Neocon Tom Cotton Set to Get Terrifying New Role in Senate
Senator Tom Cotton will be gaining a lot more power in the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments.
On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Trump will appoint Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, allowing Cotton to move up and become chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as Republicans take control of the Senate.
Cotton was initially reportedly in the running to be Trump’s vice president, but ultimately was passed over in favor of his Senate colleague JD Vance. If he does take over the Senate Intelligence Committee, he will bring his record of foreign policy hawkishness and support for violent solutions with him.
Before his political career began, Cotton called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information, and in the Senate, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran.
In 2020, the Arkansas senator called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Later that year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Recently, Cotton has made headlines for again calling for the military to be used against protesters, this time against opponents of Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, which he staunchly supports.
As the Intelligence Committee chair, we can expect more sound bites like his racist badgering of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in January, where he repeatedly asked the Singaporean social media executive if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignored Chew’s protests about his actual place of birth.
Cotton’s support of military force against Americans probably endears him to Trump, who has also called for military force against his domestic enemies. The Arkansas senator will also be pushing to use the full force of America’s intelligence apparatus against Americans he disagrees with. Cotton and Trump will very likely be working together to stamp out any dissent, especially if Congress grants the presidency unprecedented new powers.
