Sen. Tom Cotton is proof an Ivy League degree doesn’t guarantee an understanding of basic word definitions.
In fact, the Arkansas Republican showed during a Tuesday interview on CNN that he has no idea what the word “coup” means.
Here’s the back story: Ever since Joe Biden stepped down as a presidential candidate on Sunday, the Republicans who previously demanded he step down got mad that he stepped down, and claimed it was a “coup.”
It’s not. A coup is typically defined as “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group,” and not “delegates of a political party choose to support a new candidate weeks before the party makes their official nomination.”
But Cotton, who famously suggested deploying troops to attack peaceful protesters in 2020, apparently didn’t read that entry in Merriam-Webster based on his CNN appearance with John Berman.
The anchor asked the senator why Republicans keep calling the Democratic Party’s decision to circle their wagons around Kamala Harris after Biden’s departure from the campaign a “coup,” but don’t use that term for something like, say, attacking the Capitol because you’re mad your candidate didn’t win the election.
Berman was blunt: “So why call this a coup and not Jan. 6?”
Cotton then offered the type of red meat that makes MAGA followers all warm and fuzzy, making sure to check off all the liberal boogey-people like “Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Hollywood moguls, [and] Wall Street bankers,” who he insisted were working behind closed doors to get the president “to throw in the towel.”
“And now you have the Democratic Party uniting around Kamala Harris, who not only has never won a Democratic primary, she’s never won a single vote for president, yet they’ve installed her as their nominee,” he said. ”That’s what they want to go forward with in this election, even as we still have questions.”
Berman once again pressed Cotton on why he’s calling Democrats’ decision to support Harris weeks before a candidate is officially declared, but not an event where a bunch of people attacked the Capitol by force, a coup.
“You use the language coup, and again, you’ve never said that for Jan. 6,” Berman said, while pointing out that when Democrats replaced Biden with Harris “no cops were beaten up [and] no one defecated in the Capitol.”
He asked the senator and Harvard Law School graduate to confirm “there was no criminal trespass in terms of changing the Democratic candidates, were there?”
Cotton, stuck between a crock and a hard place, had to concede Berman’s point.
But not before trying to claim that Harris’ actions while serving as a prosecutor in California somehow constitute a “coup” during her time as Biden’s vice president.
“Well, no, but what you get with Kamala Harris is a failed prosecutor who wouldn’t seek the death penalty for cop killers, even though her same fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein, wanted to,” he said.
“Kamala Harris also has to answer questions about what’s happened over the last three and a half years. She was not just a part of the conspiracy of silence about Joe Biden’s decline. She was the leader of it.”
You can see the entire interview below, courtesy of journalist Aaron Rupar.
Many people on X, formerly Twitter, didn’t cotton to Cotton’s definition of a coup, or pretty much anything else he said.