Speaking last weekend to the Trump zealots at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley did what all true Trumpians do: depict himself as a victim when in fact he was a perpetrator.
What happened, he asked the crowd, when he compelled his colleagues to consider overturning the votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania when Congress convened on January 6th to certify the election results? What happened when he cheered on the mob advancing on the Capitol?
Oh dear. Never mind that mob. Rather, he said, pay heed to the “woke mob” that had tried to “cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me down.”
But it’s Hawley’s distinctive role as canceler, not cancelee, that’s won him a line in the history books. For all of the right’s fulminations against “cancel culture,” the act of cancellation that looms over all others is Donald Trump’s efforts to cancel the votes of the American electorate—not a cancellation of an individual, but of the nation, of our system of government, of the principle of majority rule (even if we interpret that rule in presidential elections to mean a majority in the Electoral College). No greater cancellation has ever been attempted in the history of American politics.
Hawley stands second only to Trump in the ranks of the election cancelers. He was the senator who joined a small band of far-right House
members in demanding that Congress consider overturning the electoral votes of swing states that Joe Biden had carried; until he came forward, Congress was simply going to certify the voters’ verdict. Hawley was also the sole senator to demand a vote on certifying Pennsylvania when Congress reconvened after the insurrectionists had been expelled from the Capitol.
Absent even a scintilla of evidence that there was anything wrong in either the voting processes or the vote totals, Hawley moved to cancel the votes of millions of Arizonans and Pennsylvanians. In claiming that he was a victim of
cancel culture rather than its archfiend, he is giving chutzpah a bad name.
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