GOP Candidates Prep to Accuse Black Rival of—Yep—Being Soft on Crime

As presidential hopeful Tim Scott slowly edges up in the polls, his 2024 opponents are gearing up to attack one of the only Black candidates for being soft on crime.

Republicans have increasingly insisted the United States is falling into a state of lawlessness, with violent crime on the rise and Democratic leaders unable or unwilling to do anything about it. (Violent crime has actually gone down in the past six months.) Many GOP candidates at all levels of governance are promising to be “tough on crime.”

Scott has actually been a big champion in Congress for police and criminal justice reform, making him a prime target for accusations of being soft on crime. He co-sponsored the First Step Act in 2018, which reduced some mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related charges and also allowed some people already incarcerated to request shorter sentences.

The South Carolina senator also pushed for police reform in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who was arresting him. Scott introduced the JUSTICE Act, which would withhold federal funding from local police departments until they changed their operating policies. (The bill went nowhere.)

Still, his little action on police reform seems like it will become fodder for his Republican rivals. Some Republican presidential candidates are already attacking the First Step Act. Ron DeSantis said in May he would want to repeal the law, while Mike Pence tried to be cute and said he wanted to “take a step back from the First Step Act.”

Except … DeSantis voted for an early version of the act in 2018, when he was still a Florida representative in Congress. Pence also championed the legislation while serving as vice president. And current Republican front-runner Donald Trump signed the act into law. So if this is the point they’re going to use to try to take down Scott, they all may want to look in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Scott may actually have sabotaged a bipartisan police reform measure so he could seem tough on crime during his presidential campaign. Excerpts released in June from Washington Post writer Ben Terris’s book The Big Break reveal that Scott worked with Democratic Senator Cory Booker to craft legislation in 2021. Shortly after Booker’s staff gave Scott a copy of the bill, it was leaked to the National Sheriffs’ Association.

“With the Sheriffs’ Association as a shield, Scott rejected the offer,” Terris wrote. “Even though the bill would have added millions of dollars to police department budgets, he accused Democrats of wanting to ‘defund the police,’ something that almost no one in Congress had been saying for months.”

As Donald Trump awaits his third and potentially fourth indictment, he seems to be making threats about what’ll happen if he actually faces legal repercussions.

Early Monday morning, the former president reshared a meme of himself on TruthSocial with the caption, “Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing.”

“‘Nothing can stop what is coming’’ is a popular phrase linked to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy and movement, which Trump has often amplified and whose followers were a big part of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This isn’t his first time endorsing this phrase. A couple months after the failed insurrection, and at the beginning stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump shared a meme with the same caption over an image of him playing the fiddle.

The ominous threat—and callout to his followers—is a sign of how much pressure Trump is under.

Trump could be indicted for the third time any day now. Last week, special counsel Jack Smith informed Trump that he is a target in the investigation into the January 6 attack and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Georgia prosecutors, meanwhile, are reportedly preparing racketeering charges against Trump for his role in attempting to overthrow the election.

Last week, a date was set for his trial on stealing and hoarding classified documents: May 20, 2024, smack in the middle of the Republican primary.

Ron DeSantis shocked everyone earlier this month when his campaign shared a deeply bigoted ad attacking LGBTQ people.

The video appeared to come from a conservative group made in support of the Florida governor. But it turns out that the video was actually made in-house and planted in the fan account.

The attack ad attempted to portray Donald Trump as pro-LGBTQ and cast DeSantis as a hypermasculine anti-LGBTQ crusader.  But instead, it came across as terrifyingly homophobic and oddly homoerotic.

The video (since taken down due to copyright issues) was originally posted on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, which was then shared by DeSantis’s campaign. But in reality, a campaign aide made the video, The New York Times reported Sunday, and then sent it to an outside supporter to post first in order to make it look like the ad was made independently.

The ad features DeSantis shooting lasers out of his eyes, as well as clips from films and television shows such as American Psycho, Troy, and Peaky Blinders—all of which one would think are more of a lesson against the oppressive, militaristic approach to governance that DeSantis has been touting.

