The Stupid, Sinister Promise of Madison Cawthorn's Dark MAGA
When he recently lost the Republican nomination for North Carolina's 11th congressional district to a less ostentatiously insane and evil opponent Madison Cawthorn responded exactly how you think he would.
In a trademark frenzy of paranoia, free-floating rage and arrogance, the national joke raged against a traitorous Republican establishment he holds responsible for his defeat and insisted on the necessity of what he refers to as a “Dark MAGA” takeover of the GOP if they hope to have any manner of electoral and legislative victories going forward.
What is Dark MAGA, you might ask? It’s Cawthorn’s coke-fueled fever dream for the future of the Republican Party, one where the most extreme and fanatical members hold power and moderates and those willing to work with Democrats for the good of the American people are hung for treason on the White House lawn.
Dark MAGA provocatively if idiotically proposes that the real problem with MAGA, a “movement” defined by paranoia, xenophobia, extremism, a cult-like reverence for Donald Trump as a messianic figure sent by God to save our country from Communists, Muslims and the trans community is that it’s not paranoid, xenophobic or extreme enough and also that it’s not even remotely worshipful enough towards the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president.
Cawthron wants to take everything that’s terrible and toxic about his party and amplify it exponentially. In other words, he wants to recreate the not so grand old party in his own image as well as Trump’s.
The young sociopath wants to purge grown-ups from the party, the ones who rightly view him as endlessly embarrassing rather than the future of the party.
In his Instagram manifesto the lying half-wit talked bleakly of the need for “patriots” and the “America First” demographic to assume total control of the Republican Party.
Thanks to Cawthorn’s hero and role model, Donald Trump, “Patriot” has become a none too subtle euphemism for “xenophobe who hates all countries other than the United States, as well as the places in the United States with sizable immigrant populations” while “America First” just means “racist.”
Cawthorn unsurprisingly also thinks that the party of xenophobia and racism really needs to up their xenophobia and racism game if they’re going to compete with the other enemy, the Democrats.
The soon to be ex-representative’s response to being defeated unsurprisingly mirrors that of Donald Trump. Trump couldn’t accept his loss so he insisted that it represented an evil conspiracy between the Deep State, corrupt, vote-stealing Democrats and RINOs that, unless stopped, will destroy democracy everywhere forever.
Cawthorn cosigned Trump’s delusions as strongly as possible. He was all in, one hundred percent. He spoke at the January 6th rally that preceded the insurrection and promised “more bloodshed” if elections continued to be stolen.
Cawthorn and Trump’s massive egos won’t allow them to accept defeat on any level. They see being fraudulently declared the loser as a national crisis that must be avenged.
For Cawthorn, that means declaring war on his own party because even they are very clearly embarrassed by him.
They’re not embarrassed by the lies. They’re not embarrassed by him being a sexual predator notorious where he went to college. They’re not embarrassed by his stupidity or extremism or even the fact that he keeps trying to bring guns onto commercial planes, something that is extremely illegal.
No, the things that embarrassed a seemingly shame-proof GOP are more salacious and less important. They’re embarrassed by him claiming that he’d personally witnessed cocaine abuse and orgies and not explicitly stating that only Democrats were involved.
They could give a fuck if he sexually harasses every woman he encounters but when video emerged of him appearing to experiment with his sexuality in college the GOP could no longer tolerate his juvenile bullshit.
Oh, and he also lost, which is not something his great hero Trump can sanction, even if he also is what we in the political sphere like to call “a big fucking loser who should be ashamed of himself.”
As somebody who holds the Republican Party in even greater contempt than he does the Democrats, I initially thought it would be a great idea for Cawthorn to institute a civil war within the Republican Party between Republicans who are at least a little bit embarrassed by January 6th, and rabid cultists like Cawthorn, who wish every day was January 6th and they all got to cosplay as MAGA revolutionaries.
A brutal internal skirmish could only weaken a Republican party that already seems to have lost its soul and its spine.
I would theoretically love it if the Dark MAGA party ran a ticket of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn.
Then I thought back to 2016, when I and seemingly everyone else felt strongly that Trump was too extreme, insane and racist to get the Republican presidential nomination, let alone win.
It turns out Trump was apparently exactly the right level of extreme, racist and insane for the contemporary Republican Party.
So it does not seem impossible that under Trump and his minions the Republican Party will move so far to the right that people we now look at as crazed zealots, like Cawthorn and his allies, will be seen as mainstream Republicans.
It’s fun and appropriate to laugh long and hard at Cawthorn but if the political sphere continues to be a divisive, increasingly fascist shit show then there’s a horrifying chance that it’ll be Cawthorn and his fellow traitorous “patriots” who will be getting the last laugh.
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