In a political climate dominated by a wannabe strongman demanding loyalty tests and cultlike worship, along with political trolling prioritized over actual policy, somehow, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton emerged from 2020 as the best politically positioned Republican. He did so while navigating a year that began with China unleashing a global pandemic on the world and ended with President Trump attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election.
Cotton, from Arkansas, is not, for lack of a better term, terribly charismatic in a party that largely traded away brains for bombast. He didn’t take much of a stand against President Trump’s worst excesses, yet now, MAGA land is keen to brand him a traitor to the cause for refusing to follow the Pied Piper in Trump’s futile hopes of disenfranchising millions. Still, he probably played the game better than anyone through sheer smarts and a level of prescient focus tailor-made for 2024 campaign ads.
While the rest of Washington went apoplectic over impeachment proceedings that ultimately failed to put a single lasting dent in Trump’s reelection odds, the Arkansas senator was laser-focused on news of the novel coronavirus. In January, Cotton was bailing on impeachment proceedings to warn the White House repeatedly it was wildly behind on targeted travel bans, testing production, and vaccine development. He was also rightly pointing out that the Chinese Communist Party’s assertion that the coronavirus emerged from a wet market that didn’t even sell bats, the original carrier of the virus, was most likely a cover for its real source: China’s only maximum-security biosafety-level-four facility, which was known to conduct gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses.
And yet, like Cassandra warning Paris his actions would start the Trojan War, Cotton was roundly derided as a crackpot conspiracy theorist by most of the media.
— John Noonan (@noonanjo) January 4, 2021
By late spring, a second crisis was emerging. Protests supposedly in the name of justice for George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed while kneeled on by a white cop, devolved into the sort of lawless riots anyone could see would spell doom, not productive lawmaking, for cities and businesses disproportionately of people of color. Cotton wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that military involvement was warranted to assist law enforcement in cities unable to quell riots, an opinion shared by nearly 3 in 5 registered voters, including nearly a majority of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives,” Cotton wrote. “Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.”
Members of the staff of the New York Times, who hadn’t raised a word of protest when the paper published direct op-eds from the Taliban, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or Hamas, were so enraged that not only did they accuse their employers of literally putting black people in danger by publishing Cotton’s opinion, but they also succeeded in upending the entire editorial structure of the opinion page and chasing respected editor James Bennet from the building.
Cotton wound up raising $200,000 in the week after his column was published, which he spent on ads in the New York Times railing against Joe Biden. (Cotton, who unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2014, went on to beat his Libertarian challenger in 2020 by 33 points, as no Democrat ran in the race.)
For Cotton’s final act of the year (which really doesn’t end until after Tuesday’s Georgia runoff elections and Wednesday’s increasingly stupid war of certifying the presidential election), the decorated war veteran decided to buck supposed fellow populists Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who are also surely using election theatrics as a platform to kick off their own 2024 runs. Despite fury from Trump and his allies, Cotton’s deal is already proving as wise as Hawley and Cruz’s is proving Faustian. Should Republicans lose the Senate, Cotton won’t be lumped in with the Republicans who inadvertently convinced would-be voters for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue that the election was too rigged to be worth voting in. Meanwhile, Cotton will never suffer the smear of having attempted to rob the Electoral College of its lawful vote.
And on those first two fronts, just how vindicated is Cotton already?
Well, on the coronavirus “conspiracy theory” front, we now know that U.S. Embassy officials warned our government back in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology — again, the only BSL-4 facility in China — was conducting risky experiments on coronaviruses from bats with suspiciously similar features to COVID-19. Furthermore, while the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization incessantly obfuscate the virus’s origins, the U.S. government began to settle seriously on the lab-leak theory as soon as April. For a final word on this matter, I’ll point to New York magazine’s brilliant cover story for the month, which I encourage everyone to read in full. Essayist Nicholson Baker writes:
With regard to Cotton’s second gambit, one only needs to look at the devastation incurred in cities across America. Leaders-in-name-only let deranged anarchists take over entire blocks of Seattle, burn entire businesses in Kenosha and Minneapolis to the ground, and turn Portland into a state of anarchy for six months and counting. The result: The poor, just as Cotton predicted, are the hardest hit by the tax base fleeing cities overrun with violence and jobs, already on tenterhooks from the pandemic, erased. Oh, and that record-setting $1 billion-plus in riot damage won’t be entirely covered by insurance companies.
Further vindication comes from the nation’s capital this week, where Mayor Muriel Bowser has called in the National Guard to maintain the peace for Washington’s umpteenth round of protests that have repeatedly devolved into riots.
Cotton may be more of an immigration hawk than what’s in vogue now, but so was Trump, and for all Trump’s whining about the election, he made landmark gains with Latinos across the country, proving that running on a law-and-order message doesn’t actually alienate minorities. Cotton may be caught in the crossfire of partisans claiming he was too much of a Trump shill or not loyal enough, but unlike pretty much every single senator gunning for the presidency, Cotton is the one who has an actual record of being right, both in terms of identifying the problem and proposing proactive solutions, on the two most consequential issues of the year, if not the decade.
Twitter stunts and trolling may earn donations, but in the end, Cotton was right without alienating any crucial faction of the GOP. The year 2024 may be a ways away, but he’s already positioned himself at the head for the start.
