Despite numerous articles, studies and his own tweets suggesting otherwise, Donald Trump continues to deny any correlation between his presidency and a rise in race-based crime.
But even members of his own party have called him out on being racist in the past, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who revisited his original criticisms of the current GOP nominee before the duo became close in an interview with The Root.
Prompted by the query regarding how many people see him as “a puppet” for the former president, Scott insisted he works alongside Trump to tackle pertinent issues — specifically racism. In fact, Scott detailed a surprising story that, he said, led to the formation of his “healthy relationship” with Trump.
It began in 2017 when the South Carolina senator and Trump had a “serious conversation about race in America” after the former president made insensitive comments regarding the racist and violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Around this time, hate crimes were at a record breaking high under the Trump Administration. According to the FBI, the amount of hate crimes doubled between 2018 and 2019, reaching the highest number since right after Sept. 11, 2001.
During the Charlottesville rally, right-wing protesters — many of whom were Ku Klux Klan members and Neo-Nazis — took to the streets to protest the removal of a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The protest was countered by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists and other supporters.
The 2017 event came to a head when James Alex Fields Jr., a self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi, rammed his car into the crowd, injuring more than 30 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, according to NBC.
Directly following the tragedy, Trump told the public there was “blame on both sides.” The president also said there were “very fine people” on both sides, seemingly disregarding Heyer’s murder totally. To nobody’s shock, Trump received a lot of heat from his comments, including during a Vice News interview in which Scott said the president had lost his “moral authority.”
The senator told The Root his critique of the former president led to Trump inviting him to the White House for a private discussion.
“I just wanted him to understand how painful the whole thing is from our perspective,” Scott said.
As the first Black senator of a Southern state since Reconstruction, Scott recalled his own family’s deep ties to slavery and Jim Crow. Using his experience as a backdrop to his discussion with Trump, Scott continued: “I didn’t expect to change his [Trump’s] mind on his historical view of race, as much as to educate him on a different vantage point on the issue of race.”
According to Scott, he broke through to Trump, who asked him “‘Can you help me help those I’ve offended?’”
Scott cited his work on providing Opportunity Zones — bipartisan legislation which aimed to fund majority minority communities through “the invisible hand” method — as coming directly from his conversation with the former President.
Despite Scott’s conversation with Trump, the nation is clearly still divided by race: Some 60 percent of Americans said racism worsened under the Trump administration, according to a 2017 PEW Research study. Trump’s claim that immigrants come from “shithole countries” and calling the National Guard on BLM protesters are evidence of the former president’s ongoing difficulties regarding racism.
(Read Tim Scott’s full interview tomorrow in the Root)