The Apprentice
On the morning of January 6, hours before a right-wing mob attacked Congress, leaving five people dead and halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in the nation’s history, Josh Hawley arrived at the Capitol early. A group of demonstrators who had answered the president’s call to “stop the steal” cheered when they spotted the 41-year-old first-term Republican senator from Missouri, tall and thin with a youthful swoop of hair. Hawley glanced in their direction with a look of determination and raised his fist in solidarity. The image, captured by a well-placed photographer, would become one of the day’s enduring visuals. It depicted the confident strut of a guy who still thinks everything is going according to plan.
A week earlier, Hawley had been the first senator to announce that he would object to the Electoral College votes from a handful of key states. Not to be outdone in their loyalty to Donald Trump, more than a dozen colleagues (led by Ted Cruz) followed suit, turning a staid tradition into an unprecedented constitutional challenge. When a small group of protesters, clutching candles and bullhorns and signs quoting Hamilton, gathered outside his Washington-area home, Hawley denounced them as “Antifa scumbags” who were “terrorizing” his block. But he shrugged off warnings that, in his quest to earn the affection of Trump and his base, he was leading his followers to a dark place. During a Fox News hit the same evening as the protest at Hawley’s home, Bret Baier pressed the senator to tell viewers that Joe Biden would be president. He refused.
Hawley wanted those viewers to remain in doubt about the election’s outcome. He wanted them to believe something had been taken from them. He wanted them to be angry. His team even readied a fundraising pitch to monetize their rage. On the afternoon of what was to be Hawley’s big moment of righteous intransigence in the Senate chamber, his campaign messaged its supporters with an urgent request: Hawley was “leading the charge to fight for free and fair elections,” the text said. Could you chip in $20 to help?
By then the world was watching in horror as violent Trump supporters overran the Capitol. With the exception of Trump himself, no one would come in for as much blame for inciting the deadly attack as Hawley. What the senator would later defend as an innocent attempt at “democratic debate” was the culmination of what Biden, discussing Hawley a few days after the riot, would call the “big lie”—in which conservative leaders amplified bogus claims of voting fraud and irregularities and then claimed they were acting on behalf of outraged constituents in questioning the election’s results.
Until the Capitol insurrection, Hawley had sailed through the GOP ranks with the ease of a certain type of young politician—usually white and male—who gets floated for everything before he’s done much of anything. A product of all the right institutions, groomed by the GOP’s old guard and endorsed by its fire-eaters, Hawley was the party’s top Senate recruit in 2018, when he unseated two-term incumbent Claire McCaskill. Barring a major scandal, he was in a position to hold onto his job for as long as he wanted—which, if
