Will he host a Fox show after his defeat? Or show up in headlines for indulging his gun-love or democracy-hate? Either way, the poison he spewed is still with us.
It’s been said by others, many times this week: The defeat of North Carolina freshman Representative Madison Cawthorn proves that Republican Party leaders can indeed purge extremists in their ranks. But they don’t purge them because they spew white supremacy, or support armed insurrection, or espouse violence—Cawthorn did all of that, as have wing nut House colleagues like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Brent Laudermilk… the list is long. His real sin was claiming, or revealing, that Republican colleagues invited him to orgies and that he saw them doing cocaine.
Cawthorn is clearly a disturbed young man. He lied about details of the car crash that left him paralyzed at 20—he said the car’s driver left him to die, although his then-friend actually pulled him from the wreckage. He falsely claimed he was admitted to the Naval Academy. He’s been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. He has clearly been miserable since the crash; we know little about who he was before. I hope he gets the help he needs, but he’ll probably get a Fox contract. And the “bloodshed” Cawthorn so casually endorsed, along with the racism, is endemic; we saw it in Buffalo last Saturday. In that way, Team Cawthorn is still winning.
Cawthorn himself is still unraveling: On Thursday he posted a crazy rant to Instagram, railing against the “Uni-party” and “globalist” establishment, promising an end to “gentile” politics (gentle? genteel? anti-Semitic Freudian slip?) and declaring, “It’s time for dark MAGA to truly take command.” He promised to defeat his “weak and cowardly” GOP enemies. “Their days are numbered. We are coming,” he closed, before adding a list of his allies, including Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Senator Rand Paul, and more. (If Cawthorn wants to provide evidence about GOP cocaine and sex parties, by the way, my friend Joy Reid on MSNBC has issued him an open invitation to come on her show.)
So ignore the Beltway journalists keeping score of Trump’s wins and losses this primary season, in which Cawthorn’s defeat goes in TFG’s loss column. Trump wins even when he loses. It’s his party now. Cawthorn’s loss shows GOP leaders can isolate and even purge an outlier in their midst, but they only do it in their own self-interest, not the country’s.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/madison-cawthorn-republicans/