Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Joe Biden's Inaugural Address: A Call for Unity and Return to Our Better Angels
At a moment of historic firsts — the first female, Black and South Asian vice president, the first inaugural address given at a recent crime scene, the first passing of presidential power from a classless, unhinged narcissist who tried to destroy the constitutional order — the most compelling attribute of President Biden’s inaugural address was its moral normalcy. I had a cascading sense of relief at hearing a president take the “pro” side of empathy, compassion and inclusion.
After Donald Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural address — essentially declaring war on the whole congressional “establishment” that sat in uncomfortable attendance — former president George W. Bush reportedly commented, “That was some weird s--t.” Biden’s speech was neither. Behind the new president’s words you could almost hear the work crews rebuilding America’s moral and political guardrails. That infrastructure project is a precondition for the return of a politics that is normal and noble.
The address was more authentic to Biden than rhetorically ambitious, objectives that typically diverge. It was clearly intended to give a sense of the president as a man — upbeat, forthright, practical, welcoming. The speech was a rhetorical X-ray. It showed that Biden’s heart is in the right place — something that could not be assumed in Trump’s alien anatomy. It is usually not high praise to say that an inaugural address puts you to sleep. But I will sleep better at night knowing that a man of admirable character holds the presidency.
Biden gave one answer that is tougher than it first sounds. Americans can unite “to fight the foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness.” He was careful to say, “We can treat each other with dignity and respect” rather than “We will treat each other with dignity and respect” — an appropriate humility. But this is not really an invitation to unity, defined as unanimity. His speech declared an intention to build a social consensus against the destructive political habits of a significant portion of the population — anger, hatred, extremism, lawlessness. This will involve drawing some hard lines, such as: “There is truth, and there are lies.” And Biden held political leaders particularly responsible for confusing those categories. The president, to his credit, is making outreach for a specific purpose: the vindication of reality.
Here is Biden's inaugural address in full:
Chief Justice Roberts, Vice President Harris. Speaker Pelosi, Leaders Schumer, McConnell, Vice President Pence, my distinguished guests and my fellow Americans, this is America’s day.
This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope of renewal and resolve through a crucible for the ages. America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The people, the will of the people, has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded.
We’ve learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.
From now, on this hallowed ground, where just a few days ago, violence sought to shake the Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power, as we have for more than two centuries.
As we look ahead in our uniquely American way: restless, bold, optimistic, and set our sights on the nation we can be and we must be.
I thank my predecessors of both parties for their presence here today. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. And I know, I know the resilience of our Constitution and the strength, the strength of our nation. As does President Carter, who I spoke with last night, who cannot be with us today, but whom we salute for his lifetime of service.
I’ve just taken the sacred oath each of those patriots have taken. The oath, first sworn by George Washington. But the American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us, on we the people who seek a more perfect union.
This is a great nation. We are good people. And over the centuries, through storm and strife, in peace and in war, we've come so far. But we still have far to go. We'll press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities, much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.
Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now. A once-in-a-century virus that silently stalks the country. It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.
The cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: Unity. Unity.
In another January, on New Year’s Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, and I quote: “If my name ever goes down into history, it’ll be for this act. And my whole soul is in it.”
My whole soul was in it today. On this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause.
Uniting to fight the foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. With unity, we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus. We can reward, reward work, and rebuild the middle class and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.
I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real, but I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we're all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never assured.
Through civil war, the Great Depression, world war, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice and setbacks, our better angels have always prevailed. In each of these moments, enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward. And we can do that now. History, faith and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other not as adversaries, but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace — only bitterness and fury. No progress — only exhausting outrage. No nation — only a state of chaos.
This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as the United States of America. If we do that, I guarantee you we will not fail. We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we’ve acted together.
And so today at this time in this place, let’s start afresh, all of us. Let’s begin to listen to one another again. Hear one another, see one another, show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war. And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.
