I have been observing Senator Josh Hawley’s rise in politics for the past few years. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he had Republicans controlling the Senate, House, and Supreme Court. Yet, most Republican voters didn’t know that many of these Republicans neither supported nor voted for Trump. Trump quickly discovered this opposition within the party that he had used as a platform to run for office but by the time he got fully acquainted with the deep swamp of Washington, DC, Republicans lost the House.
Reflecting back, Republicans losing the House was a good thing. Trump enabled great people to think of disrupting national politics. When the new Congress was elected in 2018, one of those new faces coming to DC was Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. I noticed his appearance on TV and started looking at his profile more curiously. Then I predicted, “Watch: Senator Josh Hawley is a future GOP presidential candidate and he is likely going to win“.
In 2020, Trump cleaned up the Republican party even more. He discouraged the war-profiting, cheap-labor proponent Republicans from running, forced many incumbents to retire, helped several incumbents to get re-elected, and helped many newcomers to get elected. As a result, incoming Republicans in Congress are more Trumpers than Republicans. If the congressional Republicans who dislike Trump are falsely hoping that Trumpism will go away with Trump exiting the White House, they will soon find out that they are deeply mistaken. And we can already see the trailer.
As a person who has seen the very different parts of the country, Hawley knows what the country is going through. He is from Missouri but he has lived in both California and Connecticut. These two East and West coasts are very different compared to the middle of America that he represents and calls his home. America is prosperous, united and stronger when it represents the middle of the country – a representative could be from anywhere, Donald Trump on the East Coast, Ronald Reagan from the West Coast, or Josh Hawley from Missouri.