Laden” and that El-Sayed “campaigns with Piker, who said at one point that America deserved 9/11,” referring to streamer Hasan Piker. Welker tried to bring him back to El-Sayed’s actual record. Scott brushed her off with “birds of a feather flock together,” then fled into attacks involving ICE and policing like a man pulling every fire alarm in the building because somebody asked to see his homework. When Welker reminded him that El-Sayed had denounced Piker’s comment on that very program two weeks earlier, Scott simply kept shoveling: “He continues to campaign with him anyways. You can’t denounce it with your words and do something different with your actions,” he said, as though El-Sayed and Piker had spent that morning touring Michigan in a convertible, tossing Medicare for All pamphlets into the crowd. They had not. Piker attended El-Sayed’s primary victory party, but I could find no evidence that the two had campaigned together since El-Sayed won the nomination. Scott made an unsupported present-tense claim on national television, got corrected in real time and leaned harder into it, because admitting error would have required the sudden appearance of a vertebral column.
But let’s sit with “birds of a feather flock together,” because Tim Scott, of all people, should treat that expression the way a pyromaniac treats a smoke detector: as something best avoided because it raises questions he cannot afford to answer. Donald Trump hosted Nick Fuentes, an admitted antisemite and Holocaust revisionist, for dinner at Mar-a-Lago one week after launching his 2024 campaign. Trump’s own résumé includes a jury finding him liable for sexual abuse, thirty-four felony convictions in the hush-money case and a civil fraud judgment. Scott’s response has not been denunciation, distance or even mild gastrointestinal discomfort. It has been unwavering loyalty, televised professions of love and the political equivalent of waiting outside Trump’s bedroom door in case he needs a glass of water. Scott is also allied with Greg Abbott, who appeared on another Sunday show using the same talking point Scott used to wave away Republican vulnerability after Trump endorsed Abbott for a fourth term. If “birds of a feather” is truly Scott’s standard, he needs to explain why his entire political aviary resembles the exercise yard at a white-collar federal prison. Tim Scott cannot spend years serving as Donald Trump’s emotional-support senator, carrying his talking points around like a purse dog in a rhinestone bag, and then lecture anyone else about the company they keep.
It got worse when the subject turned to inflation. Welker read Scott a warning from Susan Collins that Trump’s tariffs would raise costs for American families, and Scott immediately tried to blame Joe Biden, who has been out of office for nineteen months and is probably at home in Delaware wearing aviators, eating ice cream and wondering why Republicans keep summoning him every time Donald Trump breaks something. Apparently, the Republican strategy for the midterms is to insist that Biden secretly controls inflation from his living room while the actual president wanders around the White House taking credit for everything except the consequences of his own policies. Welker stopped Scott: “Wait. President Trump has been in office for two years.” Scott responded by saying “let me finish” four times in a row, the traditional battle cry of a man who has reached the end of his answer but still has not located the beginning of a point.
Scott then claimed Trump had brought inflation down from a “sky-high 21%” under Biden. That number was bullshit. Prices rose cumulatively by roughly 21% during Biden’s four years in office, but the inflation rate never reached 21%. Its annual peak was 9.1% in June 2022, and it was 3% when Biden left office. Scott was taking four years of accumulated price increases, slapping an inflation-rate label on them and hoping nobody at NBC had access to numbers. Unfortunately for him, Welker had several. She noted that inflation now sits at 3.4% and cited rising gas prices and estimates placing the household cost of Trump’s tariffs at nearly $2,000. In other words, Trump inherited a 3% inflation rate, pushed it higher and then sent Tim Scott onto television to announce that the arsonist deserved credit because the fire used to be in another room.
Scott tried to drag Biden’s political corpse back into the studio anyway. That was when Welker finally lost patience: “We’re not talking about Joe Biden though. The Biden administration is over. We’re two years into the Trump administration!” You could hear a network anchor, professionally trained to remain neutral while politicians urinate on her leg and call it infrastructure, reaching the outer limits of broadcast decorum. Scott had reduced Meet the Press to a hostage negotiation in which the hostage was basic arithmetic and the kidnapper kept demanding to speak with a retired president who was not involved.
