GOP’s Tim Scott delivers a rebuttal to Biden’s speech with Trumpian talking points

It is Donald Trump, not Democrats, who deserves credit for wresting the coronavirus under control, Tim Scott argued on Wednesday night as the Republican senator gave his party’s official response to Joe Biden’s first address to Congress.

Scott, a South Carolinian seen as a rising star in the Republican party, was handpicked by GOP leaders to deliver a rebuttal to Biden’s optimistic message, and duly did so, opening with a solidly Republican criticism of “socialist dreams” before taking aim at the president over some public schools having failed to reopen – a decision which is taken at state-level, frequently by local districts, rather than by the federal government.

As the only Black Republican in the US Senate, Scott had been expected to address the issue of racial inequality and the repeated police shootings of Black men, but those hoping for strident criticism of the racial crisis in the US were disappointed, with Scott instead saying, “Hear me clearly, America is not a racist country.”

Related: Progressive Democrats praise Biden on Covid but call for bolder action

Scott, a conservative, Christian southerner, has walked the fine line between the establishment and Donald Trump wings of the Republican party with more aplomb than most. His status as a potential GOP star is one of the few things that Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, still agree on, and Scott won a coveted endorsement for his 2022 re-election bid from Trump in March.

The extent to which Trump still looms over the Republican party was clear in Scott’s speech, with the senator praising the Trump administration and on occasion using talking points that could have been lifted straight from a Trump stump speech.

“This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run,” Scott said, seemingly ignoring the fact that in December, Trump’s last full month in office, the US set a record for the highest daily number of new Covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations.

“Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines. Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding,” Scott said.

He then harked back to before the Covid pandemic, which so far has killed more than 573,000 Americans. Trump has been widely blamed for allowing the virus to spiral out of control, and failing to take action once it did.

“Just before Covid, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime. The lowest unemployment ever recorded for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. And a 70 year low, nearly, for women,” Scott said.

Trump, ensconced in his holiday resort in south Florida, will have been pleased – these are claims he repeatedly made during his presidency, even if they are not totally supported by evidence.

In 2019, the Washington Post’s factchecker called Trump’s claim that the black unemployment rate was the lowest in history “skewed and outdated”, and gave it three Pinnochios. Both Trump – and Scott – failed to note that the unemployment rate among Black and Hispanic people began to decline, steeply, under the Obama administration.

Scott is leading the Republican party’s efforts to craft legislation with Democrats on police reform in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, but in his speech, he accused Democrats of voting against a police reform bill he introduced in 2020. At the time, Democrats said the bill did not go far enough to tackle police violence.

Scott has also previously joined Democrats Cory Booker and Kamala Harris to work on a bipartisan bill that would make lynching a federal crime, and led the way in creating Opportunity Zones – aimed growth and jobs in low income communities – in Trump’s 2017 tax reform package.

Once hesitant to focus on race in his political career, Scott has increasingly talked about his experience as an African American. On Wednesday, Scott said he had “experienced the pain of discrimination”.

“I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping,” Scott said, but then pivoted to criticism of Democrats.

“I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance,” Scott said. “I get called Uncle Tom and the n-word by progressives and liberals.”

Scott then addressed a familiar Republican talking point, and a favorite of Trump: that schools and colleges are now exhibiting bias against white children.

“A hundred years ago kids in classrooms were being taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic, that if they looked a certain way they were inferior,” Scott said.

“Today students are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again and if they look a certain way they are an oppressor.”

In July 2020, Trump was fiercely criticized after he offered a dystopian vision of America, along the same lines as Scott’s classroom remarks if more emotional in tone.

“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains,” the then-president said, adding that there was a campaign to “indoctrinate our children”.

Scott, who accused Democrats of a “Washington powergrab” over their opposition to a Georgia law that would make it more difficult for people to vote, later claimed that Biden would increase taxes, despite the president having said minutes earlier he would not raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year.