{"slug": "the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for", "title": "The Post-Trump Republican to Watch (and Watch Out For)", "summary": "Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) chaired an August 4 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled \"Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing,\" where he called surveillance pricing \"one of the biggest scams in American history\" and warned that \"AI surveillance pricing is the unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs.\" Witnesses included Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative, Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project, Hillary Caron of the United Food and Commercial Workers, and former Visa chief data officer Robert Hedges, who described how consumer data is harvested to calculate a buyer's maximum willingness to pay. Owens said she left the hearing worried Democrats \"may be outflanked on this issue,\" citing Hawley's partnerships with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on nearly a dozen bills, including the Break Up Big Medicine Act and the Patients Before Monopolies (PBM) Act.", "body_md": "*Read the top story of the day in your inbox. [Sign up for the Daily Prospect newsletter here.](https://prospect.org/newsletter-sign-up/)*\n\nThe subject of [the August 4 Senate investigative hearing](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/your-data-their-profit-the-consumer-cost-of-ai-surveillance-pricing) was surveillance pricing, and the senator was on fire with indignation. In his opening remarks, he called surveillance pricing “one of the biggest scams in American history.”\n\nSurveillance pricing has become ubiquitous. Rather than using fixed prices, sellers increasingly charge consumers individualized prices based on AI-analyzed personal data from platforms like Amazon or Google and credit card records, calculating what each buyer is likely to pay. The senator continued, “AI surveillance pricing is the unholy trinity of everything Americans hate: spying on people, ripping them off, and taking away jobs.”\n\nThe senator in question was Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. The hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which Hawley chairs, was titled “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.”\n\nHawley’s witness list read like a who’s who of progressive critics. The lead witness was Lindsay Owens, who heads Groundwork Collaborative, a leading think tank critical of corporate abuses (she also serves on the *Prospect* board).\n\n“I came away from the hearing worried that Democrats may be outflanked on this issue,” Owens told me. “Hawley’s outrage was authentic and he made a clear, convincing case against these companies on moral and economic grounds. The party that is willing to stand up to the corporate giants picking America’s pockets will have the advantage.”\n\nOther witnesses included Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), a key group pushing for tougher antitrust regulation and other progressive causes; Hillary Caron of the United Food and Commercial Workers, who testified about targeted price exploitation in grocery chains; and Robert Hedges, former chief data officer at Visa, who discussed the mechanics of consumer data-harvesting used to calculate a customer’s maximum “willingness to pay.”\n\nAttending the hearing was Matt Stoller of AELP, one of America’s notable progressive experts on economic concentration, who writes the brilliant Substack BIG. Stoller was not a witness, but Hawley spotted him and went over to give Stoller a warm greeting. Hawley seems to have recruited the entire progressive anti-corporate infrastructure as his brain trust.\n\nConcluding the hearing, Hawley declared, “The whole point here is to maximize the profit of these already wildly profitable corporations … We need to give consumers and working people and families in this country rights against this kind of surveillance and exploitation.”\n\nHawley’s populist stance on surveillance pricing is far from a one-off. He has partnered with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on nearly a dozen bills, including the [Break Up Big Medicine Act](https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-hawley-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-break-up-big-medicine/), which would prohibit a parent company from owning a medical provider or management services organization or a drug company, a PBM, or an insurer; and the [Patients Before Monopolies (PBM) Act](https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-hawley-harshbarger-auchincloss-renew-bipartisan-push-to-rein-in-pharmacy-benefit-managers-pbms-cut-drug-costs/), which would ban health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) from owning retail or mail-order pharmacies.\n\nHawley has also co-sponsored legislation with several other progressive Democrats. In December 2020, Hawley worked closely with Bernie Sanders to demand $2,000 individual cash payments as part of the year-end COVID relief package and personally sold the idea to President Trump. Though Trump supported the measure, Congress scaled it back to $600. When Joe Biden took office, the American Rescue Plan added another $1,400 to get to the $2,000 number.\n\nYet this is the same Josh Hawley who voted for devastating cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, who supported every conservative judge that tossed out populist policies, and who was a leading 2020 election denier among Republican senators.\n\nWhile a genuine economic populist on some issues, he has refrained from criticizing Trump, [calls himself a Christian nationalist](https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-delivers-national-conservatism-keynote-the-christian-nationalism-we-need/), and is a fiercely partisan Republican. He has mostly been a reliable vote for Trump; one vote tracker shows that he has aligned with the president [98 percent of the time](https://congressvotetracker.org/legislators/josh-hawley.html).