My fellow Americans, we have to be different than this. America has to be better than this. And I believe America is so much better than this. Just look around. Here we stand in the shadow of the Capitol dome, as was mentioned earlier, completed amid the Civil War, when the Union itself was literally hanging in the balance. Yet we endured, we prevailed.
Here we stand looking out on the great Mall where Dr. King spoke of his dream. Here we stand, where 108 years ago, at another inaugural, thousands of protesters tried to block brave women marching for the right to vote. And today we marked the swearing-in of the first woman in American history elected to national office: Vice President Kamala Harris. Don’t tell me things can’t change.
Here we stand across the Potomac from Arlington Cemetery, where heroes who gave the last full measure of devotion rest in eternal peace. And here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground.
It did not happen. It will never happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever.
To all those who supported our campaign, I’m humbled by the faith you’ve placed in us. To all those who did not support us, let me say this: Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That’s democracy. That’s America. The right to dissent, peaceably, the guardrails of our republic, is perhaps this nation’s greatest strength.
Yet hear me clearly: Disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans. All Americans. And I promise you I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.
Many centuries ago, St. Augustine, a saint in my church, wrote to the people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor and, yes, the truth.
Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation, to defend the truth and defeat the lies.
Look — I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation. I understand they worry about their jobs. I understand, like my dad, they lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering: Can I keep my health care? Can I pay my mortgage? Thinking about their families, about what comes next. I promise you, I get it.
But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don’t look like you or worship the way you do, or don’t get their news from the same sources you do. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural vs. urban, conservative vs. liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes. Because here’s the thing about life: There’s no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days when you need a hand. There are other days when we’re called to lend a hand. That’s how it has to be. That’s what we do for one another. And if we are this way, our country will be stronger, more prosperous, more ready for the future. And we can still disagree.
My fellow Americans, in the work ahead of us, we’re going to need each other. We need all our strength to persevere through this dark winter. We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation. One nation.
And I promise you this, as the Bible says: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” We will get through this together. Together.
Look, folks. All my colleagues I served with in the House and the Senate up there, we all understand the world is watching, watching all of us today. So here’s my message to those beyond our borders: America has been tested and we’ve come out stronger for it. We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again. Not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. And we’ll lead, not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.
We’ll be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security. Look — you all know we’ve been through so much in this nation. And my first act as president, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those who we lost this past year to the pandemic. Those 400,000 fellow Americans. Moms, dads, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends, neighbors and co-workers. We will honor them by becoming the people and the nation we know we can and should be. So I ask you, let’s say a silent prayer for those who’ve lost their lives, those left behind, and for our country. Amen.
Folks, this is a time of testing. We face an attack on our democracy and on truth, a raging virus, growing inequity, the sting of systemic racism, a climate in crisis, America’s role in the world. Any one of these will be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is, we face them all at once, presenting this nation with one of the gravest responsibilities we’ve had. Now we’re going to be tested. Are we going to step up? All of us? It’s time for boldness, for there is so much to do. And this is certain, I promise you: We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era.
Will we rise to the occasion is the question. Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children? I believe we must. I’m sure you do as well. I believe we will. And when we do, we’ll write the next great chapter in the history of the United States of America. The American story. A story that might sound something like a song that means a lot to me. It’s called “American Anthem.” There’s one verse that stands out, at least for me, and it goes like this:
The work and prayers of a century have brought us to this day.
What shall be our legacy? What will our children say?
Let me know in my heart when my days are through.
America, America, I gave my best to you.
Let's add. Let us add our own work and prayers to the unfolding story of our great nation. If we do this, then when our days are through, our children and our children's children will say of us: They gave their best, they did their duty, they healed a broken land.
My fellow Americans, I close the day where I began, with a sacred oath before God and all of you. I give you my word, I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution. I’ll defend our democracy. I’ll defend America and I will give all, all of you. Keep everything I do in your service, thinking not of power, but of possibilities, not of personal interest, but the public good. And together we shall write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity, not division. Of light, not darkness. A story of decency and dignity, love and healing, greatness and goodness. May this be the story that guides us. The story that inspires us and the story that tells ages yet to come that we answered the call of history. We met the moment. Democracy and hope, truth and justice did not die on our watch, but thrived. That America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forebears, one another and generations to follow.