The poorly thought-out ad was part of a larger attempt to reinvigorate DeSantis’s struggling campaign. His bid for president has yet to take off, concerning both his team and his donors. In most polls, he is second to Trump, but the gap between them is large. DeSantis’s campaign has also been bleeding cash, to the tune of more than $212,000 per day on average, according to the Times.

Analysts say that there is still time for DeSantis to turn things around, but if the disastrous ad has shown anything, it’s that the Florida governor is struggling to find a message. DeSantis has focused on promising to fight “wokeness” but has failed to produce any actual policy ideas or a clear reason why people should vote for him over Trump. Attempts to portray himself as tougher or more ideologically right of Trump have backfired spectacularly.

Republican politicians are rushing to defend ultraconservative country singer Jason Aldean, whose new song openly calls for violence against Black people.

Aldean released the song “Try That in a Small Town” in May, and the incredibly alarming music video just last week. The song’s lyrics are rife with threats to outsiders, particularly people from the city. The words encourage listeners to resort to vigilantism and gun violence against outsiders.

But the music video is more explicit about whom it considers an outsider. The video includes clips of riots, vandalism, and police encounters. Some of the images come from Fox News’s coverage of Black Lives Matter protests, but some are stock footage, including of demonstrations from other countries. The intended effect is to encourage violence against  people protesting racial injustice.

Those clips are spliced alongside shots of Aldean singing outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. The building is the site of a racist attack in 1927, when a white mob lynched an 18-year-old Black teenager by pulling him out of a jail cell and dragging him through the city behind a car. The courthouse was also the site of a race riot in 1946.

The video sparked widespread pushback, and Country Music Television said Thursday it will no longer air the music video. Conservatives have pushed back against the (very understandable) outcry by accusing people of infringing on Aldean’s freedom of speech.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said on Twitter she was “shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs.”

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn warned that “cancel culture is the enemy of freedom of expression,” while Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused Democrats of being “more concerned about @Jason_Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals.”

Presidential hopefuls have also weighed in. “Jason Aldean is a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song. Support Jason all the way. MAGA!!!” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley actually played the song at their campaign stops. Ramaswamy said Aldean was being “sacrificed at the altar of censorship & cancellation,” while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suggested that “when the media attacks you, you’re doing something right.”

This is not Aldean’s first foray into politics. He is openly anti-vaccine and has dressed his children in anti–Joe Biden clothing. His wife and sister have a conservative clothing line dedicated to mocking liberals, and Aldean wore blackface for a costume in 2015. He has also gone golfing with Trump and gave an impromptu performance at Mar-a-Lago.

You have to wonder where Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will go when Thanksgiving rolls around this time.

On Friday, Jack Schlossberg—President John F. Kennedy’s only grandson—denounced RFK Jr., calling his candidacy “an embarrassment” and a “vanity project.”

“President John F. Kennedy is my grandfather. And his legacy is important. It’s about a lot more than Camelot and conspiracy theories. It’s about public service and courage,” Schlossberg began.

“It’s about civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, and landing a man on the moon. Joe Biden shares my grandfather’s vision for America, that we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And he is in the middle of becoming the greatest progressive president we’ve ever had,” he continued.

“Under Biden, we’ve added 13 million jobs. Unemployment is at its lowest in 60 years. Biden passed the largest investment in infrastructure since the New Deal, and the largest investment in green energy ever. He’s appointed more federal judges than any president since my grandfather. He ended our longest war. He ended the Covid pandemic, and he ended Donald Trump.”

And on RFK Jr., he didn’t mince his words.

“I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president,” Schlossberg said about his cousin. “What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted again by somebody’s vanity project. I am excited to vote for Joe Biden in my state’s primary and again in the general election, and I hope you will too.”

Schlossberg’s comments follow a string of other family members expressing their discontent with the anti-vax candidate seemingly supported by more Republicans than Democrats. The denunciations came after Kennedy’s remarks that Covid-19 was “targeted” to spare people who are “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

“I STRONGLY condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” said Kennedy’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, earlier this week. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stands for, with our 50+ year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination,” added the president of the RFK Human Rights advocacy organization.

“My uncle’s comments were hurtful and wrong. I unequivocally condemn what he said,” said former Representative Joe Kennnedy III.