Sen. Tom Cotton on the Midterms and His New Book

CLAY: We are joined now by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. Appreciate him joining us. Senator, I want to start right here. I know you’ve got a new book out, Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power. We appreciate everyone listening on our Arkansas affiliates and certainly all over the country. But I want to start here, given the fact that we are one week out from the midterms. Based on the numbers that you are seeing, do you feel like you guys in the Senate will be in the majority come, you know, a week from today when these election results start coming in?

SEN. COTTON: Well, thanks for having me on, guys. And I do believe that we’re going to win a solid majority in both the House and the Senate. I won’t hazard a guess of specific numbers, but just let me say, I think it’s going to be a comfortable majority. You know, I got into New York late last night for the book launch of Only the Strong, and I turned on the local news because I like to see what’s happening in the local scene.

And every ad I saw on the local news was about Democratic congressmen in New York and Connecticut and New Jersey. Some of these congressmen are in seats that Joe Biden won by 20 points, and the Democratic Party is now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to save their hides. Why are they doing that? Because they know they’re in trouble. As I say in Only the Strong you know, you should listen to what your adversaries say. Look at what they do.

Iran says, “Oh, our nuclear deal is peaceful,” but then they build nuclear facilities in a hardened bunker underneath a mountain, which surely says it’s not peaceful. Likewise, don’t look at Nancy Pelosi saying they’re going to hold the House or Joe Biden say the polls are going to turn around. Look where they’re committing their time and their money and their surrogates’ time. They’re in places that Joe Biden won by 10 and 15 and even 20 points.

BUCK: Senator Cotton, it’s Buck. Thanks for being with us. Where do you see surprising victories now as possible? I mean, so I wouldn’t put, you know, anybody who has been ahead in recent polling — Herschel Walker, for example, Mehmet Oz — I wouldn’t view those as a surprise. We’ve been talking, though, about some important races where it looks like, for example, Tiffany Smiley — who’ll be with us shortly — in Washington state, we could pull out some huge upset wins. Do you have any that are top of mind for you? And if so, is it just that the triad, the triumvirate of crime, immigration and the economy that is pushing it?

SEN. COTTON: Yeah, Buck. Thanks for the question. Thanks for having Tiffany on as well. Tiffany is a great candidate.

CLAY: She has been fantastic.

SEN. COTTON: I’ve been behind her from the very beginning, early last year when she and her husband, Scotty Smiley, came to see me and I’ve been encouraging her. I encourage her run. I’ve been backing her for over a year now. I’ll be out on the campaign trail with her in Washington later this week. I think she’s going to beat Patty Murray, who is a failed 30-year politician —

BUCK: Wow.

SEN. COTTON: — who has no solutions and no answers. And, in fact, is part of the cause for the record-high inflation that Washington staters are suffering for the crime and the drugs and the homelessness that makes the areas in Seattle to Tacoma and the Puget Sound almost unlivable for families with young children, for the wide-open border that has brought so much of those drugs into our communities. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Joe O’Dea win in Colorado. I was with Joe on the campaign trail last month. Joe is a great up-from-the-bootstraps American success story, working as a carpenter to build his own construction company.

Michael Bennet has not only been a rubberstamp for Joe Biden, but he himself has been a driver of the inflation. He was the champion in the big stimulus bill last year of sending out welfare checks to all Americans, even prisoners, which all the Democrats voted for without any connection to work. Again, as I make the point in my book, Only the Strong, what you see with our wide-open border, what you see with these record inflation numbers, weakening our military is not an accident. It’s not bad luck for the Democrats. It’s what they intended to accomplish. I mean, Joe Biden said he was going to ban fossil fuels. We shouldn’t be surprised to see gas at almost $4 a gallon. The American people can see these things. They want to put the brakes on the Democrats ideological agenda and that’s what they’re going to do in a week.

CLAY: Okay, Senator Cotton, we got Christine Drazan who’s running and we believe going to win the Oregon governor’s race as a Republican for the first time since the 1980s. You just mentioned Tiffany Smiley, who’s going to be on with us tomorrow. We’ve had her on a couple of times already, that you think she’s going to win in Washington. What does it say that both of these women are capable of winning Washington and Oregon — among the bluest of the blue states — as Republican moms, running basically on a platform of sanity about how far left-wing Democrats have truly gone, that even they’re base states, which I think it’s fair to say Washington and Oregon, are now open to Republican arguments.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah, and I would add, another surprising race to many observers is the New York governor’s race. I’m calling up Lee Zeldin is going to beat Kathy Hochul there.

CLAY: Yeah. So Amy Sheldon is going to weigh in as well.

BUCK: Amen.

SEN. COTTON: Yes, I do. And I believe that because the Democrats have put their ideology ahead of the concrete material interests of normal Americans. As I write about in Only the Strong, this goes back 100 years to the Progressive movement and really its founder and patron saint, Woodrow Wilson, that they put ideology above things like stable prices and better jobs and sound education, safe streets, secure borders, a strong military to win wars. We have to fight them, hopefully, to deter them from happening in the first place.

