Hawley 2024? Missouri Republican could be ‘Trump 2.0,’ say conservative supporters
It took Sen. Josh Hawley just two years to make the jump from state attorney general to U.S. senator. After only one year in Washington, there are signs that the Missouri Republican is preparing for another promotion.
Hawley has established himself as a national brand within the GOP in ways that could serve as a prelude to a presidential run. He’s carved out a niche issue with his push to crack down on the tech industry and begun to articulate a foreign policy vision, which would shift the nation’s focus from the Middle East to China.
He’s become a fixture of cable news, a sought-after speaker for events hosted by high-profile conservative groups and has repeatedly generated national media attention with legislation that plays to the conservative base. Most recent was his proposal to change the Senate rules to allow for the dismissal of President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
“I think he’s the future of not just the conservative movement, but the Republican Party. I view him as a Trump 2.0 candidate… someone who can fill Trump’s shoes,” said Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, a Virginia-based social conservative group that gave Hawley an award at its annual gala last year.
Politico included Hawley in a list of 11 possible contenders for the presidency in 2024, including Vice President Mike Pence, former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Capitol Hill publication compared Hawley to another Midwesterner with an Ivy League pedigree who won the White House as a first-term senator: Barack Obama.
Hawley, 40, is not eager to embrace the comparison to a Democratic president. But as the youngest member of the Senate he has grabbed Washington’s attention by introducing more than 20 bills and resolutions during his first year in office and picking fights with some of the world’s largest companies.
But while Obama’s early message centered on hope, Hawley’s has focused on despair.
Hawley warned in a September speech that the nation is witnessing a “slow-motion collapse of the working class,” that is leading to “deaths of despair.” It was striking rhetoric at a time when Republicans, who control both Jefferson City and the White House, want to celebrate economic victories.
While some in the GOP see Hawley as the future, detractors describe him as an overambitious nuisance who disregards the party’s traditional commitment to free market values — and a phony for inveighing against the “cosmopolitan elite” after an education at Stanford and Yale Law School, followed by a clerkship for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
The willingness to pick fights with business interests evokes Hawley’s boyhood hero, the trust-busting Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. But it’s also made him a figure of scorn for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and libertarian-leaning groups, who wielded major influence over GOP politics in the pre-Trump era.
Hawley said he’s just doing his job.
“I thought it was one of the funny things about this building that we started introducing all of this legislation and doing things I said I was going to do and people immediately said, oh, you must want a different job,” he said.
“And I was like, I’m just doing my job. I’m not looking for any other job. I want to do this job and there’s a lot to do.”
In his 2016 campaign for attorney general, Hawley assured voters he was not a ladder-climbing politician. But just weeks into his tenure he brought in political consultants who would go on to run his successful U.S. Senate campaign and help direct his government office.
After The Star revealed the arrangement, Hawley faced accusations from Democrats that he illegally used state resources to support the campaign, which Hawley vehemently denied. Democratic State Auditor Nicole Galloway has spent the last year conducting a routine close-out audit of Hawley’s attorney general’s office that would also probe the various allegations.
Hawley said last week that he’s seen a draft of the audit, claiming on social media and in fundraising letters that it exonerates him. Galloway’s spokeswoman said the auditor can’t comment until it is made public, which will be in “the coming weeks.”
The early speculation about 2024 threatens to revive the narrative about Hawley using his current office as a stepping stone. But even as he downplays his interest in a presidential run, political allies have repeatedly pushed the idea that he represents the future of the Republican Party.
Gregg Keller, a St. Louis-based Republican strategist, hailed Hawley as a conservative thought leader and “someone who’s a true populist but looks like a J. Crew model at the same time.”
“I think you would be hard pressed to find a senator outside of leadership who has been more impactful in the last year than Josh Hawley and that’s pretty incredible for a freshman,” he said.
Jeff Smith, a former Democratic Missouri state senator, said Hawley “is betting that he can adapt Trump-ism by grafting an intellectual veneer onto it and drawing heavily upon his Lexington, Mo., roots to personalize Trump-style populism,” but he questioned whether this political brand would remain appealing in 2024.
Hawley’s focus
Hawley’s outspoken approach contrasts sharply with Missouri’s other Republican senator, Roy Blunt, a mild-mannered pragmatist who has been on Capitol Hill since 1997.
A Missouri Republican strategist, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said Blunt has taken on the heavy lifting of Missouri constituent case work and coordination with local governments while Hawley has developed his national and international focus.
“It’s a little unusual that it’s a freshman and a long-tenured senator. Typically the roles are reversed,” the strategist said. “If you want a passport, you better call Blunt’s office. Hawley’s office is not going to be helpful. If you are looking for someone to focus on fighting big tech, he’s probably your guy.”
For his part, Blunt praised Hawley for taking on “complicated issues that others haven’t been willing to engage in at the level he has.” He said the two quickly arrived at understanding that they would not always agree on every issue.
