“You know guys, politics is a rough and tumble business and D.C. can be a cruel town,” Seth Meyers said the night after Tuesday’s primary elections. “Just when you feel like you’re making headway in Congress, you’re unceremoniously forced out by a cruel and unforgiving system of cutthroats and backstabbers. And that’s exactly what happened last night when one of our nation’s most committed public servants, a camera-shy policy wonk who was laser-focused on serving the greater good lost his bid for re-election.”
Then, he stopped himself. “Oh wait, I think I read that whole thing wrong,” the Late Night host said, gleefully. “It was just Madison Cawthorn.”
For the next several minutes, Meyers took “A Closer Look” at the freshman Republican’s humiliating primary defeat following a “string of scandals” and a calculated campaign by his own party to take him down.
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“Oh, Madison, you may be gone, but soon you’ll be forgotten,” he said. “At least now he’ll have time for his other job: Starring as, I don’t know, a bad-boy villain in a CW drama? He looks like he should be next to a locker threatening to tell Pacey about Dawson’s relationship with Joey.”
After highlighting some scathing quotes about Cawthorn that various GOP operatives gave to The Daily Beast, Meyers called it a “rare treat to watch Republicans tear each other apart, because when Republicans decide to knife each other, they hold nothing back.” Unlike Democrats who “just snipe at each other on cable news about who’s responsible for their shitty poll numbers.”
The host also weighed in on Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to save the congressman he chose to endorse. “‘Let’s give Madison a second chance’ sounds like something you’d hear at a sorority after a pledge barfs all over the rug,” he joked.
Ultimately, Meyers said Cawthorn’s downfall proves that “when the Republican establishment wants to push someone out, they’re fully capable of doing it.”
“They could have easily done the same thing with Trump, but they chose not to,” he said. “Because they decided instead to collude with him regardless of how dangerous he is.”
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