Feb. 12, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
19:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Well, Arkansans have asked me that from the very beginning. | ||
| They want to know who's really in charge. | ||
| And my consistent answer has been obviously Joe Biden is in charge because no one could screw things up as badly as Joe Biden has. | ||
| And I think the best case in point of that is the Afghanistan fiasco in 2021. | ||
| I have it on pretty good authority that most of Joe Biden's senior aides and cabinet secretaries recommended against that course of action. | ||
| But he's had a chip on his shoulder about Afghanistan going back to his early days as vice president when Barack Obama disregarded his advice, which was to do the same thing in 2009 that he ultimately did in 2021, went with the advice that President Obama modified somewhat of the general in command there, Stan McChrystal and Dave Petraeus. | ||
| And for 12 years, he wanted to prove everyone, to include Barack Obama, that he was right and they were all wrong. | ||
| and you saw what that got us. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, Senator Tom Cotton, this is our first time sitting down in person. | |
| I just read a long Twitter thread that you put out about this border thing. | ||
| Now, we're holding this interview for a couple of days, so we shall see what happens. | ||
| But I think it's fair to say you're not thrilled with this bipartisan affair. | ||
| Yeah, I don't support the legislation because I don't think it's going to solve the crisis at our border. | ||
| This is a man-made crisis, and the man who made it is Joe Biden. | ||
| When Joe Biden took office, the border was basically closed. | ||
| And even before the pandemic, President Trump had essentially closed the border using existing authorities. | ||
| Joe Biden made a conscious decision in 2020 to basically invite the entire world to cross our border illegally. | ||
| And then he implemented that decision from the first day in office. | ||
| He has the power to reverse those decisions. | ||
| Now, we didn't think he would, which is why we wanted to at least take a stab at seeing what the Democrats would offer for border security. | ||
| We've seen their offer. | ||
| It's just not good enough. | ||
| It wouldn't actually solve the problem at our southern border. | ||
| In some ways, it might actually make it worse in the way it expands the availability of work permits for migrants who come here, which is obviously a magnet for more migrants coming here. | ||
| And in the way it also gives a lot of discretion to Alejandro Mayorkas and Joe Biden. | ||
| The problem we have is they're already abusing their discretion, in some cases, in my opinion, breaking the law. | ||
| So the offer the Democrats have made is simply not good enough. | ||
| And I think we'll have to hope that Joe Biden gets scared straight by his polling numbers and takes steps that he already has under existing law to shut down the border. | ||
| And if he doesn't do that, once we win in November, then President Trump can shut it down next January. | ||
| Is that the real weird situation that we're in right now? | ||
| That for basically a year, the Democrats and the mainstream media have been saying there is no crisis. | ||
| Then finally enough people started seeing these videos of all of the thousands of people wandering through. | ||
| Now they're acknowledging there's a problem. | ||
| And in essence, like you can only do in DC, the answer is more laws to do things that we already have laws about. | ||
| And I think some of this is just Joe Biden and the Democrats trying to shift blame for his failures. | ||
| Everyone knows that the crisis we have at our Southern border is the result of Joe Biden. | ||
| He decided to open the border. | ||
| He decided to abuse his discretion, in some cases, break the law. | ||
| He's the one that's created incentives to have people not just from, say, Mexico and Guatemala, but from Ghana and Uzbekistan coming to America via Mexico now. | ||
| So they're looking to shift the blame in part because he's scared of offending his left wing and actually taking steps to secure the border. | ||
| And now what you've seen them saying is like, oh, I needed the legal authority. | ||
| I needed this law passed. | ||
| Those terrible Republicans in Congress tied my hands. | ||
| Nothing can be further from the case. | ||
| What we were hoping to do is pass laws that would restrain an unwilling president, not to empower a willing president. | ||
| Again, the president has all the authority he'd need, as you saw with President Trump. | ||
| So I think he's largely trying to shift the blame. | ||
| Now, of course, when we vote in November, I doubt anybody's going to buy that because they've seen what's happened over the last four years. | ||
