Now You See Josh Hawley, Now You Don't

New York Times

07-07-2025

Senator Josh Hawley sure knows how to scurry away.
The Missouri Republican showed as much on Jan. 6, 2021, when he gave that infamous clenched-fist salute to the unruly mob bound for the Capitol — go get 'em, tigers! — then sprinted like terrified prey through the halls of Congress to evade them. He later wrote and plugged a book titled 'Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.' It extolled virility, valor, grit. All the qualities that he embodied on that heroic day.
And which he just modeled anew in voting for President Trump's monstrously big but not even marginally beautiful domestic policy bill. For months before Hawley fell meekly in line last week, he sought and got enormous attention for being a holdout, a maverick, someone willing to tell the president uncomfortable truths and determined to prove that the MAGA movement really was looking out for the little people. His fist was once again clenched, his arm once again raised, this time in defense of the health insurance on which so many less privileged Americans depend.
'We must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America's promise for America's working people,' he wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion in May. It was 'must,' not should. It was declarative, not ruminative. He explained that 'slashing health insurance for the working poor' would be 'both morally wrong and politically suicidal.' He sounded like a warrior — and a masculine one, at that! — manning the barricades.
Which, inevitably, he abandoned. The arc of Republican lawmakers in the Trump era bends toward complete submission. That's the posture in which Hawley and other Senate Republicans granted the president his financially reckless and needlessly cruel agenda.
Back in November, I observed that the second Trump administration would test the Senate even more than the first one had, revealing 'how shamefully far from its onetime description as 'the world's greatest deliberative body' it has strayed.' The verdict is in. Having rubber-stamped many ridiculous senior administration officials, Senate Republicans have now signed off on a sprawling policy package that will, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, add more than $3 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade, even as it cuts over $1 trillion from Medicaid and results in nearly 12 million Americans losing their health insurance.
The legislation makes a mockery of the party's longtime claims of prudent fiscal stewardship. And as Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, explained in a Senate speech, it 'will betray the very promise' that Trump made not to go after people's Medicaid.
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