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It didn’t exactly come as a surprise when Sen. Tom Cotton rallied behind Donald Trump in the wake of the former president’s latest indictment. But what struck me as interesting was how the Arkansas Republican responded to this week’s developments in Fulton County.
Here was Cotton’s pitch yesterday during an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s program:
“I understand that Democrats and liberals in the media can’t stand Donald Trump, and they’d do anything to stop him. But it would be much better from their point of view, and the point of view of the country, if they try to stop him on the campaign trail and at the ballot box, and let the American people make these choices, as opposed to having rabid zealots like Jack Smith or partisans like Alvin Bragg and the woman in Atlanta make these decisions for them, to try to take Donald Trump out of contention.”
For now, let’s put aside some of the more obvious flaws in the far-right senator’s comments. We could dwell on some of the details — it wasn't "liberals in the media" sitting on the grand juries; there’s nothing to suggest the special counsel is a “rabid zealot”; the “woman in Atlanta” has a name — but we can revisit these concerns at another time.
What’s more, let’s also brush past the highly relevant detail that indicting Trump does not actually take him “out of contention” for elected office, making the senator’s entire argument rather odd.
Instead, what stood out as especially notable was Cotton’s belief that the former president’s detractors should try to stop him “at the ballot box,” as opposed to wanting to see him held accountable in the courts for alleged crimes.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said effectively the same thing on Fox News shortly before Trump’s latest indictment was unsealed. “The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not,” the South Carolina Republican said. “This should be decided at the ballot box.”
Sen. Ted Cruz used slightly different phrasing, but the Republican pushed a very similar line during his own Fox News appearance this week. To hear the Texan tell it, Democrats only support Trump’s prosecution “because they’re afraid of the voters.”
This doesn’t have to be complicated. There are a handful of ways to hold Trump accountable for wrongdoing. He can be charged by prosecutors who’ve assembled evidence by way of a grand jury, but Republicans are against that. He can be punished by the Congress — impeachment, conviction, and being barred from office — but Republicans are against that, too.
Or Trump can be defeated by the electorate — which certainly has some appeal, though there’s one glaring problem: Americans already tried that.
As we discussed earlier in the week, it’s obviously true that in a democracy, differences are resolved at the ballot box. But — and this is the important part — when the American electorate went to ballot boxes and cast votes in 2020, Trump and his cohorts decided not to accept the results. In fact, according to evidence compiled by prosecutors across multiple jurisdictions, the outgoing president decided to try to overturn the election and put illegitimate power in the hands of the candidate who lost.
In other words, the United States tried to decide the former president’s fate at the ballot box, and Trump decided not to care. This isn’t some obscure, tangential point; it’s the foundation of the entire scandal.
Cotton and his cohorts have made the case that election results should reign supreme, but the accused felon — the one they're so eager to defend — has made clear that he doesn’t respect or accept election results he doesn’t like.
Do these Republican senators not understand this, or are they simply pretending to be obtuse?