Dark MAGA The brief saga of Madison Cawthorn has come to an end (for now) with his defeat in the North Carolina primary. His meteoric rise to the U.S. Congress made him its youngest member upon his election in 2020. Cawthorn is a Trump Republican who looks like a matinee idol from the ’50s and gets around in a wheelchair. He spews homophobic rhetoric with the best of them but lives with a staff member named Stephen Smith who’s clearly his lover. Reportedly there’s a ton of incriminating evidence in the form of photos, videos, and screenshots of intimate scenes. This and other revelations—including complaints of sexual harassment by other staffers—caused a panicky Cawthorn to marry his girlfriend before the 2020 election. But guess who accompanied them on their honeymoon to Dubai: Stephen Smith! After Cawthorn took office, the panic shifted to Congressional Republicans, who launched an investigation into his “inappropriate relationship.” His next move was to tell the media that Republicans in Congress had invited him to sex orgies and offered him cocaine—which is when his Party support collapsed altogether. In defeat, the never charming Cawthorn vowed revenge on his enemies, declaring that “It’s time for dark MAGA to take command.” That sounds scary, but it’s something we should probably know about.
