GOP’s only Black senator announces U.S. presidential run, blasts Biden

Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate, has announced his presidential candidacy, blasting the current office holder, Democrat Joe Biden, along the way.

"Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every single rung of the ladder that helped me climb," Scott, 57, said on Monday in South Carolina, announcing he would seek the Republican nomination for the presidency.

"And that's why, I'm announcing today, that I'm running for president of the United States," Scott shouted as an overjoyed audience applauded.

"We need a president who persuades not just our friends and our base. We have to have a compassion for people who don't agree with us," he said, striking a more moderate tone than some other members of his party, which has moved farther to the right in recent years.

"We have to believe that our ideas are so strong and so powerful and so persuasive that we can ... take it all the way down to places that today are hopeless and prove that who we are works for all Americans," he argued.

"We need to stop canceling our founding fathers and start celebrating them for the geniuses that they were," Scott added, in a shot at what conservatives deride as "cancel culture."

"They weren't perfect, but they believed that we could become a more perfect union."

Scott became the second GOP presidential candidate from the southern state of South Carolina after former Governor Nikki Haley, also former U.S. envoy to the UN, said this February she was throwing her hat into the ring.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump still remains the top contender for the GOP nomination, dominating primary polls nationwide, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is also believed to have a shot at the nomination, though his numbers have sagged in recent months.

Scott was elected to the Senate in 2012 in a special election to fill an empty seat, and since then has won two full terms, in 2016 and 2022.