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Magazine

THE FRIDAY READ

‘HE’S NOT OK’: THE ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE UNRAVELING OF MADISON CAWTHORN

A string of embarrassing incidents has led many to question whether the young
congressman from North Carolina was really ready for the job.

Photo by Stefani Reynolds/Redux Pictures

By Michael Kruse

05/13/2022 04:30 AM EDT

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Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. — In August of 2015, 16 months after the accident that
nearly killed him and left him unable to walk, Madison Cawthorn exchanged text
messages with the friend who had fallen asleep at the wheel and careened into a
concrete wall. Brad Ledford was about to head off to college. Cawthorn was
living with his parents in a house that had been renovated for his wheelchair.
He was suing Ledford and Ledford’s father’s business for millions of dollars of
medical bills. Phone to phone, the teens bantered back and forth about getting
together, but after a while it was clear Cawthorn didn’t want to.

Ledford referenced “the tension” of the court case and lamented they couldn’t
hang out “the way we used to.”

“I miss everything,” Ledford said.

“I miss everything too,” Cawthorn shot back, unleashing one long, raw message,
screens and screens of anguish and loss.

Brad Ledford and Madison Cawthorn on spring break in April 2014. Cawthorn posted
the photo on social media shortly before his accident. | Screenshot from
Instagram

“I miss my life,” he said. “I miss being able to defend myself … being able to
dress myself … being able to use the bathroom without someone helping me … I
miss not peeing the bed because I have no control over my penis … not having to
have pills keep me alive … being able to compete … being checked out by girls …
I miss my pride as a man … the pride my father swelled with when he spoke my
name … I miss,” he said, “not having to convince myself every day not to pull
the trigger and end it all.”

Four and a half years after Cawthorn contemplated suicide, he was running for
Congress. Turning a stirring story of conquering adversity into a shocking
political victory, he achieved his most ambitious career goal at a staggeringly
early age. And within weeks if not days of being sworn in — at 25 years old one
of the youngest members in the history of the House — he had put himself on a
short list of the chamber’s most known figures. Now, though, heading into his
first reelection, Cawthorn is mired in controversy, facing the very real
possibility that the end of his electoral career might come as quickly as it
began. Emboldened by Cawthorn’s miscues, misdeeds and array of indiscretions,
seven Republican challengers have lined up to try to take him out in Tuesday’s
primary, party leaders have abandoned him, and other MAGA firebrands are keeping
their distance what with the escalating storm of even just the past few months.

Dr. Oz, a crypto billionaire and Trump: Welcome to the year’s most important
primary night

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Police stopped him for driving with a revoked license (again). Airport security
stopped him for trying to bring a gun onto a plane (again). He made outlandish
and unsubstantiated comments on an obscure podcast about orgies and cocaine use
by his Capitol Hill colleagues. He called the Ukrainian president a “thug,” he
suggested Nancy Pelosi was an alcoholic (she doesn’t drink), and the seemingly
ceaseless gush of unsavory news has included allegations of insider trading,
pictures of shuttered district offices, a leaked tranche of salacious images and
videos, and ongoing proof in FEC filings that he’s a prodigious fundraiser but a
profligate spender as well. All of this comes on top of multiple women in
multiple places accusing him of sexual harassment, his role in the insurrection
on Jan. 6 of last year, his growing catalogue of alarming provocations on social
media and on the House floor, and his politically imprudent decision to announce
he was switching districts only to reverse course. His marriage amidst all this
lasted less than a year.

Cawthorn arrives on the House floor during the first session of the 117th
Congress on Jan. 3, 2021. He was sworn in just days before the riot at the
Capitol. | Bill Clark/Pool via AP

The scope of Cawthorn’s troubles is broad, the implications transcending mere
politics. More than 70 interviews with people who know Cawthorn, who have worked
for him and against him, allies and enemies, activists and operatives and
longtime watchers of politics here in the mountains of western North Carolina,
paint a picture of a man in crisis. Cawthorn, they say, is an immature college
dropout with a thin work resume, a scofflaw and serial embellisher who was
neither qualified nor prepared for the responsibility and the scrutiny that
comes with the office he holds. They describe him as a person whose ongoing
physical pain and insecurities have made him unusually susceptible to the
twisted incentives of a political environment and a Trump-led GOP that prizes
perhaps above all else outrage and partisan attack.