So, with purpose and resolve, we turn to those tasks of our time. Sustained by faith, driven by conviction, devoted to one another and the country we love with all our hearts. May God bless America and may God protect our troops. Thank you, America.
January 20, 2021: A New Day in America
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will unleash a full-scale assault on his predecessor’s legacy on Wednesday, acting hours after taking the oath of office to sweep aside President Trump’s pandemic response, reverse his environmental agenda, tear down his anti-immigration policies, bolster the sluggish economic recovery and restore federal efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
Moving with an urgency not seen from any other modern president, Mr. Biden will sign 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations from the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, according to his top policy advisers.
Individually, the actions are targeted at what the incoming president views as specific, egregious abuses by Mr. Trump during four tumultuous years. Collectively, his advisers said Mr. Biden’s assertive use of executive authority was intended to be a hefty and visible down payment on one of his primary goals as president: to, as they said Tuesday, “reverse the gravest damages” done to the country by Mr. Trump.
“We don’t have a second to waste when it comes to tackling the crises we face as a nation,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday night on Twitter after arriving in Washington on the eve of his inauguration. “That’s why after being sworn in tomorrow, I’ll get right to work.”
Mr. Biden’s actions largely fall into four broad categories that his aides described as the “converging crises” he will inherit at noon Wednesday: the pandemic, economic struggles, immigration and diversity issues, and the environment and climate change.
In some cases, Mr. Biden plans to unilaterally and immediately reverse policies and procedures that Mr. Trump put in place. In other instances, limits on his authority require the new president to direct others in his administration to act or even to begin what could be a long process to shift the federal government in a new direction.
“A new day,” Jeff Zients, the coordinator of Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response, said on Tuesday. “A new, different approach to managing the country’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.”
One of Mr. Biden’s first actions on Wednesday will be to sign an executive order making Mr. Zients the government’s official Covid-19 response coordinator, reporting to the president. The order will also restore the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group that Mr. Trump had disbanded.
Mr. Biden will also sign an executive order that Mr. Trump had steadfastly refused to issue during his tenure — imposing a national mandate requiring masks and physical distancing in all federal buildings, on all federal lands and by all federal employees, officials said. And he will terminate Mr. Trump’s efforts to leave the World Health Organization, sending Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, to participate in the group’s annual executive board meeting on Thursday.
He will sign an executive order revoking the Trump administration’s plan to exclude noncitizens from the census count and a second order aimed at bolstering the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects “Dreamers” from deportation. Mr. Trump had sought for years to end the program, known as DACA.
Mr. Biden will repeal two Trump-era proclamations that established a ban on travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries, ending one of his predecessor’s earliest actions to limit immigration. Advisers said Mr. Biden would direct the State Department to develop ways to address the harm caused to those prevented from coming to the United States because of the ban.
Another executive order will revoke enhanced enforcement of immigration violations aimed at people already inside the United States. Another will block deportation of Liberians who had been living in the United States. And another will halt construction of Mr. Trump’s border wall — which was devised to keep immigrants out of the country — while Mr. Biden’s administration examines the legality of the wall’s funding and its construction contracts.
Mr. Biden, who takes office after a year of racial upheaval in the country, will move quickly on Wednesday to begin to unwind some of Mr. Trump’s policies that he views as contributing to the polarization and division, according to his top domestic policy adviser.
Susan Rice, who will lead the president’s Domestic Policy Council, said that Mr. Biden would sign a broad executive order aimed at requiring all federal agencies to make equity a central factor in their work. The order will, among other things, require that they deliver a report within 200 days to address how to remove barriers to opportunities in policies and programs.
Another executive order will require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr. Trump’s administration. Another will overturn a Trump executive order that limited the ability of federal government agencies to use diversity and inclusion training.
And Mr. Biden will cancel Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission, which released a report on Monday that historians said distorted the history of slavery in the United States.
