Josh Hawley says ‘voters aren’t stupid.’ Then he keeps working against them | Opinion
Josh Hawley is talking big about the working class. Again.
Missouri’s senior senator has spent the last couple of years trying to persuade his fellow Republicans that lunch pail voters are the future of the party, that they should get away from the GOP’s century-long embrace of plutocrats and instead focus on an agenda that actually improves the lives of folks who live paycheck to paycheck.
Mostly, he’s failed.
But there he was on Monday morning in Semafor, once again talking up populism as the prescription for all that ails the Republican Party.
“Voters aren’t stupid,” Hawley told the news outlet. “They’re not in this because they’re loyal to some party or another. They’re in it to try to improve the conditions of their lives.”
Republicans control Congress, Hawley acknowledged, but they’re not doing much to help those voters these days. The GOP should be doing stuff like lowering prescription drug costs and sending out tariff rebate checks to voters.
Instead: “You don’t see Congress acting,” the senator said.
You know what? Hawley is right! (Forgive the exclamation point. I don’t get to write those words very often.)
But also: I don’t quite believe him.
We’ve heard these words from Hawley before. And we’ve seen how it turns out.
Warned against, then voted for Medicaid cuts
Here’s Josh Hawley in May, writing in The New York Times to tell his fellow Republicans that they must not cut Medicaid:
“If Republicans want to be a working-class party — if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,” Hawley wrote back then.
Voting for those cuts, he said, would “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
Again: He was right. But you know what happened next?
Republicans passed President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that contained giant cuts to Medicaid.
And Hawley voted for it.
Yes, he then introduced a bill to stop those cuts from going into effect. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee, and that’s where that particular trail ends. It’s not going to pass and nobody ever really thought it would. The senator’s bill was a poorly constructed fig leaf.
The point here is this: Hawley talks a lot about serving working class voters, but when it comes time to put up or shut up, he’s gone right along with the same GOP leadership he says is in bed with upper-class and corporate interests.
“The institutionalist Republican Party is not a populist party. I think that’s pretty clear,” he told Semafor.
Yet he gives that party his vote in crucial moments. Forget what Josh Hawley says. Look at what he does.
Trump’s populism con
Maybe the most hilarious part of Hawley’s populist push is how he uses Donald Trump as his justification.
“You’ve got Trump out there saying we ought to do dividend checks,” the senator told Semafor. “You’ve got Trump out there saying we need to do a deal that will lower prescription drugs for everybody.”
Yeah, but Trump has also spent his term making nice with oil barons, using his ties to the cryptocurrency industry to enrich his family and knocking down the East Wing of the White House to build a giant new gilded ballroom paid for by private interests with an interest in gaining the president’s favor.
Real man of the people stuff, eh?
In the meantime, millions of Americans are about to see their health insurance premiums skyrocket thanks to the end of federal subsidies — and Trump, supposedly, the tribune of the working class, hasn’t shown any urgency about helping those people.
Which kind of makes you think the president’s populism was a con all along.
If Hawley is serious about helping working Americans, then, he’s going to have to take the risk of getting crosswise with GOP party leaders — and perhaps with Trump himself. Until that happens, there is every reason to believe he’s all talk and no walk.
