The Power of Pretending

And your role in identifying it

I don’t really like to write about Josh Hawley much, because I don’t want to come off as being petty. But I received a couple of questions from intelligent people in last week’s ask me anything about Hawley and whether or not he would be our “savior” and stop the worst bill for working people in my lifetime.

So I thought it was important to take a moment to get real about the way these politicians are playing both us and the media, and why they are doing it.

Here are two of the questions I received:

“Do you think Josh Hawley will take a stand against Medicaid cuts in the “big, beautiful, bill”?”

“Will he vote against bbb to protect healthcare for working poor, disabled and seniors in “retirement” homes?”

For background, Hawley likes to repeatedly say that the Republican Party is the party of working people (I think I’ll talk about that in my next post, because it’s true in many ways) and he likes to also claim that he stands for working people (which isn’t true at all). He’s done it numerous times through the years, the liberal media always gives him a lot of press for the words he says, and doesn’t ever cover the fact that he always then turns around and votes against working people.

In the latest episode, regarding Trump’s bill to pass the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history, Hawley did the TV and media rounds lamenting how the Medicaid cuts would hurt the people of Missouri and how he would do “everything in his power” to stop it (his favorite phrase in moments like this).

Liberal media ate it up and put him on a pedestal. I even saw numerous social media posts and lists with Hawley as one of our “potential saviors.”

And then, like he has always done, when it came time to vote he voted to hook up the billionaire class and screw working people.

Even more impressively bold than his pre-vote talking points, he had the balls in his post-vote statement on cutting Medicaid and screwing us all for the donor class, to say that he would “continue to do everything in (his) power to reverse future cuts to Medicaid.”

And, because of that and his earlier statements, people give the man credit for being pro-Medicaid despite just voting for a historic Medicaid cut in order to give billionaires more money.

Doing everything in his power would include exercising his vote. In fact, that is literally the extent of his power and he didn’t use it at all. He didn’t even get any modifications to the bill as far as I can tell. In fact, the Senate bill that he voted for cuts $130 billion more from Medicaid than the House bill did. The bill left his hands worse for Medicaid than it came in.

So why do we smart people and the media continue to fall for the BS from folks like Hawley?

Hope. They prey on the fact that you hope they are actually better than they really are. Or that they have real motivations to help other people like you do. Or that they wouldn’t lie directly to your face. It’s like that crush back in high school that you just knew would like you if only they knew you. Except they just weren’t interested. No matter how much you hoped otherwise.

Your job, and everyone else’s job going forward, is twofold:

(1) Don’t fall for it.
and
(2) Call it out.

Don’t let them manipulate your hope or your internal disposition that there is good in everyone or that they will see the light. This isn’t about good. They don’t act based on goodness. It’s also not about evil with them, though, which is something you should also remember.

The guys like Hawley, the Vance’s and the Cruz’s and the DeSantis’s, all the liars and pretenders, they do what they do because they all want to be President so so so so so badly they don’t and can’t think or care about anything else.

The way to see through them is to look at their actions from that lens.

If you do that, you can predict their behavior 99% of the time and you won’t be fooled. For example, this was my response to those questions about if Hawley would “save” us:

“Ultimately, I do not think he will vote against Trump's signature bill, no. The thing about Hawley is that the number one thing he clearly cares about is being President and all of his actions should be looked at through that lens. Which means that he will definitely spout off about this a lot and that he may even try to do some things to get the bill changed so that he can claim it in his Presidential run. But, for the same reason, if he is unsuccessful there it is very unlikely he votes against the bill because that would be bad for his Presidential ambitions in a Republican primary.”

He is trying to have his cake and eat it to: carving out a lane in a future Republican presidential where he can claim to be the pro-worker candidate and scoop up all the people who like Trump and think he cares about them but otherwise wouldn’t be Republicans, while at the same time not alienating other Republican primary voters or Trump himself by actually doing something real and meaningful for working people.

His goal is to combine that angle with the Christian nationalist/fundamentalist crowd and hope that that is a plurality of the primary electorate.

And every time you and the media fall for his BS on this, you help him advance that goal.

Whether that’s good or bad, who knows. Maybe him being a future Republican presidential nominee (which I find unlikely given his personability problems) would be a good thing for Democrats.

But if you’re going to help him advance his agenda, at least recognize that that’s what’s happening and that he’s not real about this or any of the other things that I could list out but went over so many times in the campaign that I’d rather just move on.

And again, this isn’t just about Hawley. It’s about all the wanna-be presidents out there. If you want to understand them, don’t look at their actions as good or evil, or them making decisions based on what’s best for people or decency or anything other than what they think their route to the Presidency is.

Once you’ve identified that, you can understand everything they do— and also what they won’t do. If you are connected enough, maybe you can even benefit from their ambition by using it to advance your own aligned goals, I know some people who have taken that route with what I would consider mixed results.

Just remember, every time you start to believe that there is something decent there, if they have presidential ambitions, what you are seeing is ambition, not decency.

And not to piss a lot of people off, but you can apply this to politicians from both parties. Yes, with Democrats their ambition will often align with your desires, so it can work out. But then again, sometimes it still doesn’t. Which you have seen with so many selling out to Wall Street, Big Tech, or the donor class over the years and failing to deliver for working people.

Lucas