At the end of a chaotic Saturday full of skirmishes for which the local law enforcement was visibly underprepared, tragedy struck. A twenty-year-old Nazi sympathizer from Ohio, James Alex Fields, rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters downtown. The terrorist attack injured twenty-eight people and killed Heather Heyer, a thrity-two-year-old waitress and paralegal.
The demonstrators drawn to Charlottesville represented disparate cogs of an ideological machine—one emboldened by the election of the forty-fifth president. They were neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, right-wing militia members, and Klansmen. The former grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke, was among other white supremacist luminaires in attendance. “We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said at the rally. “We are gonna fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”
The collection of counterprotesters was more diverse. There were interfaith leaders, locking arms and singing hymns. There were college kids and faculty members. There were local residents. There were members of Black Lives Matter, the nascent organization that used aggressive nonviolent tactics (such as street demonstrations and “die-ins”) to combat police brutality. Problematically, there were also disciples of Antifa (“antifascist”), a conglomeration of groups, some with a history of inciting violence.
Two hours after Fields plowed his car into a throng of people, Trump delivered prepared remarks from his golf club in New Jersey. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence”—he looked up from his script—“on many sides. On many sides.”
The president also urged the country to “come together as one,” saying, “The hate and division must stop.” But these remarks were peripheral to his opening statement, which had drawn a moral equivalence between the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and the counterprotesters opposed to their ideology. Horrified by Trump’s language, Republicans raced to condemn him, strafing the White House with an unprecedented barrage of criticism.
“We should call evil by its name,” Utah senator Orrin Hatch tweeted. “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”
The White House tried to put out the fire, issuing a statement on Sunday that read, “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”
But this would not suffice. After collecting decades’ worth of racial baggage and running a campaign during which he insulted Mexicans, called for banning Muslims from the country, and played footsie with extremists, Trump would need to clean up this mess himself.
He tried. “Racism is evil,” the president said on Monday, August 14, during an impromptu appearance before the White House press corps. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
But less than twenty-four hours later, on Tuesday, the fifteenth, he reverted to form. Facing a scrum of reporters inside Trump Tower, the president defended his original remarks from Sunday, repeating his assertion of “blame on both sides.” He also lashed out at the media, which he claimed had unfairly attacked the rally’s participants. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch,” he said. Saying there had been “very fine people on both sides,” Trump argued that the campaign to remove Confederate monuments was an attempt to “change history.”
The outpouring of anger was nearly unparalleled, likely bested only by the reactions to the Access Hollywood recording. Dozens of elected Republican officials past and present condemned Trump’s rhetoric and called on him to emphasize, once and for all, that there were no “very fine people” marching with torches in Charlottesville.
One voice pierced the din of familiar outrage that had come to shadow Trump. “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Tim Scott, the Senate’s lone black Republican, told Vice News.1 “And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened.”
HAVING BEEN DEPLOYED AS A “PROP” BY HOUSE REPUBLICANS AFTER his election in 2010, and having heard the grumblings about being an affirmative-action hire following his appointment to the Senate in 2012, Scott was determined to avoid being defined by his blackness. In the absence of words, the new senator tried to lead with actions. He assembled one of the most diverse offices on Capitol Hill, led by his black, single-mother chief of staff. He also poured time and resources into mentoring programs in distressed communities back home.
But his silence on cultural events became deafening. “Scott has said little on the racial controversies and civil rights issues of the last four years, from the killings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis to the death of Michael Brown and the explosion of anger and rage in Ferguson,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate in November 2014.2 Soon enough, circumstances made the senator’s reticence unsustainable.
In April 2015, Walter Scott (no relation) was fatally shot in the back by a policeman in North Charleston. Shaken by the hometown incident, the senator called for the officer’s prosecution. (In 2017, he introduced the Walter Scott Notification Act, which would create a database of police shootings.)
Ten weeks after Walter Scott’s murder, Roof opened fire at Emanuel AME Church. Scott delivered an emotional address on the Senate floor. (“God cares for His people,” he said, quoting the son of one of the victims he had spoken with. “God still lives.”)
The next summer, in July 2016, amid another rash of police shootings, Scott returned to the Senate floor. In a spellbinding speech, the senator described how he had been victimized by racial profiling—pulled over in his car seven times in one year as an elected official, and twice forced to show identification to Capitol Police despite wearing his members-only Senate pin.
In a town filled with empty rhetoric, Scott’s remarks got everyone’s attention. Democrats applauded the GOP senator’s courage. Older, white Republicans found themselves guilt-ridden by their colleague’s story. There was no turning back for Scott. He had never wanted to be identified as the Black Republican. But there was too much at stake and too few voices in his party capable of speaking to the moment.
“We have a significant percentage of people in this country who feel they’re treated differently because of their background or their color. And we need to talk about it,” says Rubio, Scott’s close friend. “No one else could have done that. No one else could have given that speech.”
Every Republican lawmaker was bound to walk a tightrope when Trump took office, forced to weigh their moral and philosophical objections to him against fears of losing influence in Washington and support back home. But nobody had it worse than Scott. Any rebuke of the president would expose him to lunacy from the right; he became a frequent target of menacing calls and messages, with a Georgia man arrested for threatening to kill him. (“He said he wanted to be the next Dylann Roof,” Scott says.) But biting his tongue when it came to Trump’s behavior opened Scott to unyielding vitriol from the left, with accusations of being an “Uncle Tom” or worse. When one Twitter user called him a “house nigga” in early 2017, after his vote to confirm Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Scott tweeted back a one-word reply: “Senate.”