Madison Cawthorn is in for a stern talking-to, Politico reported on Tuesday. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will meet with the 26-year-old Republican congressman presumably to explain why it’s unwise to accuse colleagues of cocaine binges and orgies — as Cawthorn recently did. “I look at a lot of these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life — I’ve always paid attention to politics — then all of a sudden, you get invited to … ‘Oh hey, we’re going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes. You should come,’” Cawthorn said on the Warrior Poet Society podcast. “‘What did you just ask me to come to?’ And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy.” Cawthorn went on to say that politicians have done “a key bump” of cocaine in his fragile presence.
While he didn’t name any names, Cawthorn still managed to agitate fellow Republicans. “During a closed-door House GOP conference meeting on Tuesday,” Politico reported, “multiple Republicans in the room said lawmakers stood up to air their anger and frustration over Cawthorn portraying his own colleagues as bacchanalian and sexual deviants,” thus prompting McCarthy’s meeting with Cawthorn.
While it’s not difficult to believe that Washington, D.C., is a nest of villainy, its crimes trend more toward total impunity for war criminals and the like and less toward sexual deviancy. In addition, Cawthorn is known for stretching the truth. During his successful House campaign, he repeatedly left voters with the impression that he had been bound for the U.S. Naval Academy when a car accident ended his military career before it could begin: Mark Meadows had “nominated” Cawthorn for the honor before his plans “were derailed that year after he nearly died in a tragic automobile accident that left him partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair,” campaign materials said. In fact, as the Asheville Citizen-Times reported, the academy had rejected Cawthorn before the crash. A former friend, Bradley Ledford, said Cawthorn falsely accused him of leaving the future congressman to die in the burning car. Ledford told the Washington Post that he had actually pulled Cawthorn from the wreck.
So it’s difficult to believe that Cawthorn is now telling the truth about the unsavory habits of his fellow Republicans. Much like his idol, Donald Trump, Cawthorn’s public falsehoods are key to his political identity. That creates a quandary for Republicans who may be annoyed by Cawthorn and his fabulism. Cawthorn is a liar, but so is Trump. He’s an extremist, but so is Trump. (So, for that matter, are a number of other Republicans including Marjorie Taylor Greene.) The GOP can’t simultaneously be pro-Trump and anti-Cawthorn; by allowing Trump to set the standard for what it is willing to tolerate, the party has opened the door to Cawthorn and his falsehoods. It has contorted itself into a position in which it is now stuck.
McCarthy’s lecture is meaningless to a politician like Cawthorn, who has fashioned himself in Trump’s careless image. The freshman representative has no legislative accomplishments to tout nor does he seem particularly interested in amassing any. His record is hot air, and that’s the way he seems to like it. Whatever McCarthy says, then, might not leave much of an impact. Cawthorn hasn’t been tempered by bad press or by credible accusations of sexual misconduct or the opprobrium of his own party. To him, nothing matters. Only his constituents can hold him accountable now.
