Politically speaking, Cotton had plenty of room to lay into Trump had he wanted to do so. Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson took a strong stand against Trump days before the state’s March 1 primary, in which Trump would go on narrowly to defeat Cruz. “It is up to Arkansas to stop the Donald Trump show,” Hutchinson said in late February. “The next generation of conservatives cannot allow Donald Trump to take everything we stand for and throw it away.”
“Cotton knows just as much as Sasse how bad Trump is,” says a Republican operative close to both men. “Cotton is being a little more political than he ought to be, but part of that is that in Arkansas, Trump is actually a fairly good fit among Republicans, and the Clintons are very poisonous.”
Thus, Cotton has conspicuously declined to join in any of the hand-wringing that other Republican lawmakers have engaged in about whether to support Trump, and has played no role in the search for a third-party candidate. “I think Cotton has been more realistic in that Republican voters chose the nominee and not the other way around,” says a top Republican Senate aide.
He made it clear early on that the businessman would have his support if he won the nomination. “Well, I think he could be the commander in chief. He’s one of our leading candidates, and as I said, any of our candidates right now would be a better commander in chief” than Hillary Clinton, Cotton said in March, when the primary contest was still underway. “They’d be a more serious leader for our country than Hillary Clinton.”
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