Republican candidate Tim Scott suspends 2024 presidential campaign

Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has decided to drop out of the US presidential race, as he acknowledged that Donald Trump continues to lead in the primary polls and he does not see a way to win the Republican nomination.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday night, Scott announced his decision to suspend his candidacy, giving other contenders a slight advantage in the race to unseat the front-runner Donald Trump.

Scott, the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, made the announcement six months after he launched his White House bid with an optimistic vision of America's future, The Guardian reported.

He had used a personal story of his mother as a single mother to argue for America's greatness and accused Joe Biden and other Democrats of “attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb".

During his campaign, Scott had demonstrated a strong commitment to conservative principles and had emerged as a leading voice on issues such as tax reform, job creation, and national security.

However, despite his best efforts, he was unable to gain sufficient traction among voters in the crowded Republican field.

“We live in the land where it is absolutely possible for a kid raised in poverty in a single-parent household in a small apartment to one day serve in the people’s house and maybe even the White House,” Scott said as he announced his candidacy in May.

“This is the greatest country on God’s green Earth.”

To increase his prospects of securing the nomination, Scott recently shifted to darker rhetoric on the campaign trail.

He made the argument that Black Americans could tolerate slavery better than President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, which aimed to combat poverty and gave rise to social welfare initiatives like Medicare and Medicaid.

Critics were incensed by this because they believed Scott was minimising the horrors of slavery.

Scott also lambasted Biden for his response to the Hamas attacks on Oct 7, accusing him of inadvertently causing the violence. This sparked outrage and criticism of Biden's foreign policy agenda.

Scott later praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his "restraint" in response to Hamas attacks, despite Israeli airstrikes killing Palestinians.