[See Update below.]
The headline is cribbed from the first sentence of a George Will column, “Trump, Hawley and Cruz will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of a seditionist.” While I don’t share Will’s politics, we both deplore the current state of the Republican Party. With this post, I highlight Will’s condemnation of the two ambitious scammers from the Senate who — with Trump — put into motion yesterday’s shameful events at the Capitol:
Hawley announced his intention to object to the certification of some states’ electoral votes, for no better reason than that there has been an avalanche of “allegations” of election irregularities, allegations fomented by the loser of the election. By doing so, Hawley turned what should have been a perfunctory episode in our civic liturgy of post-election civility into a synthetic drama. He turned this moment into the focus of the hitherto unfocused fury that Trump had been stoking for many weeks.
Of Cruz, Will said:
With his characteristic unctuousness, he regretted the existence of what he and kindred spirits have not only done nothing to refute but have themselves nurtured — a pandemic of suspicions that the election was “rigged.”
“I want to take a moment to speak to my Democratic colleagues,” said Cruz. “I understand your guy is winning right now.” Read those weasely words again. He was not speaking to his “colleagues.” He was speaking to the kind people who were at that instant assaulting the Capitol. He was nurturing the very delusions that soon would cause louts to be roaming the Senate chamber — the fantasy that Joe Biden has not won the election but is only winning “right now.”
Will observes that Trump will soon be gone.
Yes, and I’m in complete agreement with Will regarding the two senators: “from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.”
Both Hawley and Cruz, of course — privileged fellows who strike populist poses — claim to be intent on examining allegations or dispelling suspicions, though they have had a heavy hand in spreading the disinformation that Trump’s followers accept. No matter their clever language, they are liars, as another conservative, Yuval Levin, notes (“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age”):
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical liars.
Update: Josh Hawley’s mentor, former senator John Danforth set aside his opposition to Trump in backing Hawley’s bid to knock-off former senator Claire McCaskill:
Hawley was Danforth’s guy. They met at a Yale Law School dinner when Hawley was still a student and Danforth was the smitten elder statesman. Enough so that years later, Danforth, a Never Trumper, turned a blind eye to Hawley’s cynical embrace of the president, intended to ensure the support of rural Republicans who love the president for all the wrong reasons.
Republican after Republican has “turned a blind eye” regarding Trump over the past five years. Finally, with less than two weeks to go, they are backing away:
“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Yesterday was the physical culmination of the long attempt (by Hawley and others) to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.”
One of Hawley’s biggest Missouri donors, David Humphries, has also rebuked the senator. “Along with his sister, Sarah Atkins, and his mother, Ethelmae Humphreys, his family provided $4.4 million of the $9.2 million Hawley raised for his 2016 campaign for attorney general.” The Humphries added another $2 million to Hawley’s senate campaign.
Now David Humphries has had enough:
Josh Hawley … has shown his true colors as an anti-democracy populist by supporting Trump’s false claim of a ‘stolen election.’ Hawley’s irresponsible, inflammatory, and dangerous tactics have incited violence and further discord across America. And he has now revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold.
“Hawley should be censured by his Senate colleagues for his actions which have undermined a peaceful transition of power and for provoking yesterday’s riots in our nation’s capital. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to protect our country and its Constitutional underpinnings.”
None of this means that Hawley’s bet that his recent showboating regarding “allegations” won’t pay off with Republican voters in 2024, or moreover, that the blowback he is experiencing now won’t pay dividends in that campaign. But at this stage, the Republican Party is split in two and (at least for the time being) the bet that Hawley and Cruz made is hardly a sure thing.
(Image above headline: KSDK TV.)
