The junior senator from Arkansas is a hybrid of insurgent and old guard.
At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate
.. when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.”
.. It was, on one level, a breathtaking leap—to equate mockery of a louche New York billionaire with attacks on the citizens of this small, conservative city, which lies across the Arkansas River from Oklahoma.
.. “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism.
.. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose term is not up until 2020, said that, by threatening journalists, Trump was violating his oath to defend the Constitution.
.. “The President puts things sometimes in a way that I would not,” he said in early October. “But he was still nominated by our voters and elected by the American people to be our President, and if we want him to accomplish our agenda we need to set him up for success.”
.. From the beginning, Tom could play to both the establishment and the Tea Party. Everyone recognizes he’s got a firm set of conservative principles, but that makes him a polarizing figure. There are a lot of people here, too, who hate him and think he’s the Antichrist. The only thing everyone agrees on is that he wants to be President someday.”
.. To make that next leap, Cotton expresses the militarism, bellicosity, intolerance, and xenophobia of Donald Trump, but without the childish tweets.
.. He and his supporters see Trump and Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party.
.. He was the one who told us about John Kelly,” the former Marine Corps general who is now Trump’s chief of staff
.. after Cotton spoke out against a quick deal to protect the Dreamers, Trump made a formal proposal to Congress that attached many strings Cotton had demanded.
.. Trump gave Cotton a victory on the touchstone issue of his Senate career by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-arms deal
.. “Putting aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it’s clear that the agreement is not in our national interest.”
.. “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees you drive him to the ground and choke him out.” In response, a questioner pointed out that killing a prisoner of war is not “American practice.” (It is, in fact, a war crime.)
.. in North Korea, Cotton supports Trump’s brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un
.. one recent report suggested that the President would name him director of the C.I.A. if Mike Pompeo, the current director, were to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
.. Cotton would ratify the President’s instincts. He offers Trump a certainty that matches his own
.. “The Democratic Party has drifted away from them,” Tom told me, as his parents sat nearby. “Bill Clinton would be repudiated by his own party today.
.. I wrote against sacred cows, such as the cult of diversity, affirmative action, conspicuous compassion and radical participatory democracy. I wrote in favor of taboo notions, such as Promise Keepers, student apathy, honor and (most unforgivably) conservativism.”
.. The letter combined outrage, overstatement, and savvy politics in a manner that Trump would perfect a decade later.
.. “ ‘God, guns, and gays’—social issues—were driving white conservatives to the Republicans all along
.. It is impossible not to see race as a central element in the fall of the Democratic Party here
.. “It took a black President to bring out the threat.”
.. “I would always say to my liberal white friends, ‘Oh, come on, surely it’s gotten better.’ And they’d say to me, ‘Oh, no, it hasn’t. You can’t believe what white people say about Obama in private—he’s Kenyan, he’s Muslim, they’d call him unprintable racial epithets.’ ”
.. I think a lot of people in Arkansas thought he was ‘uppity,’ to use the old smear.”
.. Cotton also benefitted from enormous outside spending by conservative groups, including some affiliated with the Koch brothers
.. outside groups spent twenty-three million dollars for Cotton, compared with fourteen million for Pryor.
.. Democrats in Arkansas had a special reason to disdain Obama: “It wasn’t because Barack Obama was black, it was because Barack Obama stopped the Clinton restoration.”
.. About three hundred thousand people, which amounts to more than ten per cent of the state’s population, have taken advantage of the law to obtain health insurance.
.. The program is not called Obamacare but, rather, Arkansas Works.
.. “If you live in a big city and you work in an office building, immigration is almost an unalloyed good for you. . . . It makes the price of services that you pay for a little bit more affordable—whether it’s your nanny to take care of your kids for you, or landscaping your yard, or pedicures, manicures, that sort of thing. And you get a lot of exciting new fusion restaurants as well.
“But if you live and work in a community where they have a large illegal-immigrant population
- that’s straining the public school,
- that’s clogging up the emergency room when you’re trying to get care,
- that makes it more dangerous to drive in the roads because people don’t have driver’s licenses or they don’t have insurance,
- or if they are bidding down the wages or even taking jobs away from you, then it doesn’t look nearly so good,”
.. Most economists believe that immigrants, legal and otherwise, add more to the economy than they take from it, and that their presence in the labor force does not lead to lower wages over all.
.. “He probably knows more about geopolitics than most senators.”
.. In March of his first year in the Senate, Cotton wrote an open letter to the “Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which was co-signed by forty-six other Republican senators, warning the mullahs that Congress might undo any agreement they reached with Obama. The letter was denounced by Executive Branch officials as an attempt to interfere in a diplomatic initiative, but Cotton regards it as a triumph.
.. he boasted about the letter
.. You simply cannot neglect security, and without security there cannot be political compromise and reconciliation, there cannot be good governance, there cannot be economic development, there can’t be anything.”
.. If Rand Paul is the leading Republican isolationist in the Senate, Cotton, in short order, has become heir to the opposing wing of the Party, the one associated with Senator John McCain, whose efforts to increase the defense budget Cotton has championed.
.. But Cotton has gone well past McCain in his swaggering belligerence.
.. “In my opinion, the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now,” Cotton said. “We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don’t do that they can rot in Guantánamo Bay.”
.. skirted the edge of demagoguery. “I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do,”
.. Cotton made his name in the Senate in a more personally poisonous way. In his first year, Cotton placed a hold on Obama’s nominations for the Ambassadors to Sweden, Norway, and the Bahamas, because of an unrelated dispute regarding the Secret Service.