Many of Mr. Trump’s most significant actions as president were aimed at limiting regulation of the environment and pulling back from efforts to combat climate change. Mr. Biden’s earliest actions as president will take aim at those policies, officials said.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Goodbye and Good Riddance to the Trump Era
To me, the most striking feature of Trump’s presidency was that year after year he kept surprising us on the downside. Year after year he plumbed new depths of norm-busting, lying and soiling the reputations of everyone who entered his orbit. But he never once — not once — surprised us on the upside with an act of kindness, self-criticism or reaching out to opponents.
His character was his destiny, and it became ours, too. Well, I’ve got good news. We can recover, provided that we all — politicians, media, activists — focus on doing what Trump never could: surprising each other on the upside.
Upside surprises are a hugely underrated force in politics and diplomacy. They are what break bonds of pessimism and push out the boundaries of what we think possible. They remind us that the future is not our fate, but a choice — to let the past bury the future or the future bury the past.
[W]e live for surprises on the upside from our leaders.
I have been watching Mitt Romney repeatedly put his oath to defend the Constitution ahead of his party and personal political interests. Along the way, we’ve gotten to know each other. We don’t agree on everything, but there’s mutual respect. Romney recently introduced me for a speech I gave virtually to a bipartisan climate action coalition in Utah. That surprised some people, and maybe made them look at the whole issue differently. It’s surprising what can happen when we surprise for the better.
Liz Cheney just totally surprised me on the upside last week by putting country and Constitution before party and personal ambition and voting to impeach Trump. I knew her when she worked on Middle East democracy issues. Makes me want to reconnect.
Last May, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, the rapper Killer Mike was enlisted by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to help quell the violence in Black neighborhoods. He surprised me when he scolded violent Atlanta protesters . . . .
So, I have two asks of every American: Give Joe Biden a chance to surprise you on the upside and challenge yourself to surprise him.
American businesses need to surprise us by telling Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch that their network fueled the Big Lie that led to the ransacking of the Capitol and they are no longer going to advertise on any show that spreads conspiracy theories. The best news I heard this week is that My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell — an avid Trump backer and advertiser on Fox, who has pressed debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged — said Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Wayfair and other retailers were dropping his products. Good for them.
There is no equivalent on the left to the right-wing white supremacists and other extremists who just ransacked the Capitol. Not even remotely. But liberals would surprise a lot of people on the right, and maybe even get a few to support Biden, if they forcefully rejected political correctness when it stifles dissent and called out not only violence by the police — a huge priority — but also the sources of violence in minority neighborhoods that are terrorizing Black, brown and white residents alike. I see it in my hometown, Minneapolis, every day.
And now that the threat of Trump is gone, all of us in the news business need to get back to separating news from opinions. We need more places where Americans of all political stripes can feel that they’re getting their news straight — without being enraged, divided or woke; leave that for the opinion sections.
Josh Hawley: A Portrait of Selling One's Soul
The Stanford historian David M. Kennedy has spent a career as an authority on American society and politics; winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote one of the most popular textbooks on American history and has delved into a number of controversies and political movements. But he has struggled to come up with any analogue from the past for what he describes as the “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “This is a unique moment,” he says, “where a degree of insanity and irrationality has infected a large enough sector of our body politic that we’re really sick. I think we are politically sick, and I use that word advisedly.”
Kennedy doesn’t see the Capitol rioters as the only symptom, and he doesn’t hold them solely responsible for the country’s current malady. Blame—and, he says, “shame”—also lie with elected leaders who furthered President Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election. And among the most prominent of them is one of Kennedy’s former students, “arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years”: Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
From 1998 to 2002, Kennedy was Hawley’s adviser at Stanford. Hawley, a history major who graduated with honors and wrote a thesis about Theodore Roosevelt, wasn’t just another young man in a hurry, passing through a top university. Kennedy remembers him as deeply engaged and thoughtful, and a serious scholar of the Constitution.