“But that hasn’t affected us having a very positive working relationship,” Blunt said last month. “As my wife would say, if you both agreed all the time, one of you wouldn’t be necessary.”
Hawley’s critics, however, have found his public persona hollow and question his priorities as a senator.
“I see him spend a lot of his time trying to curry the favor of cable TV hosts. It’d be nice if the senator was instead actually working for Missouri… I can’t point to anything that’s come out of what he’s been working on in the last year, aside from a few cable news clips,” said Sean Nicholson, a long-time progressive strategist in Missouri.
Rep. William Lacy Clay, the Democrat who represents St. Louis, said Hawley’s focus on China and the tech industry appears divorced from the most pressing issues facing Missourians.
“We have not really found an issue where we can work on in a bipartisan way on behalf of our mutual constituents, which is somewhat disappointing to me,” Lacy Clay said. “Those issues that you mention I don’t hear much about from my constituents, but I wish he could be a little more focused on the ones that really matter.”
Hawley and his supporters say the senator has remained focused on Missouri even while tackling national issues, including his push to give farmers a greater say over management of the Missouri River after last year’s flooding.
Last August, Hawley took a tour through southeast Missouri to focus on communities he said had been forgotten by policymakers and the media.
Mark Pickard, a teacher and pastor in Malden who met Hawley during this tour, said he was impressed by his discussions at a local barber shop.
“He spent quite a bit of time talking with people, listening to their problems and spent a lot of time…. Three guys who were there were convicted felons who he sat and had conversations with about their trials and the struggles they’ve had to deal with getting their life back on track,” Pickard said.
“Didn’t feel like a publicity stunt. He was really trying to figure out their problems and what he could do to help.”
James Harris, a veteran GOP political consultant who called himself the “self-appointed chairman of the Jefferson City Josh Hawley fan club,” praised the senator for his tour of rural Missouri for spending “a lot of time with people who probably have never met a United States Senator.
“When they meet him,” Harris said, “his constituents feel like they have a direct connection with him.”
Shortly after the tour, Hawley took to the Senate floor to discuss a Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services report on declining life expectancy in the state.
Drawing on the bleak data about suicides and overdose deaths, Hawley held the nation’s economic and political systems accountable for the misery in Missouri towns with shuttered businesses and an overflow of fentanyl.
“It is time for the governing class to admit that the policies it has pursued for decades— on trade, on immigration, on finance— have helped drive working people to this crisis. And it’s time to acknowledge that a crisis for working America is a crisis for all of America,” Hawley said. “It’s not enough for wealthy people in Silicon Valley to do well.”
Fights with Silicon Valley
Hawley, who attended college at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the center of Silicon Valley, has established himself as Capitol Hill’s go-to critic of the tech industry.
Some of his legislation, including a measure that would require audits for political bias at social media companies, has been dismissed as pure messaging meant to stir up his conservative base.
But other initiatives, like a push for consumer control of data and increased privacy protections for children online, have support from Democrats.
“With such broad support here in the building and with such public support, why don’t we start with protecting children’s privacy? Why don’t we start with giving everybody a right of control over their data? Those are pretty easy scores, so let’s do that,” Hawley said when asked about the prospect of passing the legislation this year after it stalled in 2019.
His approach to tech has sparked conflict between Hawley and the libertarian wing of the conservative movement, which favors loose regulation for businesses.
When the Southeast Missourian published an opinion piece last month touting Hawley’s “new conservative approach to governing,” Jeremy Cady, the Missouri director of Americans For Prosperity, replied in a now-deleted tweet, “Couldn’t ‘New Conservative’ also be referred to as… ‘Progressive’?”
Cady elaborated on the policy disputes between Hawley and AFP, an organization which spent more than $3.9 million on ads in 2018 promoting him and attacking his Democratic opponent, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill.
“He said technology is a source of peril, and that’s something we would disagree with,” Cady said.
“Technology as a whole has done a lot for our community, society, country and as a people. We can’t just look at tech and social media as evil. There are absolutely issues and stuff we must make better. But is the government the answer for fixing that?”
Hawley said when he develops legislation he’s not thinking about whether it fits a traditional definition of conservatism.
“When we think about putting forward these proposals, whether it’s tech, whether it’s stuff on the Army Corps, whether it’s our health care prescription drug proposals, my first thought is what’s actually going to be responsive to the concerns of people who elected me. I don’t really think in terms of what fits in this box or that box, or this label or that label,” Hawley said.
“The president won Missouri by 20 points. I think that he is clearly offering an agenda that Missourians warm to and agree with and I think it’s because people listen to him and said, he’s actually interested in getting stuff done that matters to me and my family. And I think fellow conservatives, we need to take that approach.”
Jason Hancock reported from Jefferson City.
This story was originally published January 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