.. “There is a point where winning a political battle isn’t worth it.”
.. “How many guys in town can give a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations and also get kudos in the pages of Breitbart? The answer is, one guy.”
.. Cotton has carved out a clear Trumpism-without-Trump agenda:
- limits on immigration through legislation,
- deportations, and a wall;
- longer prison sentences for American convicts and suspected terrorists abroad;
- a bigger budget for the Department of Defense.
.. The question is whether he has the charisma to sell that agenda to a broader public.
George W. Bush comes out of retirement to deliver a veiled rebuke of Trump
Bush offered a blunt assessment of a political system corrupted by “conspiracy theories and outright fabrication” in which nationalism has been “distorted into nativism.”
.. “Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone and provides permission for cruelty and bigotry. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”
.. Just hours after Bush completed his speech, Obama also made a veiled critique of the Trump era, calling on Democrats at a New Jersey campaign event to “send a message to the world that we are rejecting a politics of division, we are rejecting a politics of fear.”
.. That Trump’s two most recent predecessors felt liberated, or perhaps compelled, to reenter the political arena in a manner that offered an implicit criticism of him is virtually unprecedented in modern politics, historians said.
.. George W. Bush was taking aim at Trump’s “roiling of the traditional institutions of the country and, in particular, demeaning the office of the president by a kind of crude or vulgar bashing of opponents,”
.. “I think this is Bush throwing down the gauntlet and feeling that this is a man who has gone too far,” Dallek said. The discretion former presidents traditionally afforded their successors “is now sort of fading to the past because of the belligerence of Trump.”
.. McCain’s critique prompted Trump to warn him to “be careful” because he is prepared to “fight back.”
.. The common thread among Bush’s and McCain’s words was a defense of the post-World War II liberal order
- which supported strong security alliances,
- a defense of human rights and an
- open economic system of free trade
.. “The hallmark of McCain’s and Bush’s speeches was to try to re-center us on what have been, since 1945, these traditional ends,”
.. He cautioned at the time, however, that he would speak out if he saw “core values” at risk.
.. the unifying themes between Obama and Bush are “humanity and empathy towards the American public.”
.. Bush opened his remarks by speaking in both English and Spanish and noting that refugees from Afghanistan, China, North Korea and Venezuela were seated in the audience.
.. Bush also warned that “bigotry seems emboldened” in a passage that evoked the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville
.. “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed,” Bush said in a line that drew the most applause.
.. “Politics are now about discrediting people by ad hominem attacks, not by argumentation,” Cohen said. Those who opposed Bush’s wars have a fair point of view, he said, but their constant “demonization does help make it easier for Trump.”
In Las Vegas, Concert Security Met a New Threat: Aerial Assault
In Las Vegas, the gunman, Stephen Paddock, executed his killing spree from a towering window at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino — around 400 yards away from the festival site — well outside the usual security perimeter of pat-downs and metal detectors that is created for such events. He slipped the hotel’s own security apparatus, and chose an open-air target that is by definition vulnerable from a high elevation.
.. Louis Marciani, the director of the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, struggled to imagine how a similar assault might be prevented in the future. “There’s no way that any good operation would have caught that,” he said of the shooting. “We’ve now got to go back to the drawing board.”
.. even if Mandalay Bay were on high alert last weekend, snaring Mr. Paddock would most likely have required a level of screening that far exceeds current practices.
.. “You’d have to have X-ray machines and magnetometers at every single entrance,” said Mr. Adelman. “No hotel does that.”
.. But he ended the news conference with an unvarnished caveat. “We live in a world now where you cannot protect against every single threat,” he said.
Why the Equifax Breach Stings So Bad
Among the 2,000 or so enraged messages that I received after the most recent Equifax data breach, the wish that came up most often was that Richard F. Smith, the company’s chief executive, be pushed out the door.
But the messages also reflected something I had not seen before, not even after the scandals at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen, even though those companies committed similarly egregious offenses. It was a sense of helplessness, the recognition that we are at the mercy of an industry that makes money off our data, treats us with disdain and answers to no one.
.. “It’s going to dawn on people that we are defined by these descriptors, markers and measures, but we have no meaningful informational rights to them or over them,” Sarah Bloom Raskin, who served as deputy Treasury secretary during the Obama administration
.. The credit reporting industry begins with a sort of entrapment, said Amanda Steinberg, chief executive of DailyWorth, a financial website geared toward women,
.. If you want to do business with just about any financial services company, you must agree to allow it to report your payment history to the credit reporting agencies.
.. But there does not appear to be any way to step out of the system unless you can live a life completely free of the need for credit, mobile phones and many jobs (since employers often make a credit check a condition of employment).
.. Equifax persisted for days in charging many people for the privilege of freezing their credit files.
.. Richard Russell of the Bronx questioned whether Equifax might have an incentive to be casual about security so that it could turn around later and charge what amounted amounts to protection money. “Isn’t that what this credit freeze is essentially?” he asked in an email to me this week. “In many parts of the world, this would be labeled extortion.”
.. Equifax has not directly informed people who may have been affected by the breach. It could send them letters, but it has chosen not to so far.
.. Consider the revelation that the president of Equifax’s information solutions unit in the United States and its chief financial officer sold stock after the breach was discovered but before it was made public. If they knew about the break-in, they violated insider trading laws. The company says they did not know.
.. In what sort of company would Mr. Information Systems and Mr. Money not be in the loop on a problem like this? “That’s also horrifying,” said Cristi Page of San Diego. “They’re either unethical or they’re incompetent. Neither of those inspire much confidence.”