Tom Cotton stands a better chance of becoming Senate majority leader than a Republican presidential nominee. After all, with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Arkansas senator worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election – an unforgivable sin in Trumpworld.
Cotton branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he previously affixed to those who rioted amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd.
In 2022, Cotton mulled a presidential run, taking multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. He never announced and Trump again claimed the prize. Cotton’s dream may never die but for now he is chair of the Senate intelligence committee and the third-ranking Republican in the upper chamber – not a bad perch from which to publish his latest book.
With Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton seeks to shine a light on a major threat to US interests. In the process, he gingerly steps on Trump’s toes; trashes Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk; and repeatedly dings TikTok, which is owned by China but also by Jeff Yass, a professional investor and a convert of convenience to Trump’s cause. Cotton may come to regret all three moves as missteps.
He obliquely criticizes Trump regarding Chinese investment in US educational institutions. “A senior Chinese Communist purchased New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater, and then appointed several of his Chinese associates to its board of trustees,” Cotton writes. That sale was finalized in 2015. “The Department of Defense has granted the academy hundreds of thousands of dollars since its Chinese takeover,” Cotton adds. Federal records show such grants made during Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021.
Elsewhere, the senator slams Musk for “chasing Chinese dollars”. For 2024, Tesla reported revenues from China of $20.94bn.
On top of being the driving force of Trump’s evisceration of the federal government, via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is chief executive of companies including Tesla and SpaceX, which in turn owns Starlink internet. In such roles, Cotton writes, “Musk told China’s state television, ‘I’m very confident that the future of China is going to be great and that China is headed towards being the biggest economy in the world and a lot of prosperity in the future.’” This hardly sounds like “America first” or “Make America great again”.
Cotton groups Musk with American “tech titans” he views as putting profit ahead of the national interest, including the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta. Collectively, writes Cotton, they have “shamefully supplicated China’s Communist rulers”.
But the senator reserves a special place in hell for TikTok.
“No social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok,” he declares. “If your kid uses TikTok, I urge you to stop reading now and immediately delete the account.”
Here, Trump and Cotton are no longer on the same page. In 2020, Trump branded TikTok a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment. But now money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest.
For starters, there is Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass is also a key funder of the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed and libertarian-minded tax-exempt organization. Trump met with him late last winter. His thinking on TikTok changed. As it happens, Yass hasn’t donated to Cotton since 2013.
Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and ByteDance, a move Cotton openly criticized. On taking office, Trump imposed a 75-day moratorium on the deadline, under US law, for ByteDance to find a US buyer. At the inauguration, Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, sat alongside Tulsi Gabbard, now director of national intelligence.
Cotton has bitten his lip. “Our point in passing that law,” he told Fox News, was not to ban TikTok in the US. Rather, it was to compel ByteDance to divest, and ostensibly have a “TikTok that is not influenced by Chinese communists”. For the moment, TikTok remains in such control.
In his book, Cotton urges Americans to shun “avoid other Chinese apps like Temu, Alibaba, Shein, WeChat, and Alipay. A few dollars savings or a little extra convenience isn’t worth the threat to your family’s privacy and data security or the indirect help these apps provide to the Chinese communists.” Talk about timing.
Kash Patel, the new FBI director, is an investor in Elite Depot, Shein’s corporate parent. The Wall Street Journal blared: “Trump’s FBI Pick Stands to Make Millions From Fashion Brand Shein … Critics question potential conflicts of interest in owning shares of [a] foreign company with China ties.” Patel values his Elite Depot stock between $1m and $5m.
Cotton voted to confirm. “Congratulations, FBI Director Patel!” he posted. “America will be safer and more secure with Kash leading the FBI.”
Trump has helped Shein and Temu, mail-order retailers, stay great. Initially, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports and closed the “de minimis” loophole, which had enabled packages from China valued at less than $800 to be processed duty-free. Then Trump reversed himself. The loophole stood.
As for data security and privacy, so close to Cotton’s heart? Musk and the boys of Doge are hoovering that stuff up as you read.
Cotton remains a China hawk and an economic nationalist, but is no longer a darling of Trumpworld. In the run-up to the vote to confirm Gabbard as DNI, Cotton and John Thune, the Senate’s majority leader, received a stern warning from Matt Boyle of Breitbart, a Trump-adjacent media organ.
“They will be heroes assuming they usher Tulsi to confirmation but if Tulsi is not confirmed then Cotton and Thune are in deep personal trouble with the base. I’m optimistic on this one at this point. The consequences of failure are too dire.”
Love is conditional. Cotton lives to fight another day.
Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is published in the US by HarperCollins
