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Tim Scott’s Audience of One

A donor class sensation, Scott perpetuates a fantasy about American self-reliance that tells you everything about his candidacy.

Tim Scott relies on the coded notion of “personal responsibility” to shift the burden of society’s failures onto the individual.
Tim Scott relies on the coded notion of “personal responsibility” to shift the burden of society’s failures onto the individual. Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Baratunde Thurston
May 29, 2023

It’s hard for me to resist mocking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is allegedly very good at local politics—he did win re-election by nearly twenty points—but whose national political instincts are frequently confused. How else to explain his creative but predictably disastrous decision to make his big I’m-running-for-president announcement on the audio-only compilation of unforced errors that is Elon Musk’s Twitter?