“He’s not OK,” said Michele Woodhouse, the former Republican chair of the 11th
District who’s now running against him. “He’s very unwell,” said a Republican
strategist familiar with Cawthorn. “The recovery is not complete,” said David
Rhode, a fellow Hendersonville native who knew Cawthorn pre-politics but now
works for Wendy Nevarez, another one of Cawthorn’s current opponents. “He’s got
some deep issues that will probably never go away,” said Chuck Archerd, a
Republican who ran against him in 2020. “It’s never going to be just totally
fine,” said a friend.

Cawthorn is running for reelection in North Carolina's 11th District, which
includes his hometown of Hendersonville. | Amanda Greene for Politico Magazine

The consequences are mounting. Cawthorn long ago lost the trust and support of
some of the most influential Republicans in and around Henderson County, without
whom he would not have gotten elected in the first place. More recently he’s
lost the backing of the top two Republicans in the state Legislature, House
Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger; the state’s GOP
senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis; and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy
in Washington. And while Cawthorn widely is seen as a favorite of Donald Trump —
he spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and appeared at a recent
Trump rally near Raleigh — Trump in 2022 conspicuously has not issued an
endorsement email for Cawthorn the way he has for scores of other candidates.

> “Politics is like a vice amplifier … And then when you’re a young man who has
> a terrible accident like that, and your identity is kind of stripped from you,
> all of that is amplified even more.”
>
> a GOP consultant who knows Cawthorn

Polling shows Cawthorn sagging but still in the lead, his closest competitor
being Chuck Edwards — a state senator from the area who has the backing of
Tillis and some of the best, most experienced strategists in the state. Needing
to get at least 30 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff in July, Cawthorn is
running out of money, running no ads on local TV and barely campaigning — and
all but trying to hide when he does.

Coursing through many of my conversations with people in Cawthorn’s district is
a belief that the accident ravaged his body and messed with his psyche but that
winning the election has harmed him too.

“Politics is like a vice amplifier, where everybody has a need for affirmation,
a need to be important, to be recognized. And then when you’re a young man who
has a terrible accident like that, and your identity is kind of stripped from
you, all of that is amplified even more,” said a GOP consultant who knows
Cawthorn. “I worry about him.”

Well before he ran, won and took office, in his wrenching messages to Ledford
that are part of public court records, Cawthorn expressed understandable
bitterness, that once he was something, and all of a sudden he was not — and so
what was he now?

“I am no longer healing,” he wrote.

“You shattered me completely,” he said. “It’s impossible for me to be around
you” because “seeing you just makes me remember who Madison Cawthorn was, and I
really miss being him.”

‘YOU WANTED TO BE A CONGRESSMAN?’

Cawthorn poses with his parents Priscilla and Roger in 2018, on the front porch
of their home in Flat Rock. | Angeli Wright/Citizen Times

Cawthorn winced.

Three days after he sent the texts to Ledford, some 40 miles south of the site
of the accident that broke his ankles, his pelvis and his back, Cawthorn sat in
an office in Orlando for a deposition for his (first) auto negligence lawsuit
filed against his friend and his friend’s father’s company.

Cawthorn was struggling. The year before, on his 19th birthday, in the last week
he spent at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal cord
injury rehabilitation, he had told his family he would be “standing up for you”
the next time they sang him happy birthday. Here he was, though, three weeks
past the date he turned 20, the handsome, “charmed” second son of an “upper
middle class” financial adviser father and a homemaker mother who doubled as her
boys’ teacher, a onetime football linebacker, avid weightlifter and duck-hunter,
cheerful Chick-fil-A cashier. He was paraplegic.

CAWTHORN 2015 DEPOSITION

“Can you give me,” asked the attorney for Ledford’s father’s company, “a list of
10 things that you enjoyed doing before that you can’t do now?”

“Yes, sir,” said Cawthorn. “I can’t work out. I can’t play football. I can’t
stand up and pee. I can’t wake up in the morning by myself. I’ll probably never
be able to procreate. I can’t run. I can’t jump. I can’t wrestle with my
brother. I can’t get through the day without pain. I can’t wake up in the
morning without forgetting I’m paralyzed and also falling out of my bed. I can’t
be too far away from my doctors. I can’t climb anything. I can’t go adventuring
in places. I can’t hike. I can’t ride horses. I can’t bail hay. Do you want me
to continue?”

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“You said you can’t procreate,” the lawyer continued. “How do you know that?”

“Just because I can’t.”

“Who has told you?”

“My urologist.”

“That will never change?”

