Sen. Tim Scott fashions himself a Christian. Why does he lie about Trump and crime? | Opinion

Over the weekend, a man recently convicted of 34 felonies decided to lie to Black people about crime. One of his top sycophants did the same. One took to what was described as a Black church, and the other to TV news to sell the falsehood that violent crime has gotten worse over the past four years.

“Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen, literally, in five decades,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott told ABC News.

Scott also said “we’ve seen a spike in violent crime” during President Biden’s tenure in the White House. Scott was not telling the truth.

Meanwhile, former President Trump took to the stage in of a Detroit church in front of a mostly-white audience and declared: “Look, the crime is most rampant right here and in African American communities. More people see me and they say, ‘Sir, we want protection. We want police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed and mugged and beat up or killed because we want to walk across the street to buy a loaf of bread.’”

“The biggest thing we can do is stop the crime,” Trump said.

Trump knows about crime better than most, given he’s committed so many. Let us not forget he has been convicted of 34 felony charges stemming from efforts to hide an illicit affair with a porn star by using dishonest business records in a way that broke election law in New York. He’s scheduled to be sentenced in about a month.

You should probably hide the next portion of this column from kids who might accidentally read it over your shoulder. It’s that bad, that ugly.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee for a party that has long believed its full of “values voters” and typifies “family values” was also held civilly liable for having raped E. Jean Carroll. Initially, there was some debate about if it amounted to a finding of rape or just sexual abuse. It was a technical debate, one that the judge stepped in to clarify. Though there was a bit of confusion because of technical definitions, the judge said that in “common modern parlance,” Trump raped Carroll.

And, of course, about a month before his 2016 election Trump was caught on audio bragging about being able to casually sexually assault women.

That doesn’t even include Trump being found guilty of fraud in civil court in February and his facing dozens of other criminal indictments, including trying to overturn the 2020 election.

That’s the man that South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott — who fashions himself an upstanding God-fearing Christian and moral center of the Republican Party — was advocating for this weekend and has for the past eight years.

Scott has been doing that even though homicides increased at a historic rate during Trump’s final year in office by nearly 30%, the largest one-year increase in recorded U.S. history.

Under Biden, crime has been decreasing at a historic rate, a reversal that hasn’t gotten enough attention. As of now, the murder rate is dropping at a rate not seen since at least 1996 — while Biden is in the White House.

If Scott wanted to ensure fewer Americans are going to be affected by crime, particularly those in communities like the ones he grew up in, he’d do the sensible thing and try to stop Trump from regaining power. Instead, he’s peddling lies to put that one-man crime wave back in the Oval Office.

Scott isn’t serious about fighting wrongdoing. He wants to reward it, especially if it’s Trump committing the bad acts.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.