On Sunday, January 3, 2021, at 10:09 p.m., a political hand grenade exploded in my inbox. In a carefully crafted 327- word statement, Tom Cotton announced that he would support the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory when Congress met in joint session on Wednesday, January 6. The senator would vote against any objections.
Trump, in a last-ditch attempt to overturn the 2020 election, had issued a clarion call for Republicans to object to state-certified electoral votes from six swing states that had voted narrowly for Biden, delivering him the presidency. The majority of Republicans in the House, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise—or was it the other way around?—answered the call. In the Senate, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, whip-smart constitutional lawyers both, did the same. Between the two of them, they managed to recruit about a dozen Senate Republicans to join them.
Cotton, stunningly, gave Trump the Heisman. It was not a spur-of-the-moment calculation. For weeks leading up to the January 6 vote, Trump had ratcheted up conspiratorial claims that the election would be stolen. It was a fantastical sundae, cooked up by Trump’s calamitous legal team and served up by the president to the rank-and-file voters who backed him. The cherry on top was Trump’s assertion that Congress, and Vice President Mike Pence, were empowered by the Constitution to sidestep the Electoral College and install the losing candidate as president. In the midst of all this, Cotton, in league with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was maneuvering behind the scenes to derail the outgoing president’s effort to remain in office, and marginalize those Republicans who were abetting him.
From the inception of Trump the politician, Cotton exhibited an understanding of the future president’s psychological peculiarities, and an intuitive grasp of the fervor he inspired among his MAGA fan base. For Trump, all politics was, and still is, intensely personal. More than commitment to the agenda that revved up so many of his loyal voters early on—the border wall, the Muslim ban, trade protectionism—Trump valued deference to himself. Treat Trump “nice”—a word he used ubiquitously in tweets and interviews—and he was happy with you. Likewise, treat Trump “nice,” and his legion of grassroots supporters were happy with you, too.
And so from the earliest days of Trump’s first campaign, amid the occasional policy disagreement or reluctance to follow Trump down the road of this or that issue, Cotton courted Trump personally and avoided breaking with him politically. In July 2015, roughly one month after Trump entered the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the Arkansas Republican Party invited the upstart candidate to headline its big annual “Reagan-Rockefeller” fundraising dinner in Hot Springs. As it turns out, Cotton couldn’t make it; he was scheduled to travel to Europe with Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo. (Today, Cotton and Pompeo are budding rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, but back in 2015, they were simply close friends who collaborated on foreign-policy matters.) Aware that Trump might interpret his absence as a personal snub, Cotton telephoned him in advance to explain. The senator reassured Trump that his trip abroad was not one of those convenient tricks politicians use to avoid politically uncomfortable situations, nor was it a silent protest against the Arkansas GOP’s decision to tap Trump to keynote the Reagan-Rockefeller dinner. Cotton told the seemingly longshot presidential contender that he was glad the party asked him to headline the event and pleased he’d agreed to it. It was their first conversation.
Trump, satisfied, talked Cotton’s ear off about Iran and immigration. He praised the senator for his hardline opposition to the Iran deal and made mention, approvingly, of their shared approach to immigration policy. But just in case, to buy a little insurance, Cotton told Trump that he was sending his parents to the fundraising gala as proxies. From then on, whenever they talked, Trump would ask the senator about his parents.
For the next five and a half years, through scandal and controversy and tweets, Cotton navigated the Trumpian minefield in much the same way. He worked proactively to preserve their rapport, and by extension, to preserve his connection with the potent movement of voters Trump had inspired, encouraging the president to attack Iran and aggressively siding with Trump and police during a historic wave of racial-justice protests. His strategy worked—until it didn’t.
In the weeks after the 2020 election, as Trump’s aggressive, multistate effort to overturn his defeat foundered in court after court, the outgoing president and his supporters zeroed in on a new remedy: overturning the Electoral College. To say that Cotton was not swayed by Trump’s theory of the case is an understatement. But as is his habit, he wanted to be thorough. In early December, Cotton directed legislative aides on his Senate staff to research the matter extensively and prepare an exhaustive memorandum. As the senator suspected, it made plain that the Constitution had not, in fact, built in a secret back door for Congress or the vice president to invalidate presidential election results. In mid-December, after the states had certified their results and the Electoral College had voted, Cotton read in McConnell. Together, they plotted to countermand Trump’s bid to overturn the election and neutralize interest in objecting to Biden’s victory that was developing in some quarters of the Republican conference.
The majority leader had stubbornly refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory, or to refer to his former Senate colleague as president-elect, prior to the December 14 Electoral College vote. McConnell insisted that Trump’s legal challenges were a normal part of the process and that the results would not be set in stone until then. Once things were official according to that standard, McConnell declared the election decided and congratulated Biden. It was at this point that he moved aggressively, and very openly, to discourage Republicans from objecting to the electoral count.
Publicly, Cotton remained noncommittal, worried that Republican infighting could tank the party’s chances in two January 5 runoff elections in Georgia that would determine the balance of power in the Senate. So even as he privately counseled colleagues to follow the majority leader’s prompts and ignore Trump’s pleadings, he urged that they all keep their powder dry until January 6 to avoid an intra-party row that might blow up in their faces in Georgia.
That was Cotton’s original strategy: say nothing until the 6th. That morning, in an op-ed the senator planned to publish in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he would argue that objections to state-certified electoral votes were unconstitutional and threatened the viability of the Electoral College, and declare his intent to support certification.
But Cotton’s strategy was derailed. On December 30, Hawley became the first fly in the ointment. Despite harboring little desire to run for president, the young, intellectual populist is often mentioned as a 2024 contender because of his telegenic looks, Ivy League pedigree, and attempts to channel Trumpism into a coherent ideological framework and tangible legislative agenda. One week before certification, Hawley announced that he would object. He singled out Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes but signaled he might try to throw out votes from several more states.
A few days later, on January 2, Ted Cruz one-upped Hawley. The Texas Republican, a traditional Reagan conservative with a combative streak, was runner-up for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 and is almost assuredly running again in 2024. Rather than act as a lone gunman, Cruz brought reinforcements, announcing plans to object to Biden’s Electoral College victory with the backing of 10 Senate colleagues. Rather than target one state’s results, Cruz and his crew would seek to block half a dozen, making the baseless claim that they were not “lawfully given” or “legally certified.” They were also pushing a detailed plan to delay certification while an audit was conducted by a government-appointed panel.
With 25 percent of the Senate Republican Conference now on record as planning to object, what started out as a trickle with Hawley threatened to become a flood as members worried how they would explain to voters in the next GOP primary that they had abandoned Trump in his most desperate hour. The lame duck president had already threatened John Thune, the Republican whip and No. 2 senator in the conference behind McConnell. When reporters started peppering Senate Republicans with questions about whether they would bow to Trump’s demands, Thune, who for four years offered nary a criticism of the president, responded bluntly that there was no basis for Congress to toss Biden’s victory and that objection efforts would fail “like a dog.”
Trump responded swiftly, vowing on Twitter to back any South Dakota Republican who challenges Thune in 2022. With momentum building, Cotton reevaluated. He hopped on the phone with McConnell, and the two mulled strategic options for undercutting what they feared would be a “bandwagon effect” in favor of objecting. After some discussion, McConnell urged Cotton to speed up his timeline for announcing his opposition. The majority leader had been aggressively whipping the issue. But he believed that Cotton, with his conservative bona fides and reputation as a Trump loyalist, might be more effective at talking teetering Senate Republicans off the ledge by providing cover to those who privately wanted to stand behind the certification of Biden’s victory but feared the consequences back home.