And in a state like New York or Washington, Oregon, you know, as I’ve told some of our candidates, you know, you can’t just run a partisan campaign because there aren’t enough Republicans to win. It’s like Glenn Youngkin ran last year in Virginia. It’s a campaign that’s focused on the common sense aspirations, needs and interests of normal Americans. The American people have a sound head on their shoulders. They are not ideologues, unlike the progressive left in America today. And they don’t want leaders who put their own ideology ahead of their interests. And that’s exactly what you’re going to see in places like Washington and Oregon and New York to say nothing of slightly more Republican states.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Senator Tom Cotton and, Senator, to that end, I’m wondering for anybody — and we’ve got a reach into all 50 states here. We’ve got stations or people listening in all the competitive races right now. For anyone who’s sitting around there thinking, “Am I am I going to get up? Am I going to vote? Who am I going to vote for?” If they still have any questions in their head whatsoever about, let’s just say, in these Senate races that are very close. What is a 52 or 53 seat Republican Senate majority mean for the next two years?

SEN. COTTON: Well, the simplest and fastest accomplishment will be that we put the brakes on the Democrats ideological agenda. The reason we have 13% inflation since Joe Biden took office is the Democrats have spent trillions of dollars that we don’t have and the economy didn’t need. All that stops when we win this election and take power in January. We can also use Congress’s spending power to make some incremental gains to help reduce inflation, to help get people back to work, hopefully to forestall or weaken the intensity of a recession that Joe Biden’s inflation may be causing right now.

To insist that Joe Biden take more steps to secure our border. You know, when I was in the Senate the first two years, in the last two years of the Obama presidency, we were able to use the spending power for some such accomplishments, like, for instance, lifting the ban on exporting of oil, which only helped us produce more oil here in America, since we could now sell it all around the world. A third thing is that we’re going to use our oversight power to get to the bottom of exactly what the Biden administration has been doing to abuse its power.

Why, for instance, is the FBI conducting raids against pro-life activists for the grave sin and crime of singing hymns in front of abortion clinics, while pregnancy crisis centers are being vandalized and even firebombed in some cases, yet there’s never been an arrest on them? You know, what’s the administration proposing to do with these 87,000 new IRS agents? What exactly have they been up to in the Department of Justice persecuting parents who have the audacity to go to school boards to speak up on behalf of their kids’ education? I promise thoroughgoing, probing inquiries into the abuses of the Biden administration. Those are just a few things that you can expect if you vote Republican, and I’d urge you all to get out and vote in the next seven days.

CLAY: No doubt. Last question for you, Senator Cotton. You wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, which I agreed with at the time it was published, that we needed to get our riots in that summer of 2020 under control. And that might involve bringing out the National Guard to help patrol city streets and get places back to normal. I believe I got this correct. The executive editor of the New York Times editorial page lost his job over that article even being published. The Washington Post — I’m sure you saw this; I haven’t seen a response, but the Washington Post — 2-1/2 years later came out and said (summarized), “Oh, that was wrong. That shouldn’t have happened.” What does it say about left-wing cowardice that it took 2-1/2 years for anybody to even stand up for the belief that your opinion was valid and should be able to be shared?

SEN. COTTON: Yeah. And you know, that Washington Post story said, “We knew it was wrong at the time. We simply didn’t say it at the time because we were scared.” I think that’s the exact language: Scared of their own readers and subscribers, scared of their left-wing workforce. Just like The New York Times had a woke rebellion among the little social justice warriors working there. I think the bigger question is, what are they suppressing now? What information are they not sharing? What are they trying to censor?

And I touch on this in Only the Strong. This is part of the progressive left playbook going back to Woodrow Wilson 100 years ago, rather than engage in a debate on the merits and then try to subject to the state legislative votes or ultimately the ballot box, the left would prefer to censor information with which it doesn’t agree. You know, that was one example from 2020 about the riots in the summer. Remember, in early 2020, I also said, “You know, I don’t think this coronavirus came from a market, Wuhan. I think it probably came from these laboratories,” and we should at least examine the question.”

CLAY: Yep.

SEN. COTTON: And again, I was condemned as a conspiracy theorist, and then I was probably fomenting racism and nativism and xenophobia — or later in the election, about this time of year when Big Tech censored the New York Post and refused to allow people to share stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Well, two years later, we know that both of those are true. You know, Hunter Biden’s laptop definitely is real, and most normal people with common sense think that this virus came from those labs. Yet the Democrats still want to censor any opinion that goes against their left-wing perspective.

So if you think, for instance, that maybe a healthy teenage boy shouldn’t get the coronavirus vaccine, or a healthy teenage girl shouldn’t have a double mastectomy, or that maybe there were irregularities that we should examine and certainly not repeat in this election from the last election, or that climate change — while real — could be better handled with more fossil fuel production and more innovation and more economic prosperity? Rather than engage those on their own terms, the progressive left simply tries to censor them, and this is part of their playbook going back 100 years, as I explained, in Only the Strong.

BUCK: The book is Only the Strong. Senator Tom Cotton, appreciate you being with us.

SEN. COTTON: Thanks, gentlemen! It’s been fun.