Tom Cotton Haunted by His Own Painfully Incorrect Trump 2020 Claim

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has found himself on the outside looking in at Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential vice presidential candidates. He’s taken to TV to raise his profile—which now means defending Trump’s election denial and minimizing the January 6 insurrection.

During a segment with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Cotton was shown a comment he had made in 2020 claiming that Trump pledged to accept the results of the election and commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost. When Tapper pointed out that Trump neither accepted the legitimate results of the election nor transferred power to President Biden peacefully without encouraging an insurrection, Cotton resorted to the same technicality-laden, mealymouthed nonanswer required by any GOP member hoping to stay in Trump’s good graces.

“Of course we will accept the results if the results are from fair and free elections,” Cotton said, his answer heavy with the baseless implication that the election might not be free or fair. Cotton, Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party relied on the same phrasing to cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots in the run-up to 2020 elections.

“Every candidate in any race has a right to go to court, to seek legal redress if they think there’s been any kind of fraud or cheating,” he continued. Faced with his own comments and pressed by Tapper on Trump’s continued insistence that the election had been rigged and his encouragement of the insurrection after exhausting his legal avenues, Cotton deflected, minimizing the Capitol riot and casting peaceful protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes as left-wing equivalents of January 6.

“What happened on January 6, 2021, is that there was a protest in Washington that got out of hand, and it became a riot, and as I’ve said from the very beginning, anyone who injured a law enforcement officer or committed acts of violence on January 6 at the Capitol should be prosecuted and face severe consequences, and again, that’s unlike Democrats, who won’t prosecute violent protesters, for instance, from Democratic street militias outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”

Cotton, who has previously called for the National Guard to quash protests against police brutality, remains behind Senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and J.D. Vance and Governor Doug Burgum in the race to be Trump’s running mate, according to sources close to the Republican presidential nominee. It’s no wonder, then, that he’s making the rounds on television to engage in revisionist history about the threat to democracy his party poses.

Republican Senator Tim Scott started his week off by getting brutally fact-checked about just about everything. While Scott passed the Donald Trump loyalty litmus test with flying colors, he was only able to do so because he refused to fully answer a single question he was asked during Sunday’s episode of This Week With George Stephanopolus on ABC. 

When asked about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to lift a ban on bump stocks, one which was put in place by Trump himself, Scott quickly agreed with the court’s decision, before pivoting to criticizing President Joe Biden about something entirely different.

“Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades,” said Scott. 

“Actually, senator as I—as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they’re actually down this past year,” said ABC co-host Jonathan Karl, before he attempted to go back to his Supreme Court question.

Scott, instead, refused to budge from his point that families are “trapped in their houses” every night because of spiking crime.

Just last week, the FBI released its quarterly crime report, which found that violent crime in the United States has dropped by more than 15 percent since the beginning of the year, including a 26.4 percent decrease in murder, in line with a decrease over the past two years. 

It appeared that the South Carolina Republican would rather defer to Trump’s talking points than openly agree with the court’s decision to undo his executive order. Karl then asked Scott if he would support congressional action to ban bump stocks.

“Well, I’m strongly in support of the Second Amendment,” Scott started. “But what we’re going to do in the party, and President Trump said it on Thursday, we’re going to focus—”

“I asked about the ban on bump stocks, not the Second Amendment,” Karl said, cutting Scott off again—but the senator continued undeterred, delivering a short stump speech about violence at the southern border.  

Scott continued to cement his position, not as a politician, or even a person capable of independent thought, but as a Trumpian record player, going over and over the same old tracks. 

At every turn, Scott skirted the questions being asked in order to deliver talking points for Trump. 

Karl then asked Scott how he felt about Trump’s proposal for tariffs on imported goods, which the former president raised during a meeting with House Republicans last week. Scott himself had previously criticized Trump’s approach to tariffs, but—clearly unable to own up to even the smallest defection from his beloved leader—he again pivoted to something else entirely. 

“I was in the Senate meeting. But what I can tell you he spoke about during his time with the Senate is actually exempting taxation on tips,” he said, and went on to talk about that plan, which would likely benefit hotel owners such as Trump and hurt workers in their efforts to raise the minimum wage. 

In an effort to solve the dramas surrounding its new corporate leadership, The Washington Post is returning to something that works.

The paper has tapped one of its longest serving managing editors, Cameron Barr, to lead its coverage of publisher and CEO Will Lewis’s Fleet Street scandals, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Monday. Barr had left the organization in June 2023 after serving as managing editor for 19 years but is returning on contract to oversee controversies surrounding Lewis and Rob Winnett, the paper’s new editor in chief, currently the deputy editor of Telegraph Media Group, who is due to take his position after Election Day.