\n\nAs a fervent anti-abortion crusader, in 2026 Hawley introduced legislation that would revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone for abortion and prohibit its distribution for that purpose nationwide—effectively negating the right to an abortion for millions of American women. His wife is a prominent anti-abortion litigant.\n\nHe is a leading Republican supporter of ICE and expedited deportation. One of his bills is the Empowering States to Deport Illegal Immigrants Act, which would grant local and state authorities the legal power to remove individuals. As a subcommittee chair, [he has targeted immigrant rights groups](https://missouriindependent.com/2025/08/12/targeted-by-missouri-senator-immigrant-rights-leader-delivered-a-message-to-latinos/), demanding emails, texts, media talking points, donor lists, strategies, and any financial records of money that might have been spent in protesting the immigration raids.\n\nHow do we make sense of this guy?\n\n**A GRADUATE OF STANFORD AND YALE LAW SCHOOL**, Hawley clerked for ultraconservative federal appellate judge Michael McConnell, and then for Chief Justice John Roberts. At Yale, Hawley was articles editor of *[The Yale Law Journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Law_Journal)*, editor of the [*Yale Law & Policy Review*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Law_&_Policy_Review), and president of the school’s [Federalist Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society) chapter. So for starters, Josh Hawley is no liberal, and he is very smart and systematic.\n\nBefore defeating incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill for the Senate seat in 2018 by more than five points in a heavily Democratic wave year, Hawley served as Missouri attorney general. As AG, he joined a multistate lawsuit that sought to nullify [the Affordable Care Act](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/barack-obama-new-book-excerpt-promised-land-obamacare). He filed four separate lawsuits against Obama administration environmental regulations. But he also took on several corporations, including Purdue Pharma and other major distributors of opiates. And he opened investigations against the use of consumer data by Google and Facebook.\n\nAfter the 2020 election, Hawley won Trump’s affection by going all in as an election denier, a stance that almost wrecked his career. In December 2020, he was the first senator to object to certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. Hawley led efforts to get other Republican senators to agree, but ultimately only seven others voted not to certify the election.\n\nThen Hawley doubled down by supporting the invaders of the Capitol in the attempted Trump coup of January 6th. A widely criticized photo shows Hawley outside the Capitol, hailing the rioters with a raised fist.\n\nLeading Missouri Republicans, who had urged Hawley to run for the Senate seat, were quick to distance themselves. Former Republican Sen. John Danforth said that [supporting Hawley](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/01/07/the-biggest-mistake-ive-ever-made-former-missouri-sen-danforth-rues-mentoring-josh-hawley-blames-him-for-capitol-riot/) was the biggest mistake he’d ever made.\n\nThe stance also cost Hawley a book deal. On January 7, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract for Hawley’s book, *The Tyranny of Big Tech*, saying that it “cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.” The book was later picked up by the ultraconservative publisher Regnery. Book reviews noted that while Hawley did criticize the selling of data and invasions of privacy on the part of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, he seemed more incensed by Big Tech’s relatively liberal stances on social issues.\n\nHawley soon dropped the election denials in favor of rebranding himself as a labor Republican. Early in 2025, he circulated “A Pro-Worker Framework for the 119th U.S. Congress,” proposing civil penalties for employers who engage in unfair labor practices, bans on captive-audience meetings, and expedited union representation elections. He co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) called the Faster Labor Contracts Act, to write into law a requirement that employers begin negotiations within ten days of union certification, and use binding arbitration if a contract is not agreed to within 120 days.\n\nOn the other hand, when his vote might have counted, he never supported the PRO Act, which would have significantly reformed labor law to ensure workers’ right to unionize.\n\nWhen Hawley, facing re-election, walked a Teamsters picket line in March 2024, Jim Kabell, the retired president of the Missouri-Kansas-Nebraska Conference of Teamsters, wrote a withering op-ed in *The Kansas City Star* titled “[Anti-Union Josh Hawley’s Picket Line Pandering Is Shameless, Phony Political Theater](https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article287207065.html).” Kabell pointed out that Hawley had opposed an increase in Missouri’s minimum wage, supported state right-to-work legislation, and had never before lifted a finger to help the labor movement. Hawley subsequently walked a UAW picket line.\n\nHawley’s carefully contrived blend of social conservatism, loyalty to Trump, and anti-corporate populism seems one part authentic concern for working- and middle-class constituents and one part astute opportunism. But whether Hawley impulsively overreached as an election denier and then backed off, or deliberately devised the slavishly pro-Trump stance to offset his attacks on corporations, the posture worked.\n\nIn 2024, running for re-election against a Democratic economic populist, Lucas Kunce, Hawley won by 14 points. (Trump carried Missouri by 18 points.)\n\n**“IF YOU ARE A REPUBLICAN AND YOU DECIDE** to go after Wall Street, you need allies,” says Matt Stoller. “Hawley’s Republican allies are culture warriors. And it’s sincere. He wants to be part of a coalition that takes apart Wall Street, which he thinks is bad for families, communities, and the church.”