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A popular take among the commentariat since he narrowly lost his primary on Tuesday night is that he’s young and has made some mistakes, but isn’t untalented. He should use his time away from politics to work on the things he needs to work on. The party will still be here when he gets back. A comeback is in the cards if he gets his head screwed on straight and matures a bit.

It’s good advice.

He won’t be taking it.

He means “genteel politics,” I assume. As for his reference to “Dark MAGA,” you’re asking the wrong blogger. But from what I gather, the concept sits in that same online gray zone where 4Chan and incel message boards sit, where it’s hard to tell who’s in it for the memes and lulz and who’s in it because they’re having violent fantasies. “Dark MAGA” imagines — well, let this guy tell it:

In the description of the #DarkMAGA hashtag creator, as described by the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET), Dark MAGA represents “Napoleon, being exiled, and then raising a f****** army to attack Europe to attack the elites.”

“#DarkMAGA is the aesthetic demand that Trump embrace a harder and more focused approach to the role only he can fill. He was too kindhearted, too forgiving. Dark MAGA demands he learn from his mistakes,” writes another Twitter user.

“It’s the realization that there is no political solution beyond vengeance,” tweets another user.

Sounds terrorist-y. No congressman should endorse such a thing, but Cawthorn takes his office so unseriously that he once famously said that he built his congressional staff around “comms” rather than legislation. He’s a twentysomething sh*tposter who’s stuck in the wrong job. Fortunately, the voters in his district have solved his problem for him.

Meanwhile, imagine thinking that Donald Trump’s main problem is that he’s “too kindhearted.” Elon Musk said yesterday that he can’t vote Democratic now because they’re no longer the “kindness party,” yet here he is aligning himself with an outfit that’s preparing to renominate a guy whose most hardcore fans believe there’s “no political solution beyond vengeance.”

Trump wouldn’t embrace a philosophy as grim as that, would he?

I guess he and Cawthorn have that much in common. When they lose an election, their instincts turn fascist.

Speaking of Dark MAGA and insurrection, the nomination of Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania may end up lighting a fire under the bipartisan group in the Senate that’s working on reforming the Electoral Count Act. They’ve been dragging their feet for months, reportedly hung up on Democrats’ foolish demands to include broader voting-rights reforms in the bill. Republicans won’t go for that; they want a narrower bill targeted at making sure January 6, 2025 isn’t another fiasco. The two sides have been jawing about it behind closed doors, taking their sweet-ass time, but Mastriano’s victory this week in Pennsylvania makes a hypothetical disaster much more real. If Democrats win that state in 2024, there’s every reason to believe he’ll connive to overturn that victory. If the Pennsylvania legislature won’t act to stop him in advance, Congress should.

“All Trump needs to throw out American democracy is one governor and a majority in the House,” Murphy told me. “He’s arguably very close to that arrangement.”

That’s where ECA reform comes in. One crucial fix would require Congress to count only the electors the courts determine to be legitimate. If a governor certified sham electors — or if a state-level dispute erupted over which electors to certify, say between Kemp and Hice — court challenges would follow. Congress would have to count the rightful winner…

The difficulty lies in securing that reform while also preventing a corrupt Congress — a GOP-controlled House and Senate with more Ted Budds in it, for example — from refusing to count legitimate electors to prevent a rightful winner from claiming an electoral college majority.

As Murphy put it, the challenge is to “make it harder both for a governor to send a false certification to Congress, and for Congress to overturn a state certification.”

In a saner world, it would be laughable to imagine a Republican House rubber-stamping a corrupt attempt by Gov. Mastriano to award his state’s electoral votes to the loser of Pennsylvania’s election. In the world we actually live in, only a fool would bet on Kevin McCarthy’s caucus to show that much integrity. The obvious solution is to empower the courts to rule on the validity of electors. Congress simply can’t be trusted to put the country’s interests ahead of their own. The Supreme Court can. Probably.

By the way, remember when a Democratic rep accused some House Republicans of giving “tours” the day before January 6, when the Capitol was supposed to be closed to the public due to COVID? The insinuation was that the rioters might have wanted to case the place in preparation for what they were planning the next day and that some House GOPers were happy to accommodate them. That was an ugly innuendo with little evidence to support it. But the January 6 committee reportedly has information suggesting that at least one tour was given and they want to hear more about it. I’ll leave you with the letter below. If it turns out that the insurrection was to some degree an inside job, Congress will never be the same. And expulsions will be in order.

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