Everything is all Trump, all the time. His overwhelming presence has blotted out the sun.
But I still like to keep an eye on the lesser lights. And so, in this consequential moment, I’ve been looking for news on the senior U.S. senator from Missouri.
Four years ago, Josh Hawley played a starring role in Donald Trump’s attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. He objected to certifying Joe Biden’s legitimate electoral victory and he encouraged insurrectionists outside of the U.S. Capitol with a fist pump that was captured in a viral photo.
His actions were ignominious then, and I believe history will remember them that way. Hawley is proud of himself, however, and had the fist-pump photo engraved on coffee mugs.
For this latest transition of power, the senator has had to settle for being just another Trump sycophant.
He scored some interviews in MAGA medialand by calling for pardons for people who had barricaded an abortion clinic in defiance of federal law, which the president granted. And he helped halt a federal investigation into a Texas doctor who was charged with illegally obtaining and leaking information on minors receiving transgender care.
But those triumphs were largely lost in the flood of eye popping inauguration week developments.
Hawley joined in the chorus of ridicule after Bishop Mariann E. Budde capped off a sermon in the Washington National Cathedral by appealing directly to Trump to show mercy to people such as immigrants and transgender children — groups that Jesus might have referred to as “the least of these.”
“Hahaha,” Hawley jeered in a post on X. If the bishop had wanted to speak truth to power, he said, she should have “called out the child abusers who want to permanently sterilize and butcher children in the name of ‘gender affirming care.’”
That response validates what I tell people when they marvel about Hawley’s evolution from a revered history student at Stanford University and a constitutional law whiz at Yale Law School to a strident MAGA clone. The biggest educational waste, I say, is his tenure at Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, a Jesuit Catholic high school that traditionally has focused on social justice.
Hawley’s alma maters all emphasize critical thinking — a concept he seems to have tossed by the wayside.
Before Trump’s inauguration, Hawley supported presidential clemency for some of the people involved in the 2021 insurrection, but he drew the line at rioters who assaulted police officers.
“I’m against it for people who assaulted cops, threw stuff at cops, broke down doors, broke windows,” he told USA Today.
Trump, as it turned out, was for it. He granted clemency to all of the rioters, including those who were filmed brutalizing cops.
According to Hawley, that was Trump keeping a promise. An admirable trait.
“He said he was going to do this during the campaign and he did exactly what he said he was going to do,” Hawley told the Kansas City Star.
Except that Trump did not exactly promise to do what he did. He pledged to grant clemency for some people who were at the Capitol. He said nothing about pardons for people who assaulted police officers. In fact, Vice President J.D. Vance had indicated that Trump would not be pardoning people who committed violent acts.
Unwilling to stand on principle and criticize the pardons, as some of his Republican colleagues did, Hawley pivoted to baseless Trump adulation.
He’s revealing the same blind devotion in the Senate’s confirmation process for Trump’s cabinet nominees.
Four years ago, Hawley grilled Joe Biden’s nominees fiercely and voted against 19 of 21 picks for cabinet posts. This year, he’s pretty much said he’ll vote to confirm anyone Trump puts forth, and damn the consequences for the nation.
Hawley is now an avowed Christian nationalist. So perhaps one explanation for his unapologetic hypocrisy is that he thinks a full-bore embrace of Trump and the MAGA movement will move America closer to his vision of a nation where legal abortion doesn’t happen, transgender people shrink into the shadows and so-called wokeism is replaced forever with old-time religion.
Another possibility is he’s riding on the hope that Trump and his devotees will anoint him as their chosen successor in four years, or eight years, or sometime down the road.
But Hawley is hardly alone in that ambition. Vance, for one, would seem to have an edge at the moment. And Hawley’s vaunted animosity toward Big Tech is suddenly out of fashion now that the tech magnates have joined Team Trump.
Maybe Hawley will find his niche. Maybe one of his causes — rescuing masculinity, for example — will catch America’s imagination.
But it seems more likely that Hawley will exist as just another MAGA Republican in Trump’s shadow — too compromised and too beholden to the leader to find an identity going forward.
This feels strange to say, but Hawley’s moment in the spotlight may have peaked with the fist pump.