What if

Donald Trump loses in November, but the Republicans come back in 2024 with a smarter, slicker, savvier version of Trump?

Meet Josh Hawley, the junior Republican senator from Missouri. Hawley has grabbed plenty of headlines during the coronavirus crisis, from his push to have the federal government “cover 80 percent of wages for workers at any U.S. business,” to his call for a block on “federal relief funds to universities with massive endowments” such as Harvard and Stanford.

“Hawley reflects a post-Trump populism within the Republican Party that seems likely to outlast the 45th president,” observed Vox’s Emily Stewart in a wide-ranging profile of the senator in October of last year. For Stewart, the telegenic, 39-year-old Republican has “positioned himself as a defender of the middle of the country against the supposed ‘elite’ class.”

The Atlantic’s Emma Green described him in November as “a potential lead architect of Trumpism after Trump,” whose speeches “are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy” on income inequality, big corporations, and labor unions.

Perhaps Hawley’s biggest cheerleader on the left is Matt Stoller, who has claimed that the Republican senator is “right about a lot of things” and even suggested that Hawley “may have the populist economic lane to himself.”

This is nonsense. Yes, Hawley is no Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. And, yes, “Trumpism without Trump” is a good line. But, in fact, most of the available evidence suggests that Hawley, like Trump, is a fraud and an opportunist.