Happy Monday and welcome to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby. Today, a gut check on the boomlet for Tim Scott, a genuinely nice and genuinely conservative candidate custom built for National Review cruise-goers and Republican mega-donors who have never met a real voter in their lives.

But first…

By Tina Nguyen

• Oh, Mother: If you thought it was brutal to watch Tucker Carlson dress down Mike Pence in front of a room full of Christian activists at the Family Leadership Summit, in Des Moines, imagine being in the room. The beleaguered presidential candidate—a self-declared “born-again, evangelical Catholic” who was selected for the 2016 ticket because Trump needed to persuade religious voters that he wasn’t a sleazebag—was repeatedly booed on Friday, especially when he voiced his support for...