| You sense it's sort of just a really cynical ploy. | ||
| It's like, oh, we kind of destroy the border. | ||
| Then we say that there's a bipartisan deal. | ||
| And if the Republicans, you know, if they go against a bipartisan deal, then people will blame them regardless of whether it was their guy in the White House. | ||
| Like, you kind of got to admire the game, right? | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
| I'm shocked you would accuse the Democrats of cynicism. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I think that's part of it. | ||
| Again, Joe Biden is scared to death of his left wing on numerous issues. | ||
| You know, we're talking about the border. | ||
| We could talk about the position he's taken in trying to consistently restrain Israel from defending itself in this existential war against Hamas. | ||
| On climate change, you know, insane decisions like shutting down the export of American natural gas. | ||
| It's all an effort not to offend his left wing, in part because that's really the only people left in America who he has behind him. | ||
| So he was never going to take these actions himself. | ||
| He probably thought that if Congress would pass a law, maybe it would allow him to reduce the flow of migrants and blame Republicans. | ||
| But if we didn't pass a law, he'd still blame Republicans for not passing the law he needs. | ||
| Again, I don't think it's going to work because every normal American There are two things that I'm noticing particularly strongly in D.C. | ||
| on this trip, and they're just extensions of things I see every time I come here, at least for the last three years, which are the border thing is now bubbled up. | ||
| OK, so that's obvious. | ||
| We've already talked about that. | ||
| But the other thing is that no one really seems to think Joe Biden is in charge. | ||
| And that's a that's a very bizarre It's a bizarre notion. | ||
| It's a, it's a bizarre thing to talk about. | ||
| And yet nobody really thinks he's the one pulling the strings. | ||
| I mean, how do you, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but how do you deal with that? | ||
| How do you negotiate with that? | ||
| Does anyone acknowledge it privately? | ||
| Like what the hell's going on here? | ||
| Well, Arkansans have asked me that from the very beginning. | ||
| They want to know who's really in charge. | ||
| And my consistent answer has been, obviously Joe Biden is in charge because no one could screw things up as badly as Joe Biden has. | ||
| Um, and I think the best case in point of that is the Afghanistan fiasco in 2021. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um. | |
| I have it on pretty good authority that most of Joe Biden's senior aides and cabinet secretaries recommended against that course of action. | ||
| But he's had a chip on his shoulder about Afghanistan going back to his early days as vice president when Barack Obama disregarded his advice, which was to do the same thing in 2009 that he ultimately did in 2021, went with the advice that President Obama modified somewhat of the general in command there, Stan McChrystal and Dave Petraeus. | ||
| And for 12 years, he wanted to prove everyone, to include Barack Obama, that he was right and they were all wrong. | ||
| And you saw what that got us in the summer of 2021. | ||
| So on the biggest and most important questions, and absolutely Joe Biden is still in charge, is he has a unique ability to screw things up, if I can use the PG version of what Barack Obama said about his own vice president. | ||
| On a lot of day-to-day things, on a lot of things that don't rise that level, that don't reach the Oval Office desk, I think he has a cadre of advisors around him, to include his wife, who are oftentimes making those decisions. | ||
| But on the big things, though, on Afghanistan, on pussyfooting around with Ukraine, on appeasing and conciliating Uh, Iran on the big spending blowouts in 2021 and 2022 that produced record high inflation. | ||
| That's Joe Biden. | ||
| It may not be him like down to every comma and every clause and a piece of legislation, but that's Joe Biden giving the direction and it's a bad direction for the country. | ||
| Let me ask you one or two more on policy and then we'll do some silly stuff since I'm talking to a lot of senators and it's a lot of border stuff. | ||
| Do you sense that the bigger problem of D.C. | ||
| can be solved? | ||
| I think there's another thing happening now which is an extension of the border problem. | ||
| Uh, which is that people are just like, you know what? | ||
| We'll just leave it to the States. | ||
|
unidentified
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DC is just so screwed up that they can't do anything right. | |