“Everyone is always hopeful, but, I mean, with my injury, it’s unlikely that
I’ll walk or procreate or, you know, recover.”

In the course of the deposition, Cawthorn recounted for attorneys the hazy
mental snapshots of what little he could recall from the days and weeks after
the accident. The helicopter to the hospital with what the Florida Highway
Patrol report called “life-threatening” and “incapacitating” injuries. The
bright lights above his head. The nurse holding his hand.

Madison Cawthorn posted a picture of him in the hospital surrounded by his
medical team on July 19, 2016. | Screenshot from Instagram

Clearer for Cawthorn were the first conversations he had with his therapists
once he was in Atlanta. “She asked me if I was a motivated person, and I
responded yes, and then she said, ‘Good, because this will be the hardest thing
you’ve ever done,’” he remembered one saying. “She explained to me,” he said of
another, “that she was basically going to teach me how to live in a wheelchair,
and I remember saying, ‘Well, that’s pointless. I’m not going to be in a
wheelchair.’ And then they explained to me that I was indeed going to be in a
wheelchair.”

He had wanted to maybe play college football. He had wanted to maybe be a
Marine.

“I read somewhere,” said one of the attorneys toward the end of the day-long
deposition, “that you wanted to be a congressman?”

“I do, sir,” Cawthorn said.

“Is that still a goal of yours?”

“Absolutely,” Cawthorn said.

‘THE DISABLED GUY WHO GOT APPLAUSE’

Cawthorn speaks with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and supporters after a "Get Out the
Vote" rally with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis in October 2020. Angeli
Wright/Citizen-Times

Back home in North Carolina, he made a “vision board,” or goal board.
“Congressman Cawthorn,” it said. Cawthorn’s congressman at the time was Mark
Meadows, and he had gotten a part-time job as an assistant in Meadows’
Hendersonville office, starting in January of 2015. He had said during the
deposition he was full-time — he would tell the Asheville Citizen-Times the same
thing during the campaign — but he wasn’t. Even in his part-time capacity,
according to a fellow member of that staff, he didn’t do much. “He worked for us
and answered the phone, and couldn’t even do that, just to be honest,” this
person said.

Cawthorn was more than a year removed from the most intense stretch of rehab.
That didn’t mean he was recovered.

“I didn’t feel like a man,” he once said. “I felt very weak, and I felt very
feeble,” he explained. “If somebody attacked me at the time, if somebody
attacked my family, literally they would be in more danger if I was there than
if I wasn’t.” He described that as “the most emasculating thing.”

“What’s my purpose?” he wondered. “Do I have any value?”

> “As a child I thought I wanted to rule the world… As a young adult I know I
> do.”
>
> a caption from Madison Cawthorn’s Instagram

“One day my dad had a really tough conversation with me,” Cawthorn said, “and it
was basically saying, ‘Son, you’re going to need to make a decision. You either
need to give up or you need to move on.’” That night, he said, he stayed up for
more than four hours making a list of “pros and cons of staying alive.”

And Cawthorn in this telling made his decision. “I took the thought of suicide
completely out of my mind,” he said.

“I decided I was going to live my life,” he said.

In the fall of 2016, he enrolled at Patrick Henry College, a school in Loudoun
County, Va., with fewer than 400 students that “exists to glorify God” and
prepare “Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our
culture.” The Saturday of Thanksgiving, a few weeks after Trump’s election,
Cawthorn struck a pose in front of the U.S. Capitol. “As a child I thought I
wanted to rule the world,” he said in an Instagram post. “As a young adult I
know I do.”

But his time on campus was a disaster. His “average grade in most classes was a
D,” he later said in a deposition. In a speech he made to the student body in a
chapel on campus, he falsely suggested he had gotten into the Naval Academy
before the accident, and he said Ledford had left him to die in the car “in a
fiery tomb” — when Ledford in fact had helped pull him out. Most seriously,
though, in his short time at PHC Cawthorn “established a reputation for
predatory behavior” and “gross misconduct towards our female peers,” taking them
on “joy rides” to secluded areas where he locked the doors and made “unwanted
sexual advances,” according to an open letter 148 former students wrote and
signed. “He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing who made our small, close-knit
community his personal playground of debauchery.” (“I have never done anything
sexually inappropriate in my life,” Cawthorn has said.)

Cawthorn, pictured in a Navy sweater in 2013, said he had wanted to maybe be a
Marine before his accident and, when in college, falsely suggested he had gotten
into the Naval Academy. | Screenshot