\n\nBut when it comes to taking apart Wall Street, most of your allies are economic populist Democrats. Hawley and Warren, for instance, were lead co-sponsors of the [Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act of 2026](https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/warren-hawley-cortez-masto-gallego-britt-lead-senators-in-reintroducing-bill-to-hold-executives-accountable-after-big-bank-failures) to ensure that big-bank executives are not allowed to collect massive paychecks and bonuses and walk away if their bank blows up. And the two partnered on a [successful amendment](https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-hawley-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-limit-stock-buybacks-in-defense-contracting-following-president-trumps-executive-order/) in this year’s defense authorization bill to limit stock buybacks and excessive executive compensation by defense contractors.\n\nThey also co-sponsored a successful bipartisan [amendment](https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-hawley-file-bipartisan-amendment-to-protect-biden-admins-rule-to-guarantee-automatic-refunds-for-cancelled-or-delayed-flights/) to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization, requiring airlines to guarantee automatic cash refunds for canceled or significantly delayed flights—defeating airline lobbyists’ efforts to block the provision.\n\n“I first started noticing him when he was attorney general in Missouri and he would do these things that were surprisingly populist,” Warren told me. As a very well-informed legislator, Hawley seizes moments when they occur. “A door will open a crack for a possible collaboration and he can make a quick decision,” Warren added. “That doesn’t mean we agree on everything.”\n\nHawley has co-sponsored pro-consumer and anti-corporate legislation with Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) with bills to [lower the cost of prescription drugs](https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/05/congress/senators-unveil-bipartisan-plan-to-lower-drug-costs-00326246), and worked with Sanders on a bill to [cap credit card interest rates](https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-sanders-introduce-bill-to-curb-exploitative-credit-card-interest-rates-provide-relief-to-working-americans/). He was [one of just three Republicans](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/senate-crypto-democrats-stablecoin-campaign-00338863) to join with most Democrats in voting against an industry-backed crypto regulation bill.\n\nIn 2023, Hawley introduced the Ending Corporate Influence on Elections Act, a bill that would reverse aspects of [*Citizens United v. FEC*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC), specifically banning publicly traded companies from making independent expenditures, political advertisements for campaigns, and [super PAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_PAC) contributions. He has worked with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on a [consumer protection framework for AI](https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-and-hawley-announce-bipartisan-framework-on-artificial-intelligence-legislation).\n\nHawley has also been a fierce critic of the bipartisan free-trade orthodoxy. [In a *New York* *Times* op-ed](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/opinion/hawley-supply-chain-trade-policy.html) published in October 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, Hawley criticized the “ceding of sovereignty” to the World Trade Organization. Free-trade policies, he wrote, “have helped multinational corporations boost their profits by exploiting cheap labor abroad and offshoring America’s industrial commons and the capabilities of its manufacturing sector. As a result, thousands of factories have shuttered, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas and the economic security of the United States is now more vulnerable to unpredictable crises like global pandemics, and America is dangerously dependent on the productive capacity of China, our chief adversary.”\n\nSherrod Brown could not have said it better.\n\n**HAWLEY HAS BEEN ABLE TO BREAK WITH TRUMP** occasionally without getting on Trump’s personal shit list. He has thus bulletproofed himself against attacks as a RINO by largely refraining from explicit criticisms of the president’s policies.\n\nOne big exception came in May 2025, when [he published an op-ed](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html) in *The New York Times* urging his fellow Republicans not to cut Medicaid as part of [the budget package](https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/05/12/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-delivers-on-president-trumps-priorities-to-restore-and-expand-trump-era-growth-and-relief-for-families-workers-and-small-businesses/) being sold by Trump as “one big, beautiful bill.” He warned that the Republican Party was facing an “identity crisis” and that taking health insurance away from low-income Americans would be “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” He concluded, “Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs. More than that, our voters depend on those programs.”\n\nHowever, Hawley made no serious effort to hold the budget hostage for changes in what would end up as $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, and on June 28 he voted for final passage, after the effective date of some cuts was delayed and more money was found for rural hospitals. He then rather pathetically [introduced legislation](https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-introduces-legislation-to-prevent-future-medicaid-cuts-invest-in-rural-hospitals/) to prevent the Medicaid cuts he had voted for, after they were already enacted. That bill has not been taken up, which is true of most of his bipartisan bills. When he had leverage to stop the Medicaid cuts, he chose his president and his party.\n\nThere is a pattern here. Hawley is a populist when it’s easy. Is he willing to be a populist when it’s politically hard—when it means crossing the White House or the Senate leadership? So far, infrequently.