| And, and we just need to kind of go our ways or just care more about what's going on in our States, which is not that far out of whack with what our founders intended, but it's a little bit of a new notion in a modern sense. | ||
| Well, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. | ||
| As you mentioned, that's kind of what our founding fathers wanted. | ||
| There are certain critical responsibilities of a national government that we should be handling here, like national security and immigration and a handful of others. | ||
| But over the last 100, 125 years or so, Washington has spread its reach much too far. | ||
| It's taking too much money. | ||
| Out of the pockets of hardworking Americans and small businesses around the country and spending it on things that are not really their priorities and shouldn't be the federal government's priority either. | ||
| Federalism is also a good way to work through our differences as a country. | ||
| I think California is a beautiful state. | ||
| I love visiting there. | ||
| I've got a lot of good friends there. | ||
| Their politics is not exactly my cup of tea. | ||
| I don't love visiting there. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| If that's the way they want to run their state, which is into the ground, that's the decision for them to make. | ||
| They shouldn't be imposing that on the way we want to live in Arkansas. | ||
| So, in a way, federalism helps manage the diverse opinions and interests and points of view you have in a great continental nation. | ||
| But I think there probably is, you know, some element of Empowering states even more today because it is hard to get things done in Washington. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| One more political one, which is, are you bullish on the future of the Republican party? | ||
| It seems like it's always kind of like we can talk about how wacky the Democrats are all the time. | ||
| That's just fine. | ||
| And the fight between whatever's left of the blue dogs and the progressives. | ||
| But Republicans have their own set of problems too, and figure out a way to lose elections. | ||
| Well, it's natural that we have our differences. | ||
| And you can look in the Senate, we have our differences. | ||
| You know, take Susan Collins, for instance. | ||
| She and I sometimes vote in a different way, but I respect Susan. | ||
| And I think Susan does a pretty good job of representing Maine. | ||
| Probably a better job that I would do of representing Maine. | ||
| I hope I do a better job of representing Arkansas than she might do. | ||
| But if you look at someone like Susan Collins, she's the last Republican in the Congress from New England. | ||
| I'd hate to lose that seat to a Democrat. | ||
| So, the way I look at it is the way Ronald Reagan did, is that my 80% ally is not my 20% adversary. | ||
| And I want to build bridges, not just to my colleagues in the Congress, but all the voters out there who do agree with us 80% of the time, or to the candidates who raise their hand and say, I want to try to make a difference in Congress, even if we don't agree on every single issue. | ||
| I've endorsed a lot of candidates across the country. | ||
| We always talk about Their priorities, their ideas, what they hope to accomplish. | ||
| I really agree with them on everything, but I agree with them on a hell of a lot more than I agree with any Democrat in the Congress. | ||
| All right, let's shift all together. | ||
| Right before you walked in, my guys, we were trying to figure out, all right, if we didn't talk politics with Tom Cotton, what do you talk about with Tom Cotton? | ||
| And we couldn't quite figure it out. | ||
| We weren't exactly sure. | ||
| Then you walked in and although I've interviewed you on Skype or digital, whatever, I've never met you in person before. | ||
| You're 6'5". | ||
| Former basketball player. | ||
| What do people not know about Tom Cotton that we should know? | ||
| Well, it is one thing people often remark on when they meet me in person. | ||
| Like, I didn't realize you were so tall. | ||
| Yeah, they shrink you down on television to fit you a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, not everyone knows that I have two young boys, third grade and first grade. | ||
| I spend a lot of time with them. | ||
| Probably don't spend enough time as I would like, but I try to prioritize them. | ||
| How do you balance that? | ||
| That's a lot of DPD going back and forth. | ||
| I do, you know, when they're with me here in Washington. | ||
| Don't go out in the evenings. | ||
| You could in Washington. | ||
| You could go to three receptions and two dinners every night if you wanted to. | ||
