Betting against Tom Cotton has become a dicey proposition.
In 2020, the Arkansas senator suggested the eminently reasonable possibility that perhaps the coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, was the result of a leak from a local laboratory that experimented with precisely such infectious material. The Washington Post’s “fact-checker” sneered, echoing many in his industry, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Once it became clear that Cotton’s contention was certainly plausible and entirely rational based on the evidence, the Post admitted it was neither a “conspiracy theory” nor “debunked,” and had never been either of those two things.
In 2021, Democrats defeated a Republican amendment to the stimulus bill, the result of which, Cotton said, would mean incarcerated individuals such as the Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would receive a check from the government. Again, the Washington Post led the outcry, giving Cotton “two Pinocchios” for “scaremongering,” “theater,” and “not serious legislation.” And then — you guessed it — Tsarnaev did indeed receive a stimulus check.
Cotton’s predictions don’t spare his own party either. The 2018 First Step Act, signed by President Donald Trump, was aimed at reforming sentencing. Cotton warned violent crime would rise in its wake, and now says events proved him right.
In all cases, Cotton believes ideological thinking is blinding the political class to reality.
“All these things are, in my opinion, just commonsense observations about basic facts and the inherent logic of events,” the Republican said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I’m just looking at the world and playing out its natural or most likely chain of events and stating what seems to me an obvious conclusion.”
The Dardanelle native says that’s what his Arkansas constituents expect of him: “I have a very practical and clear-eyed view of the world; it’s the way I was raised, and it was reinforced in the Army. I’m not afraid to state those conclusions even when they might offend liberals and the media, and in some cases, people in my own party, as my predictions about rising crime over the last five or seven years have been borne out, as well, even if it gives others the vapors.”
The Army veteran who served with the 101st Airborne Division seemingly picks his battles carefully and does not let them drag on. That deliberateness has fed expectations that Cotton could be a formidable presidential candidate if he, as many expect, joins the Republican field in 2024.
Cotton was in Pittsburgh to headline the Allegheny County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner last month — a speaking slot Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held last year. For most of the evening, the former one-term congressman, who beat incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor in the 2014 wave election cycle, spent his time leading up to the dinner and speech mingling with the attendees, taking selfies with the decidedly younger-than-usual crowd, and cracking jokes.
It’s that last one that surprises people.
“One of the other things about Cotton you might miss if you only view him on the Senate floor or talking about serious issues on Fox News is how funny he is,” said Sam DeMarco, the chairman of the Pittsburgh-area Republicans.
Cotton’s appearance on the widely popular Ruthless podcast’s first ticketed live event in D.C. last month still has one of the podcast hosts, Josh Holmes, laughing at his antics. “People have this image of this straight man, this lanky, intellectual policy wonk, and he is that, but he is also so much more,” Holmes, former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell and a founding partner at the conservative public-relations firm Cavalry, told the Washington Examiner. “I think anybody who knows him personally knows that he has just an outstanding sense of humor, and the more he gets out there, the more people are on to this really hysterical other side of him.”
Asked about this hidden trait, Cotton insists it’s a natural outgrowth of being a conservative in the modern era.
“I do think the conservative temperament helps you understand the humor and the folly of things, as opposed to liberals who take everything, especially themselves and politics, so seriously,” he said.
The 6-foot-5, Harvard-educated son of seventh-generation Arkansans who left the law firm where he was working to be an infantry officer during the Iraq War reflected on his party’s momentum, and Democratic stumbles, heading into the fall midterm elections.
He begins by noting that too many reporters, strategists, and elected officials think Twitter is reflective of what the country thinks about, well, anything. “It really distorts the view of a lot of politicians because most of them, and especially the people who work around them and work on their campaigns, spend all their time there, and they don’t spend their time listening to normal people, understanding their concerns and trying to address their concerns,” he said.
The D.C.-heavy social media bubble keeps those in it from noticing that nearly everyone in Washington is not simply to the left of a normal voter; they’re to the left of a normal Democrat, “and that’s why you have Democrats who are more worried about fighting abstractions, like systemic racism, that don’t even exist in the country as opposed to getting the price of gas under control or stopping grocery inflation or making public parks livable again — the things that normal Americans see in their everyday life.”
