Madison Cawthorn has achieved the near impossible. His antics are so uniquely awful, his misbehavior so pyrotechnically out of control, and ill advised, that he makes the other GOP fringe extremists, to wit, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, look not so bad by comparison. His lunacy manages to eclipse Matt Gaetz’ corruption, Andy Biggs’ duplicity and Louie Gohmert’s legendary lack of intellect. He makes Thomas Massie’s and Mo Brooks’ displays seem tame.
These are not small achievements and the fact that one man has done it, one 26-year-old has made this trunk of broken toys appear normal speaks volumes to how messed up he is. Cawthorn is a troll like the rest but unlike them he seems to have no clue where the line is drawn. He’s addicted to his own misbehavior and like all addictions, it only gets more toxic and damaging as time goes on. One maladroit and disastrous episode feeds upon the other and sets him up for more.
An editor at Politico sees something familiar in Cawthorn’s achievement of being Most Hated Man In Congress. She likens him to the main character in Mean Girls, Regina George. She may be onto something.
Near the end of the millennial classic “Mean Girls,” there’s a scene that tells us a lot about House GOP politics right now. After getting challenged by Regina, the high school queen bee played by Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey’s teacher character, Ms. Norbury, asks the entire class: “How many of you have been personally victimized by Regina George?” Nearly every student raises their hands, showing the damage done by Regina’s gossiping.
While he’s hardly the most popular guy in the Capitol — in fact, he’s nearly the opposite — 26-year-old Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) is having a Regina-like effect on his party right now.
The intensity of the Republican outcry against Cawthorn has come as something of a surprise to even keen observers of Congress. After all, he’s not the only conservative whose antics off the floor have distracted from House Republicans’ attempts to project unity and substance …
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has (R-Ga.) harassed a Democratic lawmaker during debate over an LGBTQ rights bill and likened Covid public health requirements to the Holocaust, among other behavior. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) suggested on video, twice, that a Muslim Democratic lawmaker was a terrorist. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) posted an anime video showing himself killing yet another Democratic lawmaker.
The Regina factor is the chief reason Cawthorn is on the outs with his party right now, while his three lightning-rod colleagues are seen differently.
When Cawthorn told a podcast interviewer that Washington is riddled with “sexual perversion,” suggesting that some of his own colleagues have invited him “to an orgy” and used cocaine in front of him, he did more than implicate the entire GOP conference in possible immorality. He also made it in bounds for reporters and voters to ask his colleagues tense questions about how they spend their evenings in Washington.
Few people in the Capitol believe Cawthorn is telling anything close to the truth. His own conference leader told reporters Wednesday that Cawthorn had climbed down in private, connecting his coke-sniffing talk to a faraway “staffer in a parking garage.” Yet unless and until Cawthorn names names, as POLITICO was the first to report that some of his fellow Republicans want him to do, he is politically victimizing his entire party.
Greene, Boebert and Gosar don’t antagonize their fellow Republicans as broadly and directly. Greene has occasionally slammed her own in the GOP, but she reserves her harshest rhetoric for Democrats, as do Boebert and Gosar.
Boebert is an easier-to-defend figure for some of her colleagues, as Islamophobic as her past comments were and as much as Democrats despise her. That’s in part because of her own implication in broad, nefarious allegations by a few House Democrats, who have raised the explosive charge that some of their GOP colleagues may have conducted “reconnaissance tours” of the Capitol before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Those Democrats’ remarks were seen as alluding to Boebert – who led a Jan. 5 tour of the building. Except that no evidence has emerged so far to support a claim that implicates Boebert by association.
Greene and Gosar should be much easier intra-party targets, having appeared at a conference organized by white nationalists in addition to their other objectionable forays. The problem: Democrats have already dealt that duo the harshest punishment that Republican leaders could effectively apply, by stripping them of their committee spots.
Sure, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy could have been louder and angrier than he was in public about Greene and Gosar’s flirtation with white nationalists. But when it came to specific punishment, Democrats’ decision to take Greene and Gosar’s committee spots left the GOP leader with no real arrows in his quiver. It was notable, then, to hear McCarthy warn on Wednesday that a loss of committee assignments wasn’t off the table for Cawthorn.
Also notable: Greene is not getting a free intraparty pass to reelection, either. The Republican Jewish Coalition is backing her GOP primary challenger, Jennifer Strahan.
The key attribute which all of the performative jackasses in the GOP have is what I’ll call a Superman complex. They believe they are invulnerable and can get away with everything. They believe that the more outrageous they are, the more norms they shatter the more people they incense, somehow that makes them even stronger. Wrong. Antics in politics are like a kind of delayed kryptonite. You don’t know which thoughtless action taken on any given day is going to be the one to come back and cripple you at some unknown point down the road.
It will be instructive to see what happens in November. If enough of the shock jock MAGAs fall by the wayside, or barely squeak by to reelection, that may send a message to the others.
Something is up. With all the treasonist, racist, lying shit these folks embrace, seems strange a little coke & sex makes them lose their collective minds; unless it’s true? So treason is OK, but drugs are the devil’s work. What a bunch of fucked up ponies.
I agree, with all the crazy going on Cawthorn is the one taken behind the woodshed. smh
I would hesitate to speculate but who gives a shit, here I go speculating. Don Jr for one has got to be doing coke and having orgies. Gaetz we know is a pedophile. the trump dumpster himself seems unlikely, i bet he couldn’t get his dick hard even with viagra. could it be hannity? tucker? I bet they are into coke orgies, just speculating. Ginni thomas, we all knew clarence was a perv from his hearings, could be them. This could go on for days, which republicans are into sex parties and coke? thoughts?
Maybe Jerry springer’s show is the proper venue.
Little Maddie is not the only one doing this but he is turning on the people he is supposed to be working with. As a newbie in Congress this is a bad thing and I suspect he will not get any help of any kind from his peers besides the hardcore G.Q.P.’rs. This would be a non-issue if crazy takes over but until then, I think this is a bad move on his part. Even if he gets some form of funding from???? Russia? His compadres in the circus part of the party will be of little help. Reckon we’ll see but I would expect the mainline ‘pubes to help fund a challenger to this putz.
I keep getting the impression that Maddie is in his “Notice me, Sempai” stage. He’s still way too immature for any job that requires an adult.
He’ll get no further help from the GOP mainstream next election. Anyone endorsing him will raise the specter, sooooo…… the orgy was at your place. Just wondering?