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The Capitol Insurrection

The Rise and Fall of Josh Hawley

The Man Who Would Be King’s ambition was to be Trump’s successor. Sadly for him, he was.

Charles Bastille
14 min readJan 10, 2021

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Joshua Hawley’s rise has been meteoric, so much so that he was on an impossible trajectory.

Hawley was the thinking man’s Trump. A Yale grad with a law degree and writing chops that would make him the alt-right’s version of Obama.

Josh Hawley waving away methane emitting from his mouth at an event in Missouri. Image: Natureofthought, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

And, he was everything the Left feared. A man with autocratic tendencies who might actually be competent enough to successfully launch a dictatorship that would probably be way too close to home for Margaret Atwood readers.

He was, according to the New York Times’ Liam Stack, “recruited by party leaders who thought his résumé — Stanford and Yale graduate, law professor, father of two — made him the perfect candidate to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill.”

And beat her he did. He graduated high school in 1998 and became a U.S. Senator just twenty years later.

Then it all came crashing down.

To understand why, it helps to understand just how obsessed with power he is. His ambition was clearly defined early in life, and he never let go.

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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