| But when they're with me here in Washington, I try to manage my schedule so when we're done with our work in the Senate, I can just go straight to our house and try to be there for dinner and bedtime. | ||
| When they're with me at home in Arkansas, I try to limit my schedule so I'm not driving all four corners of the state. | ||
| And then the reverse is true as well. | ||
| When I'm here in Washington by myself, I try to pack in as much as I can. | ||
| And maybe I will go to those two dinners a night to see my colleagues or, you know, and to support important causes. | ||
| And when I'm home and they're not with me, you know, I'll get up before dawn and stay out until, you know, well after the sunset. | ||
| So I try when I'm not with my family to work as hard as I can and do as much as I can. | ||
| So when I'm with my family, I can be present and focused with them. | ||
| So we've got two boys, 18 months and 16 months. | ||
| So I don't, so you're a little ahead of me on that, but some of the things that I'm worried about are like, you know, digital devices and how to control all that stuff. | ||
| How do you, how do you manage that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So we don't, uh, you know, our, our kids at eight and seven, they don't have phones or tablets or watches or anything. | ||
| And we try not to let them use the computer at all. | ||
| Um, it's not entirely possible, you know, if, if no, And third grader wants to learn footwork for how to play first base, or your first grader wants to learn, you know, basic strokes with a tennis racket, best place to do that is to go to YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, you know, when we were growing up, we didn't have that. | ||
| We didn't have YouTube. | ||
| You had to take a tennis racket and walk out. | ||
| So you can, we try to teach them not to use the tennis racket and the baseball bat to hit each other across the head. | ||
| That doesn't work all that well, though. | ||
| So, there's a lot of good content on the internet to help kids learn and grow, same thing with educational content and so forth. | ||
| But we've found even if you're, again, you're watching a video about footwork for a first baseman, it can pretty quickly roll into videos about gambling on sports, and it pretty quickly can roll into even more inappropriate content for kids. | ||
| So, we watch it like a hawk. | ||
| Um, when they are on it. | ||
| And that's what I do as a father with my wife Anna. | ||
| But what I've tried to do as a legislator is restore control back to parents. | ||
| I've got legislation that says social media companies should have to use real and genuine age identification technology. | ||
| to verify ages of anyone online. | ||
|
unidentified
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Same thing. | |
| Who pushes back on that type of pop, on that type of legislation? | ||
| Cause we don't have that sort of thing. | ||
| I mean, basically anyone could get on, you click your, whatever it is, 18 or whatever. | ||
| You click, you say I'm 18, I'm 16 or whatever, and they let you on. | ||
| So what kind of pushback do you get on that? | ||
| It's mostly tech companies, oftentimes through front groups. | ||
| And they're claiming, you know, that this, that, or the other thing, | ||
| parents don't want to have to give it, or privacy concerns. | ||
| Most of it is spurious and pretextual, you know. | ||
| The third-party contractors who work in age verification, I mean, they work for states as diverse as California and Wyoming. | ||
| that you're doing things like unemployment benefits or other state benefit programs. | ||
| So there's really no privacy concerns there. The legislation makes it clear that this would not be | ||
| something that the government retains or can use. It would simply be providing | ||
| parents with the same rights in the digital world that they have in the real world. | ||
| A parent can say, no, you don't get to go in to that strip club. | ||
| You don't get to go into a liquor store. | ||
| You don't get to go to a tattoo parlor until you're 18 and can legally make your own choices. | ||
| They should be able to say that about social media online as well. | ||
| There's other legislation out there and some of it's good. | ||
| What I like about our bill is it's very simple and empowers parents and it just cuts the Gordian knot. | ||
| Whatever your technology is, whatever kind of platform you are, whatever you pitch, parents get a choice in what their kids are doing. | ||
| What level of the kind of woke craziness is Arkansas dealing with? | ||
| Like if just off the top of my head, if you said to me, what two states probably have the least of it, I'd probably say probably Arkansas and maybe Alabama, something like that. | ||
| Like, and I mean that in the best sense, like there's, there's a different set of values there. | ||
