Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) has been hard at work trying to get former President Donald Trump to choose him as his Vice Presidential pick. The South Carolina Senator spent the last several months showering Trump with praise and making a case that Black voters should side with the Republican presidential nominee.
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While on Fox News on Thursday night, Scott reiterated one of his bolder claims: That Black Americans and other minority groups were “better off under Trump.”
“Why are African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Republicans, Men women all looking at Donald trump with new eyes? It is simple,” said Scott. “We were better off under Trump. Economically, the lowest unemployment rates for all racial demographics.”
Unfortunately for Scott, opinion polls and unemployment numbers are readily available on the internet.
As The Root pointed out when allies of the President started circulating fake A.I. photos of Trump with all of his Black friends, the President remains unpopular with Black voters. Support for Biden has decreased somewhat among Black voters, but there’s no evidence that there’s a mass exodus to Trump land underway.
A January USA Today/Suffolk found that about 83 percent of Black voters thought the legal actions against Trump were “appropriate. And only 12 percent of Black voters supported Trump, which was the exact percentage of Black support that exit polls showed in 2020. So the idea that “all” African Americans are looking at Trump “with new eyes” isn’t exactly accurate.
Unemployment numbers are where things veer into the straight-up falsehood territory.
In fact, Black unemployment hit an all-time high under the Trump presidency, peaking at around 16.8 percent in May 2020. Black unemployment hit an all-time low of under 5 percent last year under the Biden administration.
While Trump can’t be entirely blamed for the economic turmoil caused by a global pandemic, his campaign also can’t claim credit for fictitious unemployment numbers.
If we want to be generous and assume that Scott was referring to the overall unemployment rate, he would still be wrong. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the overall unemployment rate hit 3.4 percent last year — the lowest it’s been in over 5o years.
There’s certainly more to get into with this interview, but the Trump campaign and his surrogates’ efforts to paint him as the patron saint of Black people is falling a bit flat.
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