Josh Hawley’s best path to the GOP nomination is to be the best Josh Hawley he can be, not trying to be a more erudite version of Donald Trump.
As noted on the home page, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) says he plans to object during the Electoral College certification process when a joint session of Congress meets on January 6.
“I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws,” Hawley said in a statement. “And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden.”
If Hawley is doing this because he thinks it will give him an early leg up in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, I’m not sure this is the smart play that he thinks it is — and this is besides the fact that Hawley is lending his legitimacy to the president’s increasingly unhinged complaint that the election was wrongly decided by fraudulent votes. Late last night, President Trump fumed, “Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they definitely don’t want “Trump”. So disgusting!” Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and Ron Raffensperger, who works for a subsidiary of Huawei, are not related.
There’s a lot of time between now and early 2024, when the decisions about the next GOP nominee will be made. The Bush-era Republican Party looked different and had different priorities than the Tea Party–era, and the Trump-era GOP looked pretty different from the Tea Party–era. The GOP is probably going to look different three years from now, and few among us can perfectly foresee how it will be different. And while Trumpism won in 2016, it’s almost entirely forgotten that Trump received 44.95 percent of the vote in the 2016 primary. About 55 percent wanted something different, and just couldn’t unite behind another option.
But let’s say in early 2024, the GOP-primary voters haven’t lost any of their current enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But that means if Donald Trump is running, they’ll nominate Trump. If Donald Trump doesn’t want to run, a lot of his biggest fans will vote for Don Jr. or Ivanka, if either one of them is running. How likely is it that they’re going to say, “Hey, that Missouri senator seems like the next-closest option to Trump”? Certainly not if a rabble-rousing media personality like Tucker Carlson is running.
Even if the “Trump slot” is open, how many GOP primary voters will be thinking, “Hey, that Josh Hawley guy was the only senator who stood up against the crooked election that stole the presidency from Trump, I’m going to support him because of that”? How many people will even remember the vote to certify the Electoral College results?
Whatever happens in the next three years, I doubt there will be much of a market for being a sort-of, kind-of, Trump-Lite. I think the evidence of the past five years shows Trump’s schtick doesn’t work well for anybody who doesn’t start with 100-percent name recognition, 30 years of being a ubiquitous icon of wealth and success, a long-running prime-time reality show, their name on buildings across the country, and so on. And it’s really debatable if prep-school, Stanford University, articles editor of the Yale Law Journal at Yale Law School, clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts, Temple Bar Scholar, University of Missouri law-school professor, Teddy Roosevelt biography–writing Josh Hawley is going to be the most convincing populist voice in the field.
Nope. Josh Hawley’s best path to the GOP nomination is to be the best Josh Hawley he can be, not trying to be a more erudite version of Donald Trump. If he tries that, he’s always going to come across as inauthentic.