# Tom Cotton — "Send In the Troops" > [!quote] "One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers." > — Tom Cotton, "Send In the Troops," New York Times op-ed, June 3, 2020 ## Context Published at the height of the nationwide George Floyd protests, the op-ed called on President Trump to invoke the [[Insurrection Act]] and deploy active-duty military against demonstrators in American cities. The piece set off a newsroom revolt at the *New York Times*; the paper said it "did not meet our standards" and opinion editor James Bennet resigned. Cotton republished the argument verbatim on his Senate website and reprised it in a 2025 essay during the Los Angeles deployments. ## Why this matters A receipt for the militarized-policing strain of the authoritarian right, in the words of a sitting U.S. senator: the explicit call to turn the active-duty military against domestic protesters. It is a foundational document of the [[Authoritarianism]] thread that runs forward to the second Trump administration's actual domestic deployments — and a marker of how mainstream the "send in the troops" position became. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [Cotton Senate office — republished op-ed](https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/send-in-the-troops). - **Context:** [Washington Post — the NYT controversy](https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/06/03/new-york-times-tom-cotton/). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. Author-republished. ## Related quotes - [[Donald Trump - enemy from within]] — the same military-against-domestic-opposition logic, from the candidate, four years later. ## Part of collections - [[Might Makes Right Doctrine]]