Hawley, whose Senate seat will be elected in 2024, has repeatedly said he is not running for president.
“All I can say is no,” Hawley said in an interview on Wednesday, denying having a comprehensive plan to oppose Biden’s nominees. “What can I say? This is clearly not my focus.”
But aside from Hawley’s allies, no one familiar with presidential politics or the US Senate will accept the 41-year-old president. in his word – especially after several Democratic senators used their opposition to Trump’s first nominees as a stepping stone to 2020.
“Hawley was always a young man in a hurry. He ran for attorney general on a board that would serve all four years and [almost] immediately ran for the United States Senate as soon as he took office, ” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who last worked for the political arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He noted that Hawley established himself “by taking initial pictures of Big Tech and he really developed a taste for wine, which means he really enjoyed all the attention. And he was built on that. ”
Reed said “Hawley is becoming an exotic for Republican voters in the primaries” because the Yale-trained lawyer established a niche for himself as one of the first critics of social media companies while trying to attract working-class voters.
Although the Missouri senator is “an asterisk in the first Republican polls I saw,” said Reed, “he is clearly laying the groundwork for running for president in 2024. There is no other way to explain this behavior.”
But it has a cost.
His eagerness to insinuate himself with Trump supporters led to an infamous photo of Hawley on January 6, outside the Capitol, raising his fist in support of a crowd of protesters who later stormed the building, vandalized it and temporarily delayed voting.
Hawley’s role in opposing the Electoral College vote resulted in a Senate ethics complaint and prompted Simon & Schuster to cancel his book contract, The Tyranny of Big Tech, last month. And former Missouri senator John Danforth – who helped push Hawley into the place Danforth held decades ago – withdrew its support for the senator, saying that his endorsement was “the worst mistake I have ever made”.
Hawley condemned the invasion of the Capitol and the president’s statements on January 6, but at the same time said that Trump’s impeachment trial is unconstitutional. And he made it clear in an interview that Biden is unpopular in his state and that part of his job is to be “loyal opposition, as our UK friends like to say”.
It is also a lucrative enterprise in the party world of fundraising over the Internet.
Hawley is becoming more and more regular on Fox News, the cable channel most watched by Republican voters in the primaries, and his fundraising has kept pace with his growing national profile. The negative media coverage and the Democrats’ ethical investigation of him and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for their roles that led to the January 6 Capitol rebellion served to stoke their coffers: a memo sent to donors this week said that he raised nearly $ 1 million in January, praised his popularity in the state and argued that his electoral objections were popular in Missouri.
“If Democrats think you’re so powerful and influential that they need to topple you, it’s going to help raise funds, but you need to have substance, ” said David Carney, a leading Republican consultant who advised Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign.
“He’s definitely one of the twelve guys in the president mix. Why would anyone know a senator from Missouri, basically a freshman who is a novice? This is what you need to do to break the clutter, ”said Carney. “Now it’s a double-edged sword, because if you do a lot of crazy things, you won’t have credibility. So you have to do things not crazy. You cannot become a caricature. You can’t be the class clown. “
Hawley defends his objections to the election results as a legitimate expression of constituent concerns and says he was not trying to overturn the election. His strong opposition to Biden’s agenda, he says, comes from the same place. He insists that he is not necessarily determined to oppose them all.
“I can only say that in Missouri people are a little shocked: ‘What is this?’ He’s being so aggressive that he’s not even trying to work in the hall, ”said Hawley de Biden. “If it is not good for my state, then yes, I certainly will” vote no.
The youngest senator when elected in 2018, Hawley is a rising speaker with a sense of exploring Trump’s populist style of confrontation policy. He often addresses the Senate floor in an unusual way, direct to the camera, pressing for further stimulus checks or condemning the Supreme Court decision expanding protections for LGTBQ employees. He stood out within the Republican Party for promoting costly solutions to the economic effects of the pandemic, dismissing some judges supported by his own party and attacking technology companies.
Trump’s Senate lane has three main names so far: Hawley, Cruz and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Who shares a consulting firm with the Missouri junior senator. Along with five other senators and 139 deputies, the three were opposed to certifying the victory of the Biden Electoral College – even after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill.
This vote was unparalleled in modern US politics, even compared to 2017, when Democratic resistance to Trump increased and senators like Kirsten Gillibrand from New York voted against almost everyone Trump nominee before his 2020 presidential candidacy.
“Hawley decided that resistance is the way to Nirvana,” said Jef Pollock, a researcher who advised Gillibrand’s campaign.
“The notion of how early it is too early – if you’ve decided that resistance needs to be – then resistance needs to be as pure as possible. And that means taking all positions in each vote, it means voting against each of the nominees, from the rational to the irrational. It’s clean, it’s: ‘They are not good. They’re all bad because they represent something that I can’t stand. “
One of Hawley’s Republican allies in the Senate, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, rejected that idea, saying “I don’t attribute the presidential candidacy as the reason for things.
“I have great respect for him. But it will be interesting four years from now, eight years from now, when we look at how it developed, if it changed any strategy or if it’s the enthusiast, fire in the belly fight, ”Cramer said. “Clearly, he can do bigger things if that’s what he wants. “
Although Hawley notably pushed his party to grow a lot in response to the coronavirus throughout 2020 – lobbying Trump directly to demand direct payments from Americans – he showed little interest in Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan , stopping near direct opposition because he saw no legislative text.
“Josh Hawley is doing all the right things to capitalize politically on a significant portion of the Republican base, positioning himself to become a future presidential candidate, for sure,” said Terry Sullivan, a former presidential campaign manager for Senator Marco Rubio (R- Florida). “What Hawley does with that, we’ll see. But it is important to remember that whenever a US senator or governor looks in the mirror, he sees a future president ”.