Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, did her best to pin down Tim Scott last Sunday.
Would the junior senator from South Carolina state that he will accept the results of the 2024 presidential election no matter who wins? Pretty basic stuff, you’d think, but apparently not.
Scott dodged, he weaved, he did that politician thing of saying the same non-responsive thing over and over.
But he would not answer her question – which was repeated several times, in several different ways, including Welker’s insistence on a simple yes or no. All Scott would say was that Donald Trump would be the 47th president.
Appalling as it was, the reason was obvious.
“He’s auditioning,” said Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, who worked in the Trump administration. In a CNN interview, Taylor called Scott’s refusal to commit to the very foundation of democracy “a very chilling signal”.
Chilling, it is. But Tim Scott is hardly alone in playing to that audience of one.
Even as Trump sits in a Manhattan courtroom this week, listening to a porn star describe their long-ago sexual encounter, he is deciding who will be his running mate in November.
The job, of course, has a few downsides. As Mike Pence found out on 6 January 2021, being Trump’s vice-president could result in masses of violent rioters calling for you to be hanged.
And it could result, as Pence also found out, in Trump himself throwing you under the bus, as he tends to do with even those who were his closest allies. (“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done …” Trump said publicly, about his vice-president’s decision to accept electoral votes that indicated his rival, Joe Biden, had won the presidential election. Privately, according to Politico, Trump went even further, expressing support for hanging Pence.)
The position is coveted, nonetheless. Power is every bit that seductive.
And so, the veepstakes are playing out before our eyes. And, far beyond Tim Scott’s craven avoidance, the competition is not a pretty sight.
Elise Stefanik, the New York congresswoman who wants the nod, has gone full Trump in recent years, turning from something of a moderate Republican to a raging rightwinger. Recall how she led the bullying of university presidents testifying before Congress, and then gloated in a social media post after the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania presidents resigned: “Two down.”
Soon after, she had her turn on Meet the Press and – echoing Trump’s stalwart defense of the Capitol-storming mob – furrowed her brow at the “treatment of the January 6 hostages”.
Outrageous? Certainly. But not to be outdone in trolling the libs, the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, has bragged about killing her dog and even advocated for killing Biden’s dog. It’s unclear whether this was an effort to appeal to a certain dog-hater-in-chief – or merely to indicate that nothing is beyond the pale.
“It once seemed like a dark joke to say that Trump would eventually resort to kicking puppies to get a rise out of people,” Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon. “Noem skipped that step entirely and went straight to shooting them.”
That Noem’s casual cruelty isn’t playing well with the public doesn’t matter when the audience of one indulges in that kind of thing himself – from mocking disabled people to dissing Gold Star parents to dreaming up innovative ways to insult women’s looks.
Just days ago, another hopeful – Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota – took his audition to Fox News, heaping accolades on Trump’s “clarity and focus and strength”.
Burgum, thought to be on Trump’s shortlist, got some invaluable help from Fox & Friends, noted Matt Gertz of Media Matters. Host Brian Kilmeade avoided questions on abortion – Burgum has signed extremely restrictive legislation – or about Trump’s scary declarations of going full autocrat if he’s re-elected.
Instead, Burgum was given plenty of time to extol Trump’s “positive energy”, a description that runs counter to reports that the former president falls asleep in the courtroom.
The boss does love flattery.
A few months ago, Trump bestowed a high compliment on Tim Scott, calling him “a great advocate”, and adding, “He doesn’t like talking about himself, but boy, does he talk about Trump.”
All in all, an embarrassing display of sycophancy. That would be bad enough. But far worse is the abandonment of principle, as Tim Scott made all too clear.
The real litmus test, after all, is the would-be running mate’s willingness to deny the 2020 election results and to pledge unquestioning fealty in the future – fealty not to the constitution or the American voters but to the audience of one.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist
