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.