Worst Person You Know Says Trump’s Kamala Comment Makes Perfect Sense
As many other Republicans criticized Donald Trump for questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s race on Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton took a different tack and defended the former president and convicted felon.
On CNN Wednesday, Kaitlan Collins asked the Arkansas senator if Trump’s comments were defensible, and he said yes.
“Kaitlan, of course,” Cotton said. “First off, it’s refreshing to see a presidential candidate who’s willing to go in front of the media, something that Donald Trump knew would be a tough interview. It turned out to be a hostile, adversarial interview, but he’s been doing that for nine years. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has been hiding out for the 10 days that she’s been a president nominee.”
Cotton attacked Harris as a “San Francisco liberal,” saying she had not granted any interviews since President Biden stepped down from the 2024 election and endorsed her for president.
“Yeah, I didn’t hear Donald Trump bring up any of her policy positions today or stances when he was on that stage,” Collins followed up. “But your argument is that just because she hasn’t done an interview since she became the top of the ticket, that it’s OK to question what her race is?”
After saying Trump's comments about Harris were defensible, Sen. Tom Cotton repeatedly brought up her changes on policies. “How does her changing her views on policy justify having the Republican nominee questioning her race?” pic.twitter.com/sCoBGvGnsx
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 1, 2024
Cotton denied Collins’s assertion.
“Kaitlan, if you didn’t hear Donald Trump talking about her positions and his record, then you didn’t watch the interview. It went on for 30 minutes,” Cotton said.
“The vast majority of it, Kaitlan, was Donald Trump talking about his record, contrasting it to the Biden-Harris record of higher inflation and wide-open borders and war and chaos around the world,” Cotton added.
Throughout the interview, Collins tried to press Cotton to address Trump’s comments, but the Arkansas senator continued to deflect.
“We have talked about her past positions and the reversals of those,” Collins said. “And we’ve delved into all of that. That’s actually what voters care about. But when your party’s nominee is on stage telling a panel of three Black women that the first Black woman to serve as vice president hasn’t always identified as Black, how does that help your party win elections?”
“Donald Trump said that what matters is that she identifies as a dangerous San Francisco liberal. It’s not what race she identifies as,” Cotton replied.
It’s not surprising that Cotton would be one of the few senators to publicly jump to Trump’s defense, considering his own record on race. In 2020, he called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. That same year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.”
But Cotton is out of step with many of his Republican colleagues, and if he and the rest of the GOP who are defending Trump’s remarks think that the former president will emerge unscathed, they are in for a reckoning, especially considering Trump already has minuscule Black support.
