Runnin' With The Devil

Josh Hawley outran the January 6 mob, but can he outrun his karma?

Senator Josh Hawley, trying to make it to his next appointment (i.e., not dying) on January 6

Editor’s note: Have a question about how to avoid shin splints while running in your dress shoes? Ask Josh Hawley. Have any other questions? Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

Dear Matt,
I love your work, and read everything you write. In fact, I write everything you write. My question: Who do you think would win in a footrace: Josh Hawley, running from a violent mob that he helped whip into a seditious frenzy? Or Steve Bannon, running from his new cellmate, Boo-Boo, with face tats and lust’s pure light in his eye?
Ours,
Matt Labash

Thanks for the thoughtful inquiry, Matt. It’s like you’re reading my mail.  But this is a pretty easy one. Have you seen Steve Bannon?  He is shaped like a sack of potatoes in two shirts and a five-day beard, looks like a walking triglyceride, and likely hasn’t done any cardio since the Bush administration. (Bush The Elder, that is.)  Sure, Bannon has spent the last several years in training – first, running from a congressional subpoena (why he’s headed to jail), and before that, running from his karma (Donald Trump pardoned the raging populist, who was arrested on a Chinese billionaire’s luxury yacht before he could stand trial on wire fraud and money laundering charges). But there is no way Bannon could keep up with Hawley, who has an apparently low B.M.I., who works out - even if some complain he doesn’t put the five-pound weights back on the rack in the Senate gym - and who has been running his entire life as a young man in a hurry.

I generally don’t like to pile on someone who is already at the bottom of a dogpile, but in Josh Hawley’s case, I’ll make an exception.

The skinny-suited metrosexual who is always prattling on about our “lost masculinity” (I don’t know where he left his, maybe at the kombucha bar?) has become the breakout meme star of the January 6 hearings.  At Thursday night’s committee hearing, all manner of clips were played of that fateful day. There were the police getting the snot kicked out of them by an angry mob, the latter of whom were convinced, after two solid months of being force-fed election-fraud lies, that they were righteous avengers in MAGA-wear, ensuring that the late Hugo Chavez could never tamper with our voting machines again, or something.  There were the clips of Orange Julius Caesar giving his blessing to the rioters while nominally telling them to go in peace – some three hours after they’d gone about his dirty work, injuring nearly 150 cops, one of whom died the next day, four of whom later committed suicide. “We love you, you’re very special,” President O.J. said.

But if there was any comic relief to be had, it came in the form of Josh Hawley, the Missouri Senator/future failed presidential candidate.  You’ll recall Hawley was the man who’d been the very first senatorial volunteer to help Trump attempt to steal back the election that he’d just lost handily by overturning the electoral college vote count. He was also the man who became an iconic image of congressional acquiescence when he fist-pumped the pre-riotous crowd, helping further rouse their unfounded paranoia. But now, he was being shown in a previously unseen clip right as the mob was breaching the Capitol. There was Hawley, sprinting across a hallway as fast as his grifter legs would carry him, in flight from the very mob whose delusions he’d fed, scampering away like a jittery squirrel searching for his lost nuts.

This being 2022 and all, Hawley was immediately inducted into the meme half of fame, with the Twitterverse setting his escape to everything from the Chariots of Fire soundtrack to the Benny Hill theme:

Mallory Nees @The_Mal_Gallery

Josh Hawley running away to a variety of soundtracks. Pt. 1: Chariots of Fire #January6thCommitteeHearing

It’s the kind of thing that might cause a more self-aware type shame, if Hawley were still capable of experiencing any.  But that ship sailed long ago for the people’s champion, who cut his populist teeth on the mean quads of Stanford and Yale Law. So how did Hawley respond to his newly rejuvenated legions of critics? By tweeting out a blowing-kiss emoji along with a link to his campaign store, hawking his $20 raised-fist “Show-Me Strong!” coffee mug

Senator Hawley, always moving merch

In case the point was lost that he was sucking up to the base that he himself is afraid of by continuing to falsely perpetuate election fraud (which he, richly, calls “election integrity”),  Hawley doubled down at the summer spectacular of fellow-grifter Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA in Tampa last night, telling the crowd, according to The Daily Beast:

And I just want to say to all of those liberals out there and the liberal media, just in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, I do not regret it…..And I am not backing down. I’m not gonna apologize, I’m not gonna cower, I’m not gonna run from you.

And you can’t blame him. From the video evidence, Hawley doesn’t have time to run from the liberal media when he’s too busy running from Trump supporters. Just because they couldn’t find Mike Pence on January 6 doesn’t mean they couldn’t have hanged somebody else.

Not that having to run for his life got in the way of fundraising.  On the very same day, not only did Hawley see fit - right after the riot! - to march back into a joint session of Congress and continue to try to overturn the election, but he also cranked out a fundraising email just before the Capitol invasion that he helped bring about, which read, in part:

Many career politicians in the DC establishment want me to stay quiet. I suppose you can assume nothing I do will matter. That it won’t matter if I object or not, so I should sit by and do nothing……But this is not about me! It is about the people I serve, and it is about ensuring confidence in our elections.

There are so many laughable assertions in that brief paragraph, but none so laughable as: “This is not about me!”  Everything in Hawley’s life seems to be about him. Which is why you can make such short work of assessing his character.  Which is to say, he has none.

This is perhaps why Hawley’s home-state newspaper, the Kansas City Star, succinctly asserted that Hawley “has blood on his hands in {the} Capitol coup attempt.”   And last year, in a satisfying piece of demolition, the St. Louis Dispatch’s Tony Messenger outlined how lying came easily to Hawley.  After his first-quarter fundraising bounty that increased by multiples from previous years, Messenger revealed  a key ingredient in the secret sauce: a six-page fundraising letter that appeared to be handwritten, but was generated by a computer. (A not uncommon practice, but it’s still perfectly fitting that even Hawley’s handwriting is fake.)  

In it, Hawley claimed to be a lead attorney in a landmark lawsuit against Obamacare. And yes, he participated in writing a brief in the Hobby Lobby case. But, as Messenger writes, “He wasn’t even admitted to the bar to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hawley was a bit player, which is sort of the theme of his career. He’s never actually argued a case before a jury, let alone the Supreme Court.”

Similarly, according to Messenger, Hawley falsely claimed credit for “the biggest human trafficking bust in Missouri history.” When, in fact, the biggest human trafficking bust in Missouri history was carried out by the FBI a year before Hawley was even elected.  Though Hawley still set up a press event in which he bragged about coordinating the raids of massage parlors in southwest Missouri. “Not a single felony charge was filed,” writes Messenger. “Not one.”  Hawley still pulled $3 million in that quarter, even though he wasn’t up for reelection for three years.  And with his fisting coffee mug proceeds on top of that? Well, the sky is the limit.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Hawley.  After all, he’s just doing what 80 percent or so of elected Republicans do these days: pretending they believe lies that they think their electorate is too dumb to see the cynicism in.  But I still am not being as hard on him as former police officer Michael Fanone. January 6 aficionados will recall Fanone was the cop who, on that day, while combating the mob that people like Josh Hawley whipped into a froth on behalf of Donald Trump, was dragged down a flight of stairs, was Taser’ed, was pounded with pipes, and who nearly had his own gun turned on him. Oh, and he also suffered a heart attack in the middle of all that.  

But hey, bygones…….

Though as Fanone said after assessing the new Hawley/scampering squirrel video, with an anger that is well-earned: “Josh Hawley is a bitch. And he ran like a bitch…..”

Yeah, that about covers it.

Bonus Track: You knew this was coming. Josh Hawley’s suggested campaign theme song. Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With The Devil.”