Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell. In tonight’s issue, a look at Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican with populist cred who continues to irritate some of his colleagues. Most recently, he’s been taking a vocal and strident stance against Medicaid cuts, making Democrats giddy as he practically writes their campaign ads for them. So, what’s in it for Hawley? Well, maybe another look at the White House… But first…

Elon’s power dims: Elon Musk, who recently ended his tenure as a “special employee” in the Trump administration, is continuing to savage House Republicans for passing a “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill that he says will “grow the deficit and increase the debt ceiling by 5 TRILLION DOLLARS.” (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office largely agrees.) Speaker Mike Johnson has been forced to respond multiple times to Musk’s rampage over the past 24 hours, telling reporters today that his public dismissals of the bill are “disappointing” and “terribly wrong.” More than a few Republicans have nodded at the cuts to electric vehicle subsidies as an explanation for Musk’s fury.While Musk’s rants are having quite an impact online, they’re barely registering in the Senate, which is currently in talks about how to craft their own version of the bill. Already, there’s chatter on the Hill about Musk’s depleted political capital. Sure, he still has a gazillion dollars that he can spend on primaries—which he threatened to do last night—but that money won’t go far without Trump’s backing. And while Musk has provided some ammo to Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, who are similarly apoplectic about the deficit-exploding aspects of the bill, the only outside voice that really matters is Trump’s own—and he’s still completely supportive of the effort. Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee went to the White House to meet with the president today to haggle among themselves over their version of the bill, and things seem to still be on track.

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It gets more awkward…: It’s weird enough that Musk is now being backed by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries against the likes of Johnson. Even more uncomfortable is the schism he’s potentially creating for the premier MAGA power couple, Stephen and Katie Miller. Stephen, as a top White House aide, continues to vigorously defend the Big Beautiful Bill online and on TV; Katie left the White House with Musk to run comms for him. I’ve known Katie for many years, and she becomes a true believer in nearly all of her bosses, which makes her quite effective in defending them. But the dinner conversations at chez Miller must be getting awkward. Or maybe her paycheck is so hefty that it’s all good.
Midnight regrets: At least a few Republicans who voted for the Big Beautiful Bill are experiencing buyer’s remorse of their own. House Republicans passed the tax and spending bill two weeks ago; it was accomplished in record speed and in the middle of the night. (Literally—the bill, which wended its way through the Rules Committee over the course of two nights and was voted on in the 6 a.m. hour, literally never saw the light of day.) So while Johnson hit his self-imposed Memorial Day deadline, not everyone who voted for the bill really knew what was in it. Indeed, Johnson broke his party’s own rules requiring that a bill be posted for 72 hours before a vote, and did so before final budget accounting numbers were released.Reps. Mike Flood and Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others, are now expressing their frustrations after the Congressional Budget Office dropped its report today finding that the BBB, in its current form, would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, and cause more than 10.4 million people to lose health insurance, including Medicaid. As Nancy Pelosi once said, sometimes you’ve got to pass a bill to find out what’s in it.

Now for the main event…

Hawley’s Comet

Four years after his January 6 fist pump made him a Senate pariah, Josh Hawley has reinvented himself as a populist champion for Medicaid—still a lonely position within the G.O.P., and one that’s fueling chatter about his undulled ambition to succeed Trump in 2028.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

Back in 2018, when Rupert Murdoch asked Mitch McConnell which rising Republican he should be featuring on Fox News, the Senate leader suggested Josh Hawley—the catalog-model handsome, Ivy League-educated attorney general running for the upper chamber in Missouri. Hawley, a preternaturally gifted communicator of the party’s conservative message, turned out to be a natural on TV, too. At just 39 years old, he won his campaign by 6 points in 2018 and became a ubiquitous presence in right-wing media in the process. And yet, in the Senate, Hawley’s star status started to wear off almost immediately. While he continued to rally fans among the MAGA base with the anti-establishment, anti-Big Tech persona he’d crafted on the campaign trail, Hawley also evidenced a peculiar talent for misreading the room. Barely two months into his Senate career, he held up a judicial nominee, Neomi Rao, over the issue of abortion—only backing down after getting lectured by McConnell. He pissed off Republicans again when he spiked the nomination of judicial nominee Michael Bogren for not being conservative enough. Later, after Trump lost the 2020 election, Hawley led the Senate’s effort to overturn the results. His infamous fist pump to the MAGA crowd outside the Capitol on January 6 made him a pariah among his colleagues.

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Now, Hawley seems to be reintroducing himself yet again, becoming the loudest (and still somewhat lonely) Republican voice insisting that Medicaid not be cut to pay for Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. It’s not just public posturing—senators told me he’s pushing this line in closed-door meetings as well. “I love his passion,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin told me. It may well be genuine—Hawley represents Missouri, which has enshrined Medicaid expansion in its constitution (despite protests from state Republican lawmakers), and where a fifth of residents rely on the program. Currently, Missouri pays only 20 percent of the cost, with the federal government forking over the rest. Hawley is particularly concerned that his constituents will lose their coverage if Congress winds down the provider tax, thereby increasing the amount that states must contribute, themselves. Of course, it’s a smart bit of political positioning, too. Hawley, after all, is nothing if not hugely ambitious—even if he is persistently dogged by accusations of preferring a French workweek. As memories of the January 6 fiasco fade, and chatter about a potential presidential run heats up again, the Medicaid fight presents an irresistible opportunity for Hawley to present himself as a next-gen MAGA champion of the working class—especially now that his friend and chief Senate rival for that title, J.D. Vance, has left the chamber.

Young MAGA

Hawley can be more ideological than opportunistic. A longtime opponent of abortion, he took credit this week for the F.D.A. promising to investigate the abortion pill mifepristone—a divisive position that Trump himself has steered away from. (His wife, an attorney named Erin Hawley, helped to overturn Roe v. Wade and argued against abortion drugs before the Supreme Court.) But the Medicaid issue seems to fulfill both mandates for Hawley. “Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs,” he wrote in a widely noticed New York Times op-ed last month. Eliminating or scaling back such benefits, he added, would be “politically suicidal.” Plus, as he’s pointed out, Trump agrees with him.

The senator was early to recognize the demographic shift within his party, as working-class and less-educated voters moved into the Republican column. As the Times recently noted, counties with below-average median income accounted for 95 percent of the movement toward Republicans in 2024. A cynic might say Hawley has tailored his beliefs to align with that shift; an optimist would say he’s just listening to his voters. Whatever the case, he managed to beat a formidable Democratic incumbent, Sen. Claire McCaskill, in 2018, even as Republicans were taking steep losses all over the country that wound up handing the House to the Democrats. He was also quick, once in the Senate, to try to reverse engineer some kind of intellectual scaffolding for Trumpism, which put him near the vanguard of a young generation of MAGA brainiacs. It was clear even then that he was positioning himself as a potential Trump heir apparent. (His 2024 ambitions fell by the wayside with Trump’s entry into the race.) Most Republicans I talk to suggest that Hawley’s current crusade is motivated by larger political ambitions. One Republican operative with deep experience in Missouri characterized Hawley as “an intellectual in search of a cause.” So far, Hawley’s crusade has mostly been a solo one. He is not known as a coalition-builder and, in fact, has done more to alienate his colleagues than almost anyone, including Sen. Ted Cruz. “He’s got to get 51 people to support his ideas,” Mullin told me. “Josh wants to make it better for those that he represents. We all want that. But at the end of the day, he’s got to get the support.”

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