Investment banker Warren Stephens was on the phone with Sen. Tom Cotton in January, when the Arkansas Republican gave an abrupt goodbye.
“‘I gotta go. I’ve got a meeting at the White House. This virus deal in China, we’re behind the curve on this thing,'” Stephens recounted Cotton telling him. “I said: ‘Whoa whoa whoa, what do you mean?’ ‘Cause you know at that time, it was nowhere.”
Since January, the first-term senator has warned that China was covering up the lethality of the disease and doing little to stop what became a global pandemic — taking his coronavirus concerns to President Donald Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services. He says Washington must “exact a very steep price” from China in the months to come.
So, as the rest of the Republican Party now races to condemn China as the disease’s greatest villain, Cotton finds himself with a three-month head start.
And with a series of ambitious Republican senators and governors beginning to maneuver to succeed Trump in 2024, Cotton is front and center in the debate over the GOP’s future. His emergence as the party’s fiercest China hawk could position him well regardless of Trump’s fate in November.
And as usual, the sharp-edged Cotton is taking it to the max.
“Their criminal negligence allowed what could have been a health outbreak in Wuhan to become a devastating global pandemic,” Cotton said in a telephone interview. “Their malign, deliberate actions to send the virus around the world by allowing international travel to continue in December and January represents just how little regard for human life they have.”
Cotton wants American citizens to be able to sue Chinese officials for the economic and public health fallout from the pandemic and move production of key medical supplies to the United States from China. He says he will seek to attach that legislation to upcoming must-pass coronavirus bills, which could have the Senate debating China’s culpability in a matter of weeks.
And he’s stepping up his rhetoric too, asserting that “senior leaders in Beijing made a deliberate and calculated decision” to keep air travel flowing out of China. The Chinese government, he said, “did not want to see a relative diminution of their power as against the rest of the world, especially against the United States.”
It’s vintage Cotton: Take a hard-line position early and go for the jugular in an uncompromising manner.
The senator is also playing a notable role in Congress’ coronavirus rescue efforts, serving as a vocal advocate of direct payments to Americans in previous discussions, though he now advocates a go-slow approach to the next big tranche of aid.
Regardless, the 42-year-old Arkansan has long been a young man in a hurry.
After attending Harvard and taking classes from then-law professor Elizabeth Warren, Cotton joined the Army. After he returned from service in the Middle East, Stephens recalls Cotton telling him he was going to run for the House. Stephens tried to dissuade him, arguing he was not well-known enough in the state GOP, but Cotton plunged in anyway: “My advice to him was to not do it.”
Cotton won, and just two years later, defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent to join the Senate. Now as his first term winds down, he finds himself firmly in the national mix with other high-profile Republicans vying to take the White House in 2024 or beyond.
“He’s certainly never said that to me,” said Stephens, who runs a private equity firm based in Arkansas, of whether Cotton is plotting to be president. “But, you know, he’d be a really good one.”
Cotton himself spurns talk of higher office. He says his focus is on restarting the economy, winning reelection in a race in which he has no Democratic opponent and bringing China to heel.
But targeting China is an increasingly popular position in the Republican Party, so much so that Senate Republican strategists distributed a memo advising GOP candidates to concentrate their fire on China in the battle for the Senate. Even some Democratic senators are also asking tough questions.
Cotton drew several critical headlines in February for suggesting that the virus could have come from research labs in Wuhan. Some reporting has bolstered Cotton’s statements, but there is no consensus in either the medical or political world on the matter.
Many lawmakers in both parties are careful about how closely to link Chinese labs with the virus.
“I think it is possible,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “I for one don’t know where it came from, but we certainly should find out.”
Cotton is as certain as ever.
“The presence of two different virology labs in Wuhan forces any reasonable and responsible leader to at least ask the question if the virus could have emerged in those labs,” Cotton said in the interview. “It’s not conclusive and it rarely is in the world of intelligence, but all of the evidence we have at this point points to those labs.”
Cotton spoke to Trump in January and lobbied him to ban flights to China. Now Trump cites the travel ban multiple times a day when defending his national leadership. Cotton also urged Americans to leave China and in early February warned coronavirus would likely become a pandemic, more than a month before the World Health Organization made it official.
Some critics say he could have done more.
“If you were so clever and saw that China was lying, then why did the president believe them?” said former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who served with Cotton for four years.
“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say ‘I saw it coming.’ If you saw it coming, what did you do to stop it?” she said. “It just drives me frickin’ crazy. What I’m saying is, did you write a note to yourself in your basement? Who cares if you were right. What did you do about it?”
Cotton is one of the sharpest-edged combatants in the Capitol. He led a successful effort to tank an immigration compromise Heitkamp crafted in 2018 and organized a Republican letter to Iran undermining President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement. He helped sink then-Speaker Paul Ryan’s “border adjustment tax” idea and nearly stopped a popular criminal justice reform bill from becoming law.
Yet on China issues, he’s been relatively bipartisan — working closely with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on curbing Chinese influence abroad. Schumer sometimes refers to him as “Mr. ZTE,” a reference to Cotton’s efforts to bar the Chinese telecom company from the United States.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, but it’s clear the Chinese government is keenly observing the flurry of GOP rhetoric targeting its role in the spread of the disease.
“It’s just all too obvious why some political forces in the U.S. have been obsessively attacking China using the pandemic as a weapon,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Monday. “We firmly oppose the attempts of some people in the U.S. to grab more votes and undermine China’s interests by smearing China.”
But even Republicans with wildly different dispositions than Cotton praise his early warnings on China.
“Sen. Cotton is absolutely right to point the finger at China and to make sure the world knows from where this virus came and why we collectively had a delayed response to it,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the party’s 2012 nominee. “You have to tip your cap to Sen. Cotton.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.