GOP Rising Star Tom Cotton Won’t Criticize Trump Over NATO Comments

Even though they represent the opposite of his worldview.

Ron Sachs/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the Senate’s leading neoconservatives who has been bouncing around the Republican National Convention this week to build his reputation for a possible future presidential run, is still standing behind Donald Trump even after the Republican nominee told the New York Times last night that he wasn’t sure if he’d honor NATO’s charter. At a Thursday event hosted by Politico and billed as “The New Republican Foreign Policy at the RNC,” Cotton nervously dodged questions related to Trump’s isolationist views on foreign policy—views that are the exact opposite of Cotton’s main policy agenda.

Cotton initially said that he hadn’t read Trump’s interview and had just heard a few snippets. But he’d clearly caught the headlines, and he quietly rebuked the ideas Trump had laid out, calling NATO “the most successful security alliance” and saying, “We need to stand behind our Article 5 guarantee of NATO with every NATO member.” But whenever he was pressed about Trump’s statements to the contrary, Cotton sidestepped by saying that Hillary Clinton was worse because she was too closely tied to the current president. “We shouldn’t just think about Donald Trump’s words,” Cotton said. “We have to look at Barack Obama’s actions as well, and Hillary Clinton’s support for those actions.”

When asked about Trump’s frequent praise of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Cotton instead chose to deride Obama for trying to reset the relationship with Russia early in his presidency—when Putin wasn’t president—and said that anything Trump says about Russia at the moment doesn’t count and would change once he gets more inside information. “I hope,” Cotton said, “that when Donald Trump begins to receive intelligence briefings of the nature that I’ve been reviewing for a year and a half on the intelligence committee, he might have a slightly different perspective on Vladimir Putin, because Vladimir Putin is not a friend of the United States.”

Cotton’s reluctance to criticize Trump over his NATO comments stood in contrast to the remarks of a speaker who preceded him. In the first part of the panel, before Cotton took the stage, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) ripped into Trump. Kinzinger has refused to endorse Trump so far, and he said Trump’s comments on NATO were “disastrous” and pushed him further from the party’s presidential candidate. “Comments like this are not only ill-informed, they’re dangerous,” he said. “I’ve actually really, to be quite blunt, have wondered why Donald Trump and his team have been seemingly so pro-Russian.”

Kinzinger continually stressed that that even if Trump doesn’t end up in charge of US foreign policy, merely having a major presidential candidate question the country’s commitment to political allies could embolden countries like Russia to take a more aggressive position. “This is not Republicanism,” he said. “I was drawn to this party partially because of foreign policy—I agree with the other tenets. But what you see right now is a candidate for president who doesn’t understand the role of America, which is to be an example of self-governance for the billions of people who don’t have it.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate