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What these scenes from the Capitol reinforce is something that many G.O.P. politicians for the past four years have been unwilling to acknowledge: that when Trump spoke, voters listened, and many took him at his word.
I think a lot about how Republicans in Washington I've interviewed over the years, for all their castigation of "bubbles," often seemed genuinely ignorant of the extent to which Trump's words had taken root in their districts.
Republicans often griped that reporters were flagging them in the hallway to ask about Trump's latest tweet as some sort of "gotcha" exercise. I'm sure it was sometimes.
But most reporters, especially those who covered congressional campaigns, were animated by what was such an obvious disconnect, and what was always a real story: that as politicians claimed not to have read the tweets, many of their constituents were using them as guideposts.
(I still remember a voter I interviewed in Cleveland in the summer of 2019 whose shirt said, 'My president tweets.')
The long con of Washington, of course, is that ideas and rhetoric are an essentially aesthetic province — that so long as they are gestured to "correctly," with the right references to Madison and Burke, they risk no inconvenient material consequences.
Anyway, I've been thinking about these things a lot as I've been working on a profile of Hawley. I've found extraordinary the number of (powerful and ostensibly smart!) people who were so drawn to him initially because he was, they said, an "intellectual."
I've found more extraordinary the number of those who, when pressed, could not tell me what it was he actually believed. That's entirely to Hawley's credit, in terms of his means of ascent: He understood that when it came to the donor class and whatnot, it didn't really matter.
Anyway, bye!
