Trump’s feud with Cotton snaps heads in the Senate

President Trump’s doxing of Sen. Tom Cotton over a stalled bill to establish year-round daylight saving time is throwing an unexpected twist in the Arkansas Republican’s reelection race and sets up a fierce fight in the Senate this fall over the biannual changing of clocks.

Trump’s decision to publish Cotton’s cellphone number on his Truth Social account, which has more than 13 million followers, left Senate Republicans and their advisers in shock.

Trump urged his followers to press Cotton, the third-ranking member of the Senate GOP leadership and the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to contact the senator directly to press him to drop his opposition to the Sunshine Protection Act.

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One Senate Republican strategist called Trump’s doxing of Cotton, one of the most influential national security hawks in the Republican conference, an “enormous disruption.” The strategist questioned whether the president is throwing a brushback pitch at a rising conservative star who may be the next Senate GOP leader trying to get him in line.

“The chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence gets a lot of important calls. I imagine he’s had to turn that phone off and contact known associates with a new phone number. It is mind-bogglingly stupid of this administration in the midst of a disastrous campaign to focus on this,” said the GOP strategist, who requested anonymity to comment on Trump’s shot at Cotton.

“It’s not like the Senate can suddenly come back into session and pass this bill,” the GOP strategist said. “Tom Cotton has a pretty good argument for why he doesn’t like the bill.

“Whichever stupid staffer that put this in front of [the president] did not think about the fact that for the next two years you’re going to need ever single Senate Republican to band together against impeachment, against subpoenas,” the source said, noting that Republicans are expected to lose Senate seats — and possibly their majority — next month.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) defended Cotton’s opposition to making daylight saving time permanent as driven by “real safety concerns.”

Wicker said Cotton is speaking for a number of Republican senators when he stands up against making daylight saving time year-round.

“I think there’s more opposition to it than the president realizes. There’s some real safety concerns, particularly in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus at very early hours,” Wicker said.

And Wicker said he “wouldn’t have advised” Trump to make Cotton’s cellphone number public, which will probably force the third-ranking member of the Senate GOP leadership to find a new number.

“I wouldn’t have advised to do that,” he said.

The battle in the Senate over making daylight saving time year-round will reach a critical point during the Senate’s lame-duck session in November and December.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), another close Trump ally, is working hard behind the scenes to get a vote on the Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the House 308-117 in July.

“I’ve got my Sunshine Protection Act. I’m working on a vote on that. We’re going to have a vote on that. It [lets] states make their own decisions,” he told The Hill.

Scott emphasized the bill doesn’t require states to permanently adopt daylight saving time but gives them the option of doing so.

The idea is very popular in his home state of Florida, where, according to one GOP strategist, it has overwhelming support.

But senators who represent northern states and those on the western edges of the Central and Mountain time zones are not fans of the idea, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).

“I’m from a northern clime,” Thune said. “I voted against it in committee,” referring to his opposition as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Thune said it “remains to be seen” whether the Sunshine Protection Act could get the 60 votes it needs to pass the Senate.

One former GOP aide hypothesized that Trump in a subtle way may be trying to exert some influence on a future Senate leadership race.

“This might be a way for him to s‑‑‑ on Cotton’s leadership race,” the source said, speculating that Cotton could make a bid for leader if Thune decides to retire after this year’s election.

Both Cotton and Scott are viewed as potential candidates to become the next Senate Republican leader whenever Thune, who is 65, decides to step down from the job.

When asked about the online clash between Trump and Cotton, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) quipped that the president “can go from zero to a‑‑hole in about three seconds.”

“Tom Cotton feels strongly about it. Tom is a rock star senator. If you get between him and what’s best for Arkansas, he’ll devour you like a light snack,” Kennedy told Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“President Trump’s also my friend. He feels strongly about it,” he continued. “The president, as we know, can be sometimes — he exists loudly. He can be tempestuous,” he added.

A senior Senate Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss the controversy said that “nothing” that Trump does really surprises senators but acknowledged that any Senate chief of staff would be highly annoyed and agitated if someone blasted out their boss’s cellphone number to millions of people.

Trump pulled a similar move on then-Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in 2015 when he read the South Carolina Republican’s cellphone number out to a crowd at a speech in South Carolina.

Trump shared Graham’s private number with the world hours after Graham called him a “jacka‑‑.”

Graham then published a video of himself destroying his old flip phone in a variety of creative ways, chopping it with a meat cleaver, dropping it into a blender and walloping it with a golf driver.

Cotton also appeared to take Trump’s publication of his private information in stride — but he held firm to his opposition to the legislation that would encourage states to adopt daylight saving time all year long.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” he posted on social platform X over the weekend.

“Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first,” he said.

The high-profile clash throws a twist into Cotton’s otherwise unnoticed reelection campaign.

The two-term Republican incumbent is running comfortably ahead of his little-known Democratic opponent, Hallie Shoffner, a sixth-generation farmer, in an August poll of 803 likely voters by J.L. Partners.

Other polls, however, show the race could be more competitive than expected.

A Hendrix College poll of 1,217 likely voters conducted Aug. 11-12 showed Shoffner leading Cotton 47 percent to 44 percent.

But hardly any Senate Democrats are talking about Arkansas as a real opportunity to pick up a Republican seat in November, even if there is a big blue wave that propels them to the majority.