Senator Tom Cotton is striding up and down the press spin room of Pennsylvania’s National Constitution Center; at 6ft 4in, he dwarfs the other campaign surrogates. Wearing a navy jacket and black trousers, his hands clasped in front of his chest and his hair sharp, he looks every inch the conservative lawmaker. It’s early September: in a few minutes, in the next room, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will take part in their first head-to-head debate, moderated by ABC News.
Earlier this year, Cotton, who has served as Arkansas’s junior senator since 2015, seemed to have his sights set on higher office. Around May, outlets reported that the Harvard-educated Republican was a frontrunner in Trump’s search for a vice-presidential candidate. Despite being passed over for JD Vance, Cotton has remained a fervent Trump loyalist. He has become a ubiquitous presence on America’s news circuit, preaching the Maga gospel daily.
Many see this show of support as a bid for serving in Trump’s second administration. But Cotton brushes this rumour off. “I’m focused on getting Trump elected and a Republican majority in Congress,” he says. The former president, he adds, “will have a lot of great choices for every position he needs to fill.”
When Trump lost to Biden in 2020, Cotton said the president had “every right to pursue legal remedies and recounts” and failed to openly contradict Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories. I ask what he thinks about the integrity of the coming election. Cotton warns that “some states have taken significant steps to change the practices that were in place in 2020 while other states, controlled by Democrats, have not”.
The Republicans, he adds, simply want “to make sure that the Democrats aren’t changing the laws or the practices at the last minute on the fly as happened in the last election”.
This baseless line—that Democrats somehow rigged the system in 2020—is a trademark of the Maga movement. This time around, Cotton insists his own party is committed to respecting the process. “The RNC and our other campaign committees are working very hard to follow the election laws that are in the books, even if we don’t like them: to encourage early voting and mail-in voting.”
Cotton lambasts what he sees as the Democrats’ failure to show sufficient strength against Iran, which has led to “Iran and its proxies rampaging across the Middle East”. Under Trump, he says, “Iran was afraid of America, as Iran should be afraid of America.” He blames the Democrats for Hamas’s 7th October attack on Israel. He argues that Hamas believed the US government would let them get away with it—“and President Biden has proved them largely correct.”
He also criticises Biden for not doing enough to get back the hostages held in Gaza who were US citizens. A Trump administration, he says, would “simply let Israel win. There would be no arms embargo on Israel; there would be no constant criticism of the Israeli government and Trump would back Israel to the hilt, as he did for four years.”
Minutes before the debate begins, Cotton predicts that Trump will “contrast his record in office” with Biden’s. Instead, the former president veers off course, ranting about Haitian immigrants eating pets and “transgender operations on illegal aliens”, leaving precious little time for any serious policy discussion. Harris is widely agreed to have put in a stronger performance; nevertheless, the polls remain tight. If Trump clinches victory once again, Tom Cotton may find himself at the eye of the second Trump storm.
