It must be exhausting to be Josh Hawley—forever sprinting from one television hit to the next, one moral panic to another, one sanctimonious soliloquy to the inevitable fainting couch of performative outrage. Missouri’s senior senator—though one struggles to find anything senior about his judgment—has carved out a peculiar niche in American politics: the constitutional scholar who finds democracy inconvenient, the Ivy League populist who loathes the elite, and the devout Christian who treats empathy like a heresy.
Hawley’s latest turn in the spotlight involves a breathless recitation of claims from a supposed Secret Service whistleblower who alleges that President Biden “gets lost in his closet.” One assumes this wasn’t meant metaphorically—though with Hawley, who knows? Either way, the senator trotted this claim onto the political stage like a Shakespearean prop skull, demanding gravitas while offering only spectacle.
We’ve seen this before. From his raised fist on January 6 to his bestselling lament about manhood being in peril, Hawley is not so much legislating as auditioning. His America is a set piece, his opponents mere strawmen in ill-fitting costumes, and his followers—God bless them—are treated as both audience and extras in his heroic narrative.
He bills himself as a populist, but he’s no Huey Long. This is not firebrand redistribution. It’s culture-war cosplay, complete with moral indignation and a soundtrack of Tucker monologues. Hawley doesn’t seek to improve the lives of his constituents. He seeks validation—preferably with camera angles and applause breaks.
And yet, for all his theatricality, Hawley is dangerous. He is articulate, disciplined, and ideologically committed to a vision of America where loyalty matters more than law, and performance more than principle. He offers a slick, made-for-TV version of autocracy—patriotic on the surface, authoritarian in the subtext.
So when Hawley claims that Biden is cognitively unfit, ask yourself: is this concern or choreography? When he quotes scripture, is it faith or framing? And when he rails against elites, is he really reaching for the common man—or just angling for better seats at the next Heritage Foundation gala?
Josh Hawley doesn’t fear chaos. He counts on it. Because for a man who sees governance as theater, the greatest sin is not sedition—it’s silence.