Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) walked into a rhetorical trap of his own creation Thursday when he attempted to defend former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who flubbed a question about the primary cause of the Civil War this week during a campaign event.
Cotton made his comments on Twitter/X, where he suggested that Democrats had supported the expansion of slavery rather than vote for Abraham Lincoln. That, the senator maintained, was what led to war among the states.
“The Civil War started because the American people elected an anti-slavery Republican as president and Democrats revolted rather than accept minor restrictions on the expansion of slavery to the western territories,” Cotton wrote on social media.
He added:
Really? Wow! That’s one hell of a bizarre reading of history, and it wasn’t long before others on social media began giving Cotton a much-needed lesson on what actually took place in the United States and has transpired in the years since the Civil War ended in 1865.
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