Social media users are roasting Senator Tim Scott after the South Carolina Republican delivered an animated speech at the GOP midterm convention in Texas that saw him yell and pretend to rip his heart out of his chest.
“There are no words for how over the top Tim Scott’s Trumpapalooza performance is,” liberal journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X. “It’s an SNL cold open.”
Rupar added that Scott’s often impassioned tone resembled a “spoof of a preacher whose life took a wrong turn.”
Others took a similar tack in criticizing the performance at the Dallas convention, with one social media user accusing Scott of “playing a TV character.”
“Is Tim Scott OK?” filmmaker Morgan J. Freeman wrote in an X post.
open image in galleryEven some Republicans took note of the speech’s out-there style.
“Tim Scott is not ‘low-keying it,’” former congressman Matt Gaetz wrote on X.
The criticism was ironic, given that Scott sought to paint Democrats as the weird ones, reprising an insult Democrats used against the Trump-Vance ticket during the 2024 presidential election.
During his speech, Scott said the Democratic midterm slate had “the most dangerous, radical and frankly weird Democratic candidates in American history.”
“He believes God is non-binary,” Scott said of the Texan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico. “He thinks God needs special woke pronouns. But Texas, we know who God is. We’re talking about Jesus.”
Talarico has since walked back those comments, which he has called “cringey.” He said in a recent interview his comments about God in 2021 were meant to be deliberately provocative.
open image in gallery“You can’t use human categories to define God,” Talarico, who has studied at a seminary and holds a master’s degree in theological studies, recently told ABC News.
Elsewhere in the speech, Scott framed the midterms as a fight for the heart of America.
“The Democrats’ extreme candidates won’t rip that heart out of chests,” he said, miming his heart being ripped out. “They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American. Hear me, Dallas. Not! On! Our! Watch! We will not back down.”
Beyond Scott’s eyebrow-raising speech, the convention has made news elsewhere because it featured a video message to attendees from Democratic Sen. John Fetterman.
“Why am I here talking to you today?” he said in the video. “Because, well, I am a common-sense Democrat. I am always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes [of] socialism and that anti-American way of life.”