Back on Friday, Salon’s Roger Sollenberger revealed that Tom Cotton has built his career on a lie. He has long claimed to have been an Army Ranger, and touted himself as a Ranger in his campaigns for Congress in 2012 and for Senate in 2014. In truth, he only graduated from the Army’s Ranger School, which gave him the right to wear the Ranger tab on his uniform. While there is some confusion among non-military types about this, military protocol is pretty clear—if you graduated from Ranger School, you only have the right to call yourself “Ranger qualified,” not a Ranger. PvtJarHead diaried about it here.
Cotton responded last night in an interview with Bret Baier.
Translation: “Those libruls are just ganging up on me because I’m a conservative.”
Earlier, Hugh Hewitt, who has frequently hosted Cotton over the years, took to Twitter to basically say, “Leave this war hero alone!”
But Sollenberger wasn’t backing down. In fact, he went further, pointing out that Cotton claimed to have actually seen combat duty while wearing the Rangers’ coveted tan beret.
He then brought receipts in another piece for Salon, pointing out that Cotton is on record as claiming to have seen combat duty as a Ranger.
For instance, this ad from his 2014 run for Senate, in which he claimed to have “made tough decisions as an Army Ranger.”
Most damningly, during his 2012 run for AR-04, Cotton claimed to have earned his Bronze Star—awarded for heroic or meritorious service on the battlefield—while a Ranger.
Sollenberger also discovered at least two interviews Cotton granted to Hewitt in which he did indeed lead Hewitt to believe he’d fought as a Ranger. In 2013, then-Congressman Cotton told Hewitt that he had enlisted as an infantry officer and “became an Army Ranger,” leading Hewitt to ask him whether “as a Ranger” he’d been attacked by suicide bombers while in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cotton replied that his patrols weren’t attacked, “thankfully for my men and me.”
And in 2019, Hewitt interviewed Cotton as part of the promotion for Cotton’s book, “Sacred Duty.” While asking Cotton about his return to civilian life, Hewitt said, “Now you, Senator, are a Ranger, and ‘Rangers lead the way’ is the motto.” Rather than correct him, Cotton replied, “Well, you know, people weren’t trying to kill me anymore.”
That sucking sound you heard was the air going out of Cotton’s presidential ambitions. His Senate career might survive, but if Richard Blumenthal is any indication, he probably won’t go any further.