Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott leaned into his personal poverty-to-politics history to make the case for his GOP nomination Friday.
During a brief appearance, the South Carolina senator said that “the truth of my life destroys the lies of the radical left.”
“I have had the privilege of living the American dream coming from a single-parent household mired in poverty in the deep south,” Scott said. “All things are possible in this nation.”
During a 15-minute speech that began with him jumping off the stage and high-fiving supporters, Scott said his candidacy is focused on restoring hope, creating opportunities and protecting the country based on four basic principles: “If you’re able bodied in America, you work; if you take out a loan, you pay it back; if you commit violent crime, you go to jail; and if God makes you a man, you play sports against men.”
In his opening salvo to the roughly 100 attendees at his banquet speech, Scott praised law enforcement and called for closing the southern border, insisting the federal government “build the wall” between the U.S. and Mexico
“Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Get ‘er done.”
His border message is a main pillar of his campaign and a follow-up to his visit to Yuma, Ariz., in August, when he met with law enforcement, community leaders and Americans who lost their children to fentanyl overdoses. In his speech Friday, Scott reiterated a statistic he often cites: that 70,000 Americans annually lose their lives to fentanyl, largely due to the substance illegally crossing the border.
Earlier this year, Scott introduced a bill that would withhold funding from sanctuary cities and redistribute the money to border security. On Friday, he said he would like to reinstate the Trump administration’s Title 42 public health directive that expelled migrants back to Mexico — a policy that ended in May.
Scott, who is polling in the single digits behind former president Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, also targeted public education Friday. He said he wanted to “break the backs of teacher unions” and oust Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (though he mistakenly said she was at the U.S. Department of Education).
His position toward education is similar to many of his Republican challengers: advocating for a parents’ bill of rights to inform them of what their children are learning and banning instruction about gender and sex education.
“We don’t need CRT,” he said, using the acronym for critical race theory. “We need ABC. We need to quit indoctrinating kids and start educating kids.”
Asked about his plans for the economy, Scott said he would “set America’s energy resources free.” He said his Made in America plan would create 10 million jobs by allowing the nation to excavate its oil and gas. He also said 2 million jobs could be created through innovation and reshoring factory jobs that have been lost to China.
Scott claimed credit as one of three major authors of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that permanently lowered corporate taxes from 35 to 21% and reduced them by 20% for small businesses. He said the tax cuts he helped pass during President Trump’s term took unemployment among African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans to their lowest levels in the history of the country.