Another manifestation of this, Cotton says, is letting green activists set the agenda on climate and energy, beginning with Joe Biden’s first day in office, when he nixed the Keystone pipeline and implemented other policies that threw a wet blanket over American energy production, especially oil and gas. That, and Biden’s opposition to coal and reticence on nuclear energy, has squandered jobs and left America less prepared for the resource wars. Biden’s energy agenda “not only made us poor at home as working families see now, but as we’ve seen in the last month, it makes us dangerously at risk in the world,” Cotton said.
“This is not an unintended consequence — this is very much the intended consequence of the Democrats’ energy policy. They want to move beyond oil and gas and coal,” he went on. “And I have nothing against other energy sources, but for many years to come, to power our economy, to create good jobs and more security, we’re going to need oil and gas and coal.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising for a military veteran, but Cotton’s most thorough critique of Biden centers on his responsibility for American security, a responsibility Cotton believes the president has abdicated. Cotton sees the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan as a moment from which the president’s credibility as commander in chief has yet to recover.
“Joe Biden’s negligent mismanagement of the drawdown in Afghanistan permanently and forever changed the way Americans view him,” Cotton said, adding that it indelibly tarred Biden’s competence, one of the key themes of Biden’s election campaign. He ran against Trump as the wise, old statesman who had been around the block in the Senate and as vice president who understood first-hand how to handle a crisis. And he would, more generally, calm the waters Trump had roiled.
“And then, Americans saw the parading gang of seventh-century savages rampaging across Afghanistan, seizing the capital, breaking into the airport, and chasing innocent, young Afghans who were trying to cling to C-130s, sometimes with tragic results, to get away from the Taliban,” said Cotton. “That is seared into the American mind and their views of Joe Biden. And even if it’s not on the front pages, it will always influence the way they see him.”
Biden’s weakness and slow-footedness only emboldened Vladimir Putin to launch the second foreign crisis of the president’s term, a brutal invasion of Ukraine. It’s a bit of a replay for Biden, who was vice president in 2014 when Russia last invaded Ukraine.
“He did it under President Obama, he’s done it under President Biden; the desire has always been there, but Putin hasn’t taken the action, except for when we had weak Democratic presidents who didn’t see the world clearly and take the steps necessary to deter him,” Cotton said.
In his speech to the Western Pennsylvania Republicans, Cotton hit Biden for his unpreparedness. He was aware of Putin’s ambitions on Ukraine for months, “and yet we sat on our hands, we continued to grant concessions to Vladimir Putin … we sat idly by while he built those troops up, as opposed to sending, in a deliberate and extended fashion, all of those missiles, all of those guns, all that ammo, all that body armor that we’ve been rushing to the front in Ukraine.”
Cotton said that help, despite its lateness, may still enable the Ukrainians to preserve their freedom, “but at much greater cost and much greater risk than it would have if it had started months ago.”
What more should we do? “There are a lot of Russian banks that aren’t sanctioned, and President Biden knows, as well as I do, that in Russia, Vladimir Putin can control all those banks,” Cotton responded, and “we can help them obtain those MIGs from Poland.”
Security failures abroad accompany those at home. Cotton places some blame on fellow Republicans for “sowing the seeds for a new crime wave in America, because too many Republicans joined with Democrats in accepting the premises that our criminal justice system is flawed or racist, or that we somehow have an overincarceration problem.” The clearance rate for murder cases has fallen over the decades to about 60%, violent crime about 50%, and property crimes even lower, he noted. “Yet, what are we doing? We’re cutting mandatory minimums. We’re letting hardened criminals out of jail. We’re eliminating our bail systems and putting them back on the streets moments after they’re arrested.” You can’t fool the voters into feeling safe; instead, Cotton says, you have to reconsider and question the ideas behind failing policies and adjust — which Biden and the Democrats simply aren’t doing.
It all goes back to what Cotton sees as one advantage the Republican Party has at the moment: the recognition that some issues, whether it’s crime, security, economic instability, or radicalized school instruction, cross ideological lines, and voters turn to the party willing to address them. This dynamic makes Republicans out of people “who weren’t Republicans five or 10 years ago.”
And these issues have another thing in common, according to Cotton: They cross race and class barriers. “Whether you’re rich or poor, black or white or Latino, whether you live in Pennsylvania or Arkansas, or anywhere in between, they’re the concerns that normal Americans have everywhere,” he said.
Too many people feel helpless in their own communities because of national Democratic policies, Cotton says, and “they’re looking for the Republican Party to help stop the madness in Washington and in too many state capitals, and frankly too many of their school boards. And that’s what I plan to do. And that’s what the Republican Party needs to do.”
Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
