An eye for the world after Trump
TOM COTTON IS A SERIOUS MAN. Pretty much everyone you talk to about the 43-year-old junior senator from Arkansas agrees on that. It’s not hard to see why. Cotton’s style of politics is cool and analytical, his approach deliberate and decisive, his areas of interest weighty — China, law and order, immigration — and his ambitions lofty (the other thing everyone agrees on is that he plans to run for president in 2024).
After that, opinions quickly diverge. To liberals, he represents the sinister side of Trumpian authoritarianism. To advocates of a more restrained foreign policy, he is an irredeemable hawk committed to a heavy US involvement in the Middle East and seemingly determined to accelerate the deterioration of relations with China. To libertarians, he is a civil-liberties and criminal-justice nightmare who complains about America’s “under-incarceration” problem and permeable borders.
To many on the right, he is one of the few politicians capable of expressing a coherent, credible vision of post-Trump Republicanism. To your correspondent, he is a powerful counter-example to the idea that the GOP is a smouldering wreck of a party after the Trump revolution.
According to the official version of recent political history, Republicans like Cotton aren’t supposed to exist. The GOP has been at war with itself for at least the last half a decade, hopelessly split across various divides: the establishment versus the insurgents; elite neoconservatism versus blue-collar Republicanism; economic populists versus libertarians; protectionists versus free-traders; foreign policy isolationists versus interventionists; immigration hawks versus doves.
Republicans like Cotton aren’t supposed to exist in the present climate
But Cotton — who stands at a gangly 6ft 5ins tall, wears close-cropped dark hair, carries