Then, after the election, the professor watched in shock as his former star student became the first senator to say he would challenge the certification of Joe Biden’s win, openly trying to prevent the people’s chosen president from taking office. On January 6, Hawley was photographed giving a raised fist to protesters outside the Capitol as he walked in, planning to object to the electoral results. Even after the rioters breached the Senate chamber and violently interrupted the process, he refused to backtrack on his claims, refuted by court ruling after court ruling, of “irregularities” and “fraud” in the election.
“I absolutely could not have predicted that the bright, idealistic, clear-thinking young student that I knew would follow this path,” says Kennedy.
Conversations with more than a dozen of Hawley’s Stanford classmates and a half-dozen faculty members who knew him all raise versions of the same question: What happened to the person they knew?
Like Kennedy, they paint a portrait of a studious intellectual who was ambitious but principled. At a largely liberal, secular campus, Hawley was open about being a conservative Christian—but not dogmatically so. Many say they simply can’t square the man they knew with the one they’ve seen splashed across their TV screens and social media feeds in the past few weeks.
Hawley’s response to the election has already gotten him denounced by his longtime political mentor in Missouri, called to resign or be expelled by some of his Senate colleagues, vilified by columnists and editorial boards across the political spectrum, and condemned by more than a thousand of his fellow alumni. Meanwhile, he’s been embraced by the likes of Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson. How has a man educated at some of America’s most prestigious institutions ended up positioning himself as an anti-elite heir to Trump?
Some of the explanation for his transformation lies in his journey into elected politics since he left Stanford, climbing from Yale Law grad to attorney general of Missouri to senator in just over a decade. Part of the answer also lies in the particular politics of our era, when Trump has pulled his party away from its longtime policy values and moved it sharply in a more populist direction. But the years Hawley spent in college, despite the noticeable differences in his character, offer some insights into his more recent behavior.
It was no secret that Hawley had his eyes on public office from a very early age, and, if anything, the image his undergraduate peers and professors most often saw back then was one carefully crafted to help get him there. It’s possible, if not likely, that Hawley’s rebranding is just another instance in a long line of moves to position himself, ultimately, for the presidency.
“It’s a pretty cynical calculation,” says Kennedy. “But that’s the only explanation I think that fits the facts.”
Hawley stood out early on. As a prep school student before college, he had already written several political columns for his hometown newspaper, and at Stanford, he joined the Stanford Review, the right-wing student publication founded more than a decade earlier by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel. There are few indications Hawley was particularly interested in or concerned about the burgeoning Big Tech scene, as he is today. But, unlike the vast majority of his peers at the time, he was clearly a conservative and inclined toward politics.
“He was very certain of his political ideology, even at that age, even at 18,” says Brooke Eisele, who also wrote for the Review and was a close friend of Hawley’s from the time they both lived in the same freshman dorm. “I think a lot of us came in with our predispositions and kind of felt things out and shaped ourselves there. He came in with a rock-solid view of the world.”
He wasn’t like one of these people like Stephen Miller, who was excoriating liberals and fueling culture wars on campus, at least not that I was aware of,” says a classmate who knew Hawley but spoke only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of being targeted violently by supporters of the senator.
Still, some classmates say, there were hints of Hawley’s current brand of politics, which has a populist tinge but appears to be anchored by a Christian nationalist viewpoint. Several of them remember him as someone who took his evangelical faith seriously enough to shape his civic worldview. Colin Mathewson, who did Bible study with Hawley when they lived in the same freshman dorm and was his roommate one summer in D.C., when Hawley interned at the Heritage Foundation, says Hawley’s politics seemed to come “from a religious source and had a religious kind of purpose to it. In my experience with Josh, the politics were secondary to what the sort of religious truth was.”
Other classmates, however, say that while Hawley was ardently against abortion, his faith during college seemed less an obvious motivation for his political aspirations and more a guide for his social interactions. Friends of Hawley’s told POLITICO they didn’t ever see Hawley drink, smoke or “bring a girl back” to his dorm room. By many accounts, he preferred to stay in and study on weekend nights than to go out and party.