Then came Darline Graham. Scott called Lindsey Graham’s sister “the real deal,” “highly qualified, incredibly competent, ready for prime time” and an “easy choice” for the Republican nomination. That is a remarkable collection of words to use about a woman who, four days earlier, had been asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues for the United States and answered as though the moderators had requested her Wi-Fi password. “I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not on national security that, I’m not that informed on national security, so. But I do support the military. My brother was in the Air Force for 33 years.” That was her answer. Not a fragment removed from a sophisticated discussion. Not an unfairly edited clip. The whole damn answer. She did not know whether Taiwan matters, but she once knew a man who wore a uniform, and apparently that is close enough for the United States Senate.
Graham also announced during the debate that South Carolina has fifty million residents. It has approximately 5.6 million. She misplaced more than forty-four million people, which is less a numerical error than the spontaneous creation of a second South Carolina, three Georgias and a moderately sized European country. The woman is trying to represent a state whose population she exaggerated by nearly nine times while admitting that she has not yet gotten around to learning national security. At this rate, somebody could ask her to identify Canada and she would point toward Savannah. Days later, Graham told reporters that she had misspoken and would work to “become informed” on national security, a lovely self-improvement project for a woman who is already occupying a seat in the United States Senate. Most people become informed before applying for the job. Darline Graham apparently plans to learn geopolitics during orientation, somewhere between finding the restroom and setting up her Senate email. And I thought her brother was an idiot.
Here is the part that should terrify anyone still pretending American politics has a functioning quality-control department: Darline Graham could win tomorrow’s Republican runoff and then become an elected United States senator. She finished first in the August 11 primary with 32.7% of the vote, eight points ahead of Ralph Norman’s 24.6%. She has since been endorsed by Donald Trump, Tim Scott and third-place finisher Russell Fry, giving her every institutional advantage available to a candidate who appears unfamiliar with both Asia and South Carolina. There is no reliable public head-to-head poll of the runoff, but Graham has a genuine path to the nomination. And if she gets it, she will not be some doomed Republican sacrifice in a safely Democratic state. She will become the Republican nominee in South Carolina, a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since Fritz Hollings won his final term in 1998. In other words, the woman who lost forty-four million constituents during a debate and openly admitted that she does not understand national security could be elected to a six-year term in the United States Senate less than three months later.
Her Democratic opponent would be Annie Andrews, a smart, caring and genuinely knowledgeable pediatrician who possesses the apparently elite political qualification of knowing roughly how many human beings live in her state. Andrews would have a real opening against someone this catastrophically unprepared, but South Carolina’s Republican lean means Darline Graham could stumble through the runoff, survive the general election and spend the next six years voting on wars, treaties, military appointments and foreign-policy matters she has promised to begin learning about at some point. That is not merely funny. It is horrifying. Republicans may take a woman who admitted national security is “not her thing” and make national security her thing until 2032. Somewhere, Tommy Tuberville is probably furious that somebody has finally made him look overqualified.
And that brings me back to Tim Scott. Darline Graham embarrassed herself because she did not know the answers. Scott embarrassed himself because he knew exactly what he was doing. He chose to go on national television, invent an inflation rate, blame a president who left office nineteen months ago, misrepresent Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign activity and certify a woman who cannot locate forty-four million of her own imaginary constituents as “ready for prime time.” This was not a bad interview inflicted upon him. This was Tim Scott’s preferred use of a Sunday morning. He volunteered for it, dressed for it and arrived early enough for makeup. For years, Scott has tried to manufacture an image of strength by standing beside more powerful men, repeating their lies and smiling broadly enough to suggest that submission is actually confidence. But Kristen Welker stripped away that performance one follow-up question at a time. By the end, Tim Scott had finally demonstrated something beyond dispute: Donald Trump does not need to humiliate him anymore. Scott has learned to do it all by himself—and now he is using his position to help send people even less qualified than he is to the United States Senate.
