Can Josh Hawley out-Trump Trump with the working person?

If you offered me half of Elon Musk's holdings to tell you what Josh Hawley truly believes, I would not be able to cash the check.
But after watching our senior U.S. senator for eight years now, I can say with confidence that he likes to stand out in a crowd.
By being first to object to the 2020 Electoral College results, then claiming he never tried to overturn the election that Joe Biden won, he did more harm than we'll ever be able to calculate. But there he was, leading the way, even if it was to perdition.
With that infamous raised fist on Jan. 6, he tried to rally the rioters he then bolted away from. But hey, by that afternoon, many more Americans knew his name.
Our man Hawley played a big role in the Big Lie: The risk that Donald Trump would not leave office after his defeat in 2020 really only became real, according to the 2021 book 'Peril,' by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, when Hawley said he would object to the Electoral College certification.
In the traumatic hours after the attack on the Capitol, Hawley stood off to himself on the Senate floor, as The Star reported at the time. According to the book, 'No one spoke to Hawley, who many of them blamed for instigating the riot by announcing his opposition to the certification a week earlier.'
Eventually, Sens. Ted Cruz and Roy Blunt asked him what he was going to do, and 'even with the carnage and push from some colleagues to stand down, Hawley decided he would keep his objection to both Arizona and Pennsylvania. He would remain in lockstep with Trump. When told of his decision, many of his Republican colleagues groaned. … Other Republicans would surely stick with Hawley, fearful of being seen as out of step with Trump's voters.'
So what to make, then, of Hawley's recent declarations that he would never, no not ever, vote to cut Medicaid, as the Big Beautiful Bill currently does in a big, ugly way?
This is quite a turnaround for someone who tried so hard to repeal Obamacare, and to fight Medicaid expansion.
Lately, Hawley has started saying that cutting this precious program for the most vulnerable is one line he'd never cross, and that what's more, it's one that Trump wouldn't cross, either.
This is clever, because how can Trump call him out for quoting Trump's own campaign promise to the public? Trump pushed hard for the House to pass the 'Big Beautiful Bill,' cuts and all, which it did. And when Hawley says Trump would never sign his own BBB if it included Medicaid cuts, well, sure he wouldn't.
Hawley is right that cutting Medicaid would be a disaster for low-income families and the disabled and those with autism and in nursing homes.
It's also incontrovertibly true that such cuts would hit Missourians particularly hard: An analysis by KFF Health News earlier this month found that Missouri was one of six states, along with Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina and West Virginia that would suffer the most.
A recent front-page piece in The New York Times suggested that Hawley the culture warrior has also been 'less noisily' on the side of the little guy all along. So much less noisily that I can't say we ever noticed the effects of all those years of effort in Missouri.
The graduate of Rockhurst High, Stanford and Yale Law, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and spent a gap year teaching at St. Paul's in London, does, like Trump, who was a millionaire in grade school, talk an awful lot about how much the elites hate us regular folks.
At Hawley's Senate campaign launch in 2018, I was still capable of disappointment at hearing him start right in with this us-versus-them golden oldie: 'The liberal elites who call themselves our leaders refer to us as flyover country,' he said. 'They deride not just our location but our whole way of living.' But, that's a song that always gets them out on the dance floor, and maybe the aggrievement was genuine.
The Times piece about him said that as a longtime populist, Hawley had from his earliest days in office done things like go after opioid manufacturers as attorney general of our state. He did file lawsuits against them, it's true, and maybe he would have done so anyway.
But he did that, as The Star reported, after discussion with the Washington political consultants who were involved in running his office and then his U.S. Senate campaign to get him some national buzz. And this was after his soon-to-be Senate opponent, Claire McCaskill, had already launched a Senate investigation into the opioid industry.
My point is really that we have heard many words but seen few results from Josh Hawley, man of the people.
If our senior senator really wants to, as a former aide to Bernie Sanders told The New York Times, break up the cozy relationship between his party and corporate America that's gone on since Reagan was president, does that mean he'll challenge Trump for selling access and demanding fealty from CEOs who then cash in? Rhetorical question.
In some ways, what Hawley is doing reminds me of the recent moves from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is breaking with his party and running to the center on trans athletes, limits on Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrants and declarations that he's going to stop 'funding failure' when it comes to curbing homelessness.
Only, where Newsom is concerned, everyone and his puppy sees what he's doing as a bald political calculation in preparation for a potential '28 presidential run.
He's getting nothing but noogies, both from his own party and from Republicans, for tacking to the center, while Hawley has been praised and reappraised by Democrats for simply saying he wouldn't cut Medicaid.
The Wall Street Journal did disapprovingly note 'Josh Hawley's Medicaid Switcheroo.' And on X, he's being pressured to change his mind.
Of course, if Missourians lost their health care, and Grandma couldn't stay in the nursing home, those giving him grief now would feel differently. And if that's what he's betting on, then he's right.
Hawley's ambition is one of the only other things I know for sure about him.
In his own recent essay in The Times, he made it seem that on the issue of Medicaid cuts, this is him and Trump against the bad guys.
'Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid,' he wrote. 'But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party's Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.'
I can practically hear the score to 'Les Mis' in the background, calling us to the barricades, can't you?
Now that the Republican House has passed the bill with those very same deep cuts — deeper, actually — it will be up to the Senate to stop the worst of it. Far less surprisingly, Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Susan Collins of Maine have concerns about the bill, and Sen. Ron Johnson thinks it doesn't cut spending enough. They have until July to figure it out.
Maybe Hawley won't backtrack at this point.
And trying to out-Trump Trump with the working person, if that's the goal, would not actually be that hard. But if he really wants to become Trump's heir, and make that dreamed-of presidential run in the way that he hopes, he'll have to start doing more than talk.

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