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Sen. Tom Cotton and his son
Gabriel, 2, attend a Senate Armed
Services Committee last April 27.
Kids were on the Hill for Take Our
Daughters and Sons to Work Day.
Trump’s election might have surprised many Americans, but Cotton
was not one of them.
“Donald Trump saw some things that pretty much every other candidate
did not see, whether it was on the Republican stage or against
Hillary Clinton,” Cotton said. “He understood that many Americans
had grown increasingly alienated from the establishment in both parties.
They had gotten a lot of things wrong on immigration, trying to consistently
grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, trying to expand legal immigration
at a time when so many people were out of work or hadn’t had
an increase in their weekly take-home pay.” On terrorism, he saw more
and more threats in the United States and in Europe and realized “there’s
too much political correctness or too great a willingness to accept those
threats as a new normal, a kind of a new, ordinary course of business for
our national life. If there’s anything you can say about Donald Trump, it’s
that he doesn’t do business in a traditional way.”
But with partisanship reigning strong in Congress, can a Republican
president move the needle?
“The Democrats on Capitol Hill are still reconciling themselves to
Donald Trump’s victory, I can tell you that,” Cotton said. “So, it is highly
partisan right now. My suggestion to them is they acknowledge that Donald
Trump won, and learn the right lessons from Hillary Clinton’s failure,
but in the meantime, try to work together where we agree to move the
country forward. There’s no reason why Republicans and Democrats
can’t agree, for instance, to increase our defense budget or can’t work
together to reform job training. There’s no reason we can’t work together
to reform legal immigration to ensure we’re getting the very best, highly
skilled, well-educated immigrants, which we need in this country, and
not, you know, the flow of unskilled and low-skilled immigrants that are
hurting working class wages.”
Is it a matter of ego that Democrats seemingly aren’t willing to work
closely with Republicans?
“I think they’re still so shocked that Donald Trump won, and I think
Donald Trump gets under their skin in so many ways, including his policies,
his rhetoric, his tone and his style,” Cotton said. “The Democrats
have a hard time accepting that he’s president, I will simply say. And
I understand. I was disappointed when Mitt Romney lost in 2012, but
the American people spoke. They elected Barack Obama. I opposed him
where I had to, and I tried to get his support where I could. I have the
same approach with Donald Trump. I support him where I agree and I
try to change his mind where we don’t. Of course, I happen to agree with
Donald Trump a lot more than Democrats do. The shoe was on the other
foot under Barack Obama, but you didn’t see the kind of immediate and
almost uniform opposition to Barack Obama in 2009-2010 that you saw in
the early days of the Trump administration.”
Cotton is a frequent guest on news shows, and as such, people are
perking up to his wit and wisdom.
He’s candid about any topic you want to discuss with him.
During the interview, he tied trucking to the infrastructure.
“Right now, we’re working on the details of the infrastructure,” Cotton
said. “The Congress will obviously put its own stamp on any infrastructure
plan, but it’s good for the administration, through the White
House and Department of Transportation and some of the other agencies
and departments, to work hand-in-glove with Congress. This is another
example of how we could get bipartisan support in Congress. You typically
do on infrastructure bills and I hope we can. It may not be something
that happens in 2017, given our crowded agenda, but I do think it’s
something that can happen in the first half of 2018.”
Trucks, of course, are among the biggest users of the infrastructure.
“Trucking is a vital industry. I mean, you can go into any store in
almost any town across Arkansas, across this country, and much if not a
majority, of what you find there at one point or another was on a truck,
whether it was a long-haul truck or a short-haul. So, the trucking industry
is vital for our economy. It’s also vital for our workforce. Millions of
Americans make their living through the trucking industry, and that’s
one reason why it’s so important that associations like yours represent
them to elected representatives and to the American people so they are
reminded of just how essential trucking is to our society.”
Trucking is high among the industries that believe there are far too
many federal regulations and that the country is overregulated, especially
after the Obama administration.
“That’s one of the big successes, I would say, in the opening days of
the Trump administration, following the Obama administration, is that
we’ve either through congressional action or through the president’s
executive action, repealed dozens of regulations that have an impact in
sums of tens of billions of dollars on our economy. There’s a lot left to
be done. We should try to permanently reform our regulatory policy so a
future administration can’t impose such big costs on our economy again.
I think one of the untold stories of the early days of the Trump administration
is the effort at regulatory reform.”
So, these are the words of Tom Cotton barely two years into his sixyear
term and now a frequent guest on network news programs and
Sunday talk shows.
He’s gaining notoriety throughout the country.
In just over two years from now, the presidential race will heat up
again, and Cotton has already campaigned in Iowa, declaring Americans
“ready for that new beginning” there recently, walking a delicate path
by raising his national political profile at a time of turmoil for Trump’s
White House.
To which he will only say, “I am looking forward to running for reelection
in 2020 if the people of Arkansas will send me back to the Senate.”
TCA 2017 www.Truckload.org | Truckload Authority 27