\n\nAs an isolationist conservative, Hawley did cast one vote invoking the War Powers Act in January of this year, joining four other Republicans led by Rand Paul who were concerned about Trump’s moves in Venezuela. [Trump then said on Truth Social](https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/01/08/congress/trump-war-powers-republicans-election-00716332) that Republicans “should be ashamed of the Senators that just voted with Democrats to take our Powers.” These senators, he declared, “should never be elected to office again.”\n\nHawley quickly backed off. He cast no other War Powers Act votes; and despite his own history as a severe critic of quagmire wars, has not been a vocal critic of Trump’s Iran policy. Thus does Hawley thread the needle.\n\n**HAWLEY IS TODAY’S EQUIVALENT OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED** a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, combining nationalism and cultural conservatism with serious economic populism. And he is more than a superficial convert. In 2008, at the age of 28, long before he entered politics, Hawley published an intellectual biography with Yale University Press titled *Theodore Roosevelt, Preacher of Righteousness*.\n\nHawley’s posture suggests a lane for a post-Trump Republican Party drastically different from one whose presidential nominee in 2028 might be JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz. All three show up regularly on lists of contenders for the succession, but Hawley doesn’t. He is not explicitly running, and so the pundits have mostly missed him.\n\nAll three of the others are already trying to undermine each other and fighting for the allegiance of the seriously dwindling MAGA base, while Hawley stays under the radar, honing a muscular and largely credible economic populism that seeks to be the antithesis of Trump’s fake populism. When Vice President Vance took an oblique one-line poke at AI, in a remark on an obscure evangelical podcast (he noted the tendency of chatbots to flatter their users as “kind of Satanic”), [it was front-page news and interpreted as a dig at Trump](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/vance-called-ai-satanic-he-struck-a-chord-among-christian-republicans-dcc34048), who is a big promoter of AI. Hawley’s far more detailed and scathing hearing, by contrast, received almost no coverage, though the senator’s first-rate media operation got Fox to run it live.\n\nTrump has explicitly shunned bipartisanship, except when the House or Senate needs to peel off a few Democratic votes to pass odious legislation. Hawley displays what a post-Trump bipartisanship might actually look like.\n\nThe commentariat likes to write that the post-Trump Republican Party will be a battle between the heirs of MAGA and a regrouping of badly battered traditional corporate conservatives. Hawley suggests a third way.\n\nIs Hawley quietly preparing a presidential run? Some Democrats whom I spoke with for this piece think that he is. He would be a far more formidable opponent than one of the MAGA leftovers whose era is already fading, or a corporate Republican lacking Trump’s dark charisma.\n\nOthers think that he is positioning himself to have influence over what will be a painful debate over the future direction of the Republican Party, assuming that the party suffers a serious defeat in 2026 and 2028. At 46, he has plenty of time to play either role, or both. For now, he is pretty much a faction of one.\n\n“Hawley is a genuine intellectual,” says Matt Stoller. “He has thought through what he wants to accomplish.” And what he wants is a blend of economic populism and extreme cultural conservatism.\n\n[In a remarkably candid Senate floor speech in June 2020](https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/joshhawleysenatefloorbostock.htm), Hawley excoriated the Supreme Court for its 6-3 ruling in *Bostock v. Clayton County*—in which Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that the prohibition against sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act covered sexual orientation and gender identity. Hawley viewed this ruling as a betrayal of a tacit deal between cultural conservatives and corporate conservatives.\n\nHawley declared, “The bargain is that you go along with the Party establishment … in return the establishment will put some judges on the bench who supposedly will protect your constitutional rights to freedom of worship … We were told that we’re supposed to shut up while the Party establishment focuses more on cutting taxes and handing out favors for corporations—multinational corporations who don’t share our values.” That deal, Hawley declared, sounding like a jilted lover, “is over.”\n\nJosh Hawley is hardly the first politician to blend opportunism with conviction, and he does it well. In 2028, the top issue will be the economic screwing that ordinary Americans have been experiencing—not just under Trump, but for decades.\n\nTrump’s Iran war and his cuts in social benefits have intensified that assault. So have the kinds of corporate abuses that Hawley has attacked.\n\nA Republican who does not have a plausible story and set of remedies for the economic mess will not be able to compensate by waving the bloody shirt of DEI, or transsexuals, or Haitian immigrants who eat house pets. That’s yesterday’s campaign, and it has been overtaken by reality, except for the ever-narrowing MAGA cult. Hawley’s strategy is to step around the Trump mess, define a new political era, and speak directly to working people.\n\nHawley does this better than any other Republican. The Democrats can do it still better, because they are not hobbled by Trump’s legacy of corruption or the rest of the Republican pro-corporate baggage—but only if they nominate the right Democrat.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for", "canonical_source": "https://prospect.org/2026/09/10/trump-republican-to-watch-josh-hawley/", "published_at": "2026-09-10 09:15:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-10 09:23:19.381199+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-ethics", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Josh Hawley", "Lindsay Owens", "Groundwork Collaborative", "Lee Hepner", "American Economic Liberties Project", "Hillary Caron", "United Food and Commercial Workers", "Robert Hedges"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-post-trump-republican-to-watch-and-watch-out-for.jsonld"}}