Hi, I'm Isaac Devere and welcome to Off Message.

Today's guest, Senator Tom Cotton, freshman senator from Arkansas, and one of the leading

young Republican lights in the Senate, very prominent in the party, even though he's only been

in the Senate since winning in 2014, very quickly

positioned himself as a person who is in front of the cameras a lot and also very active

behind the scenes. He was even doing some nosing around about potentially running for president

in 2020, had Donald Trump lost, spotted in Iowa.

He instead, as he said, came very quickly to the conclusion that he needed to, like everybody

else, except that Donald Trump is president, work with Donald Trump as president, and he has been

very successful at doing that. But these are strange times for the Republican

Party. They don't know exactly what they stand for. Is it the party of Reagan? Is it the party of

Trump? What do they do on immigration reform, foreign policy? All these things that Trump has stirred up,

Republicans in Congress don't know what to make of it and how to position themselves. And we see

that playing out in even what's going on of the Obamacare fight.

And Cotton, who served in the military, is someone who was right in the middle of the

Obamacare fight, but also right in the middle of all the things about Syria and foreign

policy, questions that have come up around

Trump. We're going to start out, though, with Eliana Johnson talking about where she sees

Cotton fitting into this, joining us again, my colleague from Politico, and how the Republican

identity crisis that she's seeing in her reporting is connected to what Tom Cotton was talking about.

I want to remind everybody to follow me on Facebook and on Twitter at Isaac Dover.

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