Gregory, the historian, says he remembers making a prediction to colleagues at the time Hawley was a student: “He would eventually become at least a U.S. senator,” Gregory guessed. “It sounds like a crazy thing to say about any undergraduate, but he really was that extraordinary.”
The classmate who spoke to POLITICO anonymously for fear of violence suggested that image was at least partly cultivated. Hawley would make a point to meet with professors outside of class, to seek out prestigious advisers and to win academic awards, the classmate said, adding, “It was clear he was positioning himself for advancement.”
Not everyone admired Hawley’s focus on meticulously fashioning his profile. As soon as he arrived on campus, he joined the freshman men’s rowing team—a grueling experience, according to teammates, that included early mornings on the water and afternoon workouts in the gym.
One teammate, who asked not to be named, also for fear of retribution from Hawley’s supporters, felt Hawley complained too much at practice and didn’t put in the same effort as others. “There was a lot of entitlement mentality,” the rower says. “Like, ‘This should be different because I want it to be different.’ I also got that he was more interested in appearing to be an athlete than actually being an athlete.”
Hawley only lasted weeks on the team before quitting. Bard Luippold, another rower, says Hawley cited a shoulder injury from an exercise that wasn’t part of the team’s training regimen. “I just felt like Josh didn’t want to stay with us, like he didn’t want to make it work, and that he had chosen himself over the team,” Luippold recalls. “That impression stuck with me.” A third crew teammate, who says he is surprised that Hawley refers to himself as a college rower to this day, adds, “When you look at what happened over the last year, maybe he’s just really not a good team player overall.”
On January 4, a group of prominent historians and constitutional scholars put out a statement warning against anti-democratic efforts to oppose the election certification. Two of the signatories were Hawley’s mentors at Stanford, Kennedy and Rakove. Yet two days later, Hawley went ahead with his challenge anyway—a decision Kennedy calls “irresponsible,” “pigheaded” and “absolutely reprehensible.” Rakove describes it as “despicable.”
To me, it’s a great mystery why someone so young with so much promise would prostitute himself or compromise himself so early when he didn’t really have to do it. He was not politically dependent on Trump to make his career in Missouri politics,” adds Rakove. “But I’m not as surprised as I am depressed.”
Hawley’s professors and classmates have found themselves poring over their memories of the now-senator—considering the thinkers he studied, and the ideas he appeared to take seriously—and feeling even more confused about why he seems to have emerged to stand so strongly against those principles.
“Hawley is misrepresenting basic elements of free speech and constitutional democracy, and he knows better than that,” says Jim Steyer, another Stanford professor who didn’t teach Hawley but remembers him as a student. “He knew better as a freshman at Stanford, for gosh sake.”
“All I feel is a sense of just utter bewilderment and tremendous sadness,” says Gregory, the history professor who is now at Notre Dame.
Many classmates who knew Hawley express dismay that he came out as a Trump supporter to begin with.
“It’s been bothering me,” says Eisele, who was once a close friend, “just trying to square the current reality with my memory of him when he was younger. The Josh I knew in college was very logical and he had a deep respect for democratic institutions and the constitution.”
“He’s extremely sharp and always thinking two steps ahead, so the only thing I can think is that he knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s calculating that it’s going to help his political career,” Eisele says. “That’s the part I didn’t see when we were younger. I guess I didn’t see the calculation. Maybe I was just naïve.”
Perhaps most distressed of all is literatures, cultures and languages professor Elizabeth Bernhardt, who says she knew Hawley during all four years he was at Stanford and later attended his wedding. . . . Bernhardt’s class was called “Letters and Diaries of Resistance in Fascist Germany,” and she says it earned the subtitle from students of “a course about doing the right thing.” The first sentence of the syllabus in 1999, when Hawley took the class, was: “How one develops the courage to do what is right and maintains the strength to resist evil in the face of personal persecution are fundamental human dilemmas.” Through reading a series of letters, diaries and memoirs from Nazi Germany, the syllabus continues, students were exposed to individuals who had “the courage, the intellectual and/or spiritual means, or the strength to speak and act against the evil with which they were confronted.”
