Madison Cawthorn

Welcome to Thunderdome, where back-to-school airborne illnesses, pumpkin spice lattes and fantasy football drafts herald the return of fall and the point where most normal Americans start actually paying attention to who’s running for president. It turns out there are more people running than Joe Biden and Donald Trump! Who would have guessed? This is because normal people do not have the gaping maw inside themselves, that hole that can never be filled by anything — and they have higher priorities than the unceasing undulating political scrum. There are errands to run and tailgates to plan and pumpkin gewgaws to be purchased from Home Goods. But, in the height of modern convenience, one thing you can do while doing all those things is listen to Thunderdome!

Cockburn finds Madison Cawthorn — the first-term Republican congressboy from North Carolina, defeated in a GOP primary last night — an interesting study. His behavior reminds Cockburn of a Capitol Hill freshman fraternity pledge who just can’t seem to get the rules of the house down. Cockburn never seems to see Cawthorn’s name in the headlines for anything but scandalous reasons: his past is riddled with sexual misconduct allegations, bizarre vacations that involved dressing in lingerie and taking seductive photos with white wine, and dubious claims surrounding his “derailed” career at the Naval Academy (where he wasn’t accepted) and about the aftermath of an accident that led to his paralysis (he’s seeking $30 million in a lawsuit related to the incident).

Are you a Republican — or did you vote for the infrastructure bill? That’s the binary choice offered to House GOP members by the right-wing of the party. The thirteen representatives who voted to pass the landmark legislation find themselves in the sights of not just their fellow members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, but also former president Donald Trump, whose list of primary targets grows longer by the day. In a Saturday email, Trump called for “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots to run primary campaigns” against both the members who’d voted for the infrastructure bill and the members who had voted to impeach him for causing the January 6 storming of the Capitol. “You will have my backing!” he asserted.

Politicos have spent years asking what would happen to the Republican party post-Trump. Establishment types prayed that he was an anomaly and that the party would return to ‘normal’ after his reign. Slightly more savvy observers worried that the Trump base would slip back toward the Democrats once they lost their champion and the GOP would have to rebuild a winning coalition. Both relied on an assumption that Trumpism cannot exist without Trump. That was wrong. Elitist politicians and the mainstream media have been so obsessed with denouncing Trump’s egregious character that his voters developed a reflexive tendency to defend the man rather than his policies. But nearly four years later, many Trump voters feel unsatisfied with his list of accomplishments.