Lewis was named as a central figure in a hacking cover-up at Rupert Murdoch’s News U.K. A phone-hacking lawsuit filed across the pond by attorneys for Prince Harry, Guy Ritchie, and Hugh Grant accused Lewis of “giving a green light” to erase millions of emails pertaining to the phone-hacking accusations, even after authorities had instructed the company to retain all of its records.

But Lewis has been involved in other unsavory efforts to cover emerging details of the lawsuit, as well. Earlier this month, Folkenflik reported that the British tabloid journalist had offered him an unsavory deal in a “heated” exchange: an exclusive on the Post’s health if he promised to squash a story about Lewis’s involvement in the phone-hacking lawsuit.

Lewis’s legal troubles also appeared to fuel the unceremonious departure of the Post’s editor in chief Sally Buzbee, who reportedly refused to cave to Lewis’s demands in March and May about the paper’s own coverage of his legal battles.

As it stands, Barr may be uniquely situated to translate the British scandal to American audiences: The newsroom leader left the Post to move to England with his wife last year—a return to her home country, according to Barr’s exit announcement.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media behemoth swallowing up local news stations and spitting them out as zombie GOP propaganda mills, is ramping up pro-Trump content in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Its latest plot? A coordinated effort across at least 86 local news websites to suggest that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency, based on edited footage and misinformation.

According to Judd Legum, Sinclair, which owns hundreds of television news stations around the country, has been laundering GOP talking points about Biden’s age and mental capacity into news segments of local Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. One replica online article with the headline “Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event” shares no evidence other than a spliced-together clip of Biden watching a musical performance and another edited video of Biden giving a speech originally posted on X by Sean Hannity. The article was syndicated en masse on the same day at the same time, Legum found, suggesting that editors at the local affiliates were not given the chance to vet the segment for accuracy.

Most outrageously, the article, along with at least two others posted in June, makes the evidence-free claim that Biden may have pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, based on a video of the president sitting down during the event. According to Legum, one of the article’s URLs includes the word “pooping.”

The shoddy evidence behind the segments, originally published by Sinclair’s National Desk, appears to have been lifted directly from social media posts by RNC Research, the X account operated by the Lara Trump–run Republican National Committee. On at least one occasion, a Sinclair piece quotes directly from the Trump campaign social media team’s response to an RNC Research post. “Lights are on but no one’s home,” the campaign’s reply to a post showing a “dazed” Biden watching a musical performance, was included in the syndicated article.

Sinclair’s takeover of local news is a dire development for the future of independent journalism in the United States. But the gutting of newsrooms (and the weaponization of their remnants by right-wing conglomerates) across the country isn’t just a problem for tomorrow; it’s having devastating effects on American democracy today.

Donald Trump has privately been fuming that GOP lawmakers aren’t doing enough (in his opinion) in his crusade for political vengeance following his conviction on 34 felony charges, amid his ongoing efforts to weaponize House Republicans.

Trump has been urging his close allies within the Republican Party to take up their swords for the embattled former president, who has continued to insist that his conviction is somehow the doing of President Joe Biden, Rolling Stone reported Sunday.

“I need action,” Trump told them, one source repeated to Rolling Stone.

A second source recounted to Rolling Stone that the former president had delivered an angry, profanity-laced tirade, complaining that lawmakers weren’t doing enough to punish the Biden administration for his conviction.

Since Trump’s guilty verdict, leading Trump fanboy Representative Jim Jordan has begun his own side quest against New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who led the case over Trump’s hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Jordan invited Bragg to speak before the Ohio Republican’s subcommittee on the supposed weaponization of the federal government, but apparently even that’s not enough for his beloved leader.

“[Trump] doesn’t just want Congress to defund Alvin Bragg. He thinks there needs to be a wider net cast,” the second source said.

Speaker Mike Johnson also reportedly believes the House can have a role in overturning Trump’s conviction. House Republicans have set out to devise new legislation that would allow any president or former president to move a trial from a state court to a federal court, which would allow Trump to pardon himself should he be found guilty and wind up in the White House anyway. Trump held several meetings with Republican lawmakers before the verdict even came out, pushing for any legislation to shield him from non-federal prosecutions.

While Republicans can slow things down, any GOP-backed, revenge-fueled legislation would have absolutely no shot at passing the Senate. But that’s never been the point for do-nothing Republicans, who simply wish to disrupt governance, rather than execute plans. Too bad for them, Trump wants them to actually do something this time.