“This was a smart person, the kind of person that you want to have in class, but the one that you hope goes on the right road, not the wrong road. I would have thought that he was going to end up being the most brilliant statesman that I could imagine,” Bernhardt said. “I just didn’t expect a mindless follower.”
Beware of anyone so blinded by ambition and so obsessed with their profile. I was guilty of the latter during my years in the closet and I can only assume (in my opinion) Hawley has something to hide besides trying to further his overweening ambition.
Coming to Terms With America's History of White Supremacy
When domestic terrorists fueled by outlandish conspiracy theories spun by a white supremacist president of the United States stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to overthrow the government, I was shocked. But not surprised. Our history is filled with eruptions of violence when our nation’s entrenched system of white supremacy feels that its place at the center of American life is threatened.
David Blight, Ron Chernow and Nikole Hannah-Jones, three chroniclers of our fraught racial history, were the perfect people to put the Capitol insurrection into greater perspective. “We have plenty of precedents for what happened on January 6, not at the federal level, but in white-on-black violence in the South during Reconstruction,” Chernow told me in a primer he emailed to me before appearing on my Sunday show on MSNBC. “During this dreadful period, we had numerous cases of rampaging whites invading legislatures.” Chernow is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of President Ulysses S. Grant.
“In July 1866, a White mob, backed by the police, stormed the Mechanics’ Institute in New Orleans, where a convention was meeting to shape a new constitution to safeguard Black rights. 34 Blacks and 3 White Republicans were butchered,” recounted Chernow. “In April 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, as many as 200 Blacks were slaughtered at the county courthouse — the worst carnage perpetrated during Reconstruction.”
The horrific violence was fanned by comments from elected officials, Chernow pointed out. “For days before the bloody assault on the Mechanics’ Institute convention in New Orleans in July 1866, for instance, Mayor John Monroe had issued incendiary statements that whipped up the white supremacist community into a frenzy,” he said.
And then there was the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in response to the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote. “Southern whites realized that, if Black men dared to vote, they would come to power in the South. The Ku Klux Klan emerged as the terrifying response to this situation,” Chernow noted. “The Klan became the Invisible Empire in the South, slaughtering thousands of Blacks without prosecution, and it focused on Blacks who dared to register or vote or engage in political activity.”
Americans have been shocked to learn that among the domestic terrorists involved in the Jan. 6 attempted coup were members of law enforcement and the military. But that’s not new, either. Chernow pointed out, “The KKK and other white supremacist groups that started during Reconstruction had many policemen and Confederate veterans in their ranks, making them that much more dangerous.”
Blight, whose biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, struck a note of optimism on the Sunday show. “This practice of white supremacy, white nationalism has always been resisted, has always been fought,” said Blight.
Part of that pushback was Grant’s decimation of the KKK. “So strongly did he feel about Klan violence that in April 1871, he marched up to Capitol Hill and lobbied for passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act, which gave him extraordinary powers to crush the Klan,” explained Chernow. “By a nice coincidence, the Justice Department had been formed just a year earlier and it forged its identity in this campaign.” This is why attorney general-designate Merrick Garland cited Chernow’s scholarship in accepting President-elect Joe Biden’s nomination to run the Justice Department.
Another American tradition is calling for unity without fully addressing the injustice that elicited said calls to begin with. Hannah-Jones, the New York Times reporter whose “1619 Project” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020, warns against this “instinct to move on” in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“If we learn from what happened in Reconstruction, there has to be serious consequences and there has to be a serious effort to really show that we will not allow this type of violence to rule our politics in this country.” . . . Then she asked two really important questions. “What does reuniting with people who are willing to overthrow our democracy in the service of holding on to white power [look like]? … How does one then unify with them without actually being dismissive of the Black Americans whose votes are what caused all of this?”
These questions have been asked throughout our history. That Hannah-Jones is asking them in 2021 shows that national reconciliation is the one path the United States has yet to successfully pursue.
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