| So, but I'm sure there's, there's some level of it. | ||
| Very little. | ||
| You do have that some, it's typically in our somewhat larger communities, but, but very little, nothing like you'd see, you know, in California, since we were talking about California earlier. | ||
| Chicago or Boston, I would imagine, but very little of that, that you often see in the feedback I get from parents. | ||
| Occasionally, we do get those kind of concerns, and we talk to parents about how they might, you know, address them locally, you know, through their school board, or if it's a state matter, through their state legislators, or what we can do if there's anything we can do in Washington. | ||
| To help them. | ||
| But I imagine it's a very different story if you're trying to raise your child in a traditional, normal, patriotic household in, I don't know, Madison, Wisconsin, than it is in Russellville, Arkansas. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So when you talk to your colleagues that are dealing with that kind of stuff, I mean, it's kind of funny. | ||
| You have technically the same job as them, but the set of issues that you're bringing here are completely different. | ||
| That's got to be a little tricky to blend. | ||
| That's part, I mean, part of what the Congress is supposed to do, again, in a big continental nation. | ||
| You have not just very different kind of cultural views or aspirations, just very different interests as well. | ||
| You know, Arkansas doesn't have a lot of coastlines, you may have noticed. | ||
| So, it's not a set of issues in which I'm particularly well-versed on behalf of Arkansans. | ||
| But, you know, we've got colleagues who are, you know, people like John Kennedy from Louisiana or Susan Collins. | ||
| from Maine, Tim Scott from South Carolina. | ||
| So part of what we do as senators and congressmen is be advocates and voices for the unique and peculiar set of interests that we represent. | ||
| You know, in Arkansas, you know, we're a very big agricultural state, one of the biggest forestry states, some of the biggest Specifically, within those segments of our economy, catfish and rice production. | ||
| Again, that's not something that Mike Lee from Utah might have a lot in his state. | ||
| So, part of what we're trying to do is help to inform and educate our peers, and especially in the United States Senate, where a state like Arkansas or like Utah or like Wyoming has a voice that's equal to California and Texas and New York and Florida. | ||
| I was trying to get silly. | ||
| Somehow we ended right, we ended up right back on politics. | ||
| So I'll just ask you one that's, uh, that's close to my heart. | ||
| And, and certainly from what I've seen in the last few months, close to your heart, uh, you've been a great defender of Israel. | ||
| Um, can you talk about why you're a defender of Israel? | ||
| I don't think, I think people understand sort of policy, but not sort of why the relationship between Israel and America matters. | ||
| Well, I mean, Israel is one of our best allies in the world, and we support Israel not just because it's the right thing to do and the moral thing to do, but because it's good for America's interests and America's power in the Middle East. | ||
| They are a strong military, a vibrant economy. | ||
| But with Israel, there's a deeper connection to that. | ||
| There's the Judeo-Christian heritage we share. | ||
| The fact that they're the only capitalist democracy in the Middle East, and that all they want to do is, you know, live on their biblical homeland in peace and security, yet they're surrounded by so many of these bloodthirsty terrorists, like Hamas and like Hezbollah, who want to annihilate them. | ||
| So, it's in our interest to support Israel, to be sure, but it's also the morally right thing to do. | ||
| The people of Arkansas want us to do as well. | ||
| You just look at public opinion polls, which are never represented well in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, where you have far-left ideological liberals dominating it, always wringing their hands about, you know, the poor, you know, fighters in Hamas not getting enough food or whatever. | ||
| Look at public opinion polls, strongly on the side of Israel, especially after this latest atrocity last October 7. | ||
| What position did you play in basketball? | ||
| I played under the basket because 6'5 is pretty tall in rural Arkansas, but then I got to college and realized that I should have developed a better jump shot and ball handling skills if I wanted to play in college. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| So you became a senator. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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