Opinion | Tim Scott is struggling to find his presidential message

Scott’s sermons typically begin with a little self-effacing humor and inspiration from his biography. He points to his troubles as a student, noting he graduated “thank ya Lawdy” instead of cum laude or that “when you fail Spanish and English, don’t nobody call you bilingual. No. They call you bi-ignorant.” With his parishioners loosened up and ready for the word, Scott often transitions to the importance of family and faith by emphasizing their journey “from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”

Only then is a repast of red meat served. His attacks on the left are ladled with the same Black pastoral alliterations. “Woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy,” Scott once offered on Fox News, leaning into the most overused word in American politics. When critical race theory dominated the news cycle, the senator’s comments carried hints of a preacher’s dialect: “We need ABCs, not CRT, in our schools.”

A pulpit still clearly calls to him — but now it’s the bully one. On April 12, Scott took a step toward the White House by announcing his exploratory committee for the 2024 presidential election. An apocalyptic civic spirit pulses through his announcement video, which was recorded at the site where the Civil War began, and declares that President Biden, and other progressives, are “indoctrinating our children to believe we live in an evil country.”

Marrying church vernacular with political jargon is child’s play, though, compared with Scott’s strategy for victory: combining the compassionate conservatism of a bygone era with Donald Trump’s sharp-elbowed MAGA Republicanism. The idea is to survive Republican primaries and win the nomination without closing off avenues of appeal to the broader electorate. He’ll need a miracle.

The case for Scott begins where the thing necessarily starts: He is the Senate’s only Black Republican. For a party routinely accused of veiled and even overt racism, Scott is a genial counterargument. His presence makes the Republican brand more palatable to those who want an American conservatism without the racial resentment. Inside the party, he is the rare Republican who arrived with the tea party wave of 2010 but has not been defined by radicalism during the swift transition to Trumpism. A Venn diagram of the party’s competing factions could have Scott in the overlap. And he scratches the itch for pragmatic bipartisanship among independent voters. When questions of race policy have arisen, Scott has sometimes found agreement with Democrats on issues such as funding for historically Black colleges and universities, anti-lynching legislation and criminal justice reform.

To emerge from the growing number of Republican hopefuls, however, he must demonstrate a more acceptable but fundamentalist version of Trumpism. Like former vice president Mike Pence, Scott might hope to show more character and less animus than the original version — a sort of Eagle Scout Trumpism — but, so far, this is an imagined ideological space that no one has been able to locate and occupy.

It isn’t long before the idea of a candidate hits the national spotlight, and when it does, the idea rarely goes according to plan. Scott’s well-publicized stumble through abortion policy recently was evidence of his desire to appear uncompromising yet pragmatic, hard-right in policy but inclusive by personality. It is a difficult step to pull off.

There was a window where Scott’s ascendance was impossible to ignore. From 2015 forward, Scott was the party’s most forthright voice on racial justice issues, holding court on the Senate floor in 2016 for three detailed speeches on his personal experience of racism. In 2018, when Politico profiled the bachelor senator, I remember getting more than a few texts from fellow Gen X Black veterans asking basically the same thing: “Where has THAT guy been? I’d at least hear him out.” Scott emerged as a potential answer to a long-standing Republican question: how to win 1 in 5 Black voters in a presidential election.

But as Trump’s provocative behavior, impeachments and election conspiracies tested the nation’s democratic guardrails, Scott mostly blended into the pack and toed the party line. Two visions of Scott — the bootstrapping, pro-entrepreneur, compassionate Black conservative, and the good party soldier who sees his identity as political capital not to be squandered by challenging party leadership — appeal to vastly different groups and cancel each out before he can weld them into a viable coalition.

This is the senator in his element, trying to do two things at once. The stump speech that appeals to White conservatives and the sermon that evokes the Black church. An appeal to Black conservatives alongside the declaration of enmity against the party most Black voters support. The story of American exceptionalism, salted with dire warnings about progressive Americans deemed a danger to society.

Standing at the site where a would-be nation declared war on the United States, Scott unveiled his “Faith in America” campaign slogan. It invokes religious faith, patriotism and a belief that the United States is a providential undertaking. It also relies on a universe of threats — China, immigrants at the southern border, believers in a “liberal agenda” — that suggests the nation is being besieged on all sides in an existential battle of biblical proportions.

He is the happy warrior comfortable with the culture war, wondering whether he’ll get an amen.