The New York Times
Josh Hawley is ‘not going anywhere’. How did he get here?
Most Republicans who spoke at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, avoided recognizing the January 6 events. But in less than 30 seconds in his speech, Senator Josh Hawley confronted them head-on. That day, Hawley said, highlighted the “great crisis moment” that Americans are currently in. That day, he explained, the mob had come after him. The “awake crowd”, that is. In the weeks that followed, they “tried to cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me down”. To “stop me,” said Hawley, “from representing you.” Sign up for the New York Times The Morning newsletter “And guess what?” he continued, his pace increasing, the audience applauding: “I’m here today, I’m not going anywhere and I’m not going to give up.” Missouri’s junior senator’s appeal reflected what has become the standard tariff on a Republican Party still under the control of Donald J. Trump. As Hawley’s public seemed to agree, his expansion of the former president’s false claims of a stolen election was not an incitement to the crowd of protesters who invaded the Capitol on January 6; it was a position of principle against the “radical left”. However, for some of the senator’s early supporters, it was precisely because of his banality that the speech stood out, the latest reminder of the distance between Josh Hawley they thought they had voted for and Josh Hawley who now regularly appeared on Fox News. Against the backdrop of Trump’s GOP, the idea was that Hawley was different. Sworn in at 39, he ascended the Senate in part because he sold himself as an intellectual in a movement that seemed to increasingly avoid the intellect. While Trump fired fiery tweets filled with random capitalizations and adverbs like “grandly,” Hawley published essays on subjects like medieval theology. Throughout his life, whether as a student at Stanford or as a law professor in Missouri, Hawley impressed people as “thoughtful” and “sophisticated”, a person of “depth”. And, as an increasing number of conservatives saw it, he also had the right ideas. Since adolescence, he criticized loyalty to the free market at the center of republican orthodoxy; when he arrived in Washington, he immediately launched a crusade against Big Tech. The conservative think tank class embraced him as someone with the right vocabulary, the right suits and the right worldview to translate Trump’s vague populist instincts into a new project for his party’s future – someone elite enough, in other words, to be entrusted with the banner of anti-elitism. Which is partly because, when Hawley became the first senator to announce that he would object to Joe Biden’s certification as president, many of his allies went through a kind of public mourning. They expected the same from, say, Ted Cruz – as a senior Senate aide, the Texas Republican, who obstructed Obamacare while his namesake was still in office, has always been transparent about his motivations. But Hawley? To examine Hawley’s life is, in fact, to see consistency in the broad features of his political cosmology. However, interviews with more than 50 people close to Hawley shed light on what, in the haze of charm and first impressions, his admirers often seemed to lose: an attachment to the constant cadence of ascension and an increasing comfort in doing what can be done. necessary to maintain it. Hawley’s adviser at Stanford, historian David Kennedy, struggled to reconcile his memories with the now infamous image of the senator, fist raised in solidarity with pro-Trump protesters just before they went down to the Capitol. “The Josh I knew was not an angry young man,” he recalls. “But when I see him now on television, he always looks angry – really angry.” Kennedy acknowledged that Hawley was just one of the many Republicans of the Trump era who impregnated his “anger, resentment and hurt” brand. But for many of those who were once close to Hawley, that was the point: how did a man who looked so special end up being like everyone else? And why, they wondered, did Josh Hawley have to be so angry? When Hawley arrived in Washington in January 2019 as a junior senator from Missouri, he positioned himself as the intellectual heir to Trumpism – the politician who could integrate the president’s populist instincts into a comprehensive ideology for the Republican Party. In his inaugural speech, he evoked the lament of the cultural erosion that he had been refining since high school, arguing that the “great American milieu” had been overlooked by a “new and arrogant aristocracy”. For conservatives who thought Trump had identified uncomfortable truths about the party, despite governing as a typical Republican, Hawley’s arrival was timely. That July, conservative writers and policy experts gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington for the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, with the aim of mapping a departure from the corporate-class policies that for decades defined conservatism. Hawley, who in his main speech condemned the “cosmopolitan consensus”, was presented as the “champion in the Senate” of the fledgling movement. He did not discourage rumors about 2024, and some younger Trump campaign advisers, who saw him as the “refined” version of his boss, particularly meditated on working for him if he ran. It wasn’t long before Donald Trump Jr. invited him to lunch at his father’s hotel in Washington. Still, he confused his party’s leadership while trying to derail confirmation from some of Trump’s conservative court nominees, considering his records on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage insufficiently pure. But it was Trump’s refusal to accept the election results that offered the first real stress test for the brand that Hawley worked to cultivate – if it was possible to be the darling of the conservative intelligentsia and the “fighter” that the party base craved. He had reason to believe so. He felt comfortable paying “the price of admission,” as a Republican official said, for a place in Trump’s Republican Party, partly because nothing in his short political career suggested there would be a cost. At first, few blinked when he hugged the president during a visit to Missouri. He had courted far-right figures during his campaign, but he still received excellent lectures at noble conferences. And so, on December 30, Josh Hawley became the first Senate Republican to announce his intention to challenge Biden’s congressional certification. Hawley’s team said he was not motivated by a possible presidential candidacy in 2024, but, among other things, was moved by a video conference in December with 30 constituents who said they felt “disenfranchised” by Biden’s victory. “He knows the state well after two campaigns, and I think he knew that Missouri residents supported the president,” said James Harris, Hawley’s longtime political advisor. He tried to thread the needle as he always did, involving his objection not in feverish tweets “STOP THE ROBBER”, but in questions about the constitutionality of postal voting in Pennsylvania. And if there had been no violence, perhaps his move would have worked. But when Hawley and others lent their voices to Trump’s lie about voters’ rampant fraud, people listened. Hawley spent much of January 6 hiding with his colleagues in a Senate committee room while Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He sat hunched against the wall, his eyes fixed on the phone, while Republicans and Democrats blamed him for the madness. Later that night, when the senators met safely to finish certifying the election, Hawley moved on with his objection. The reckoning was quick. Simon & Schuster abandoned plans to publish their book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech”. Major donors have broken ties. However, something else happened as well. Hawley saw an increase in small-dollar donations to his campaign, making January his best fundraising month since 2018. As Axios first reported, the $ 969,000 he accumulated easily made up for defections from corporate political action committees. Added to that were the applause of the Senate Conservative Fund, which has since raised more than $ 300,000 for Hawley. In the opinion of his advisers, the lessons from the Trump era – that success in today’s GOP means never having to apologize – were clear. And Josh Hawley was nothing if not a famous student. In the weeks that followed, Hawley promised to sue Simon & Schuster’s “wide-awake crowd” for dropping his book. He wrote for The New York Post about “America’s gagging”. He appeared on Fox News to discuss the said gagging. And although he said shortly after the turmoil that he would not run for president in 2024, his advisers continued to consider him “one of the favorites” of a potential Republican primary camp. Hawley tested his new cri de coeur in a live audience on February 26, at the meeting of the conservative faithful in Orlando. “You know, on January 6, I was opposed to the certification of the Electoral College,” he began. “Maybe you heard about it.” The room exploded. “I did,” he continued, “I got up -” His words were drowned out by applause. It had not been the mood of his speech. But when he paused to get a standing ovation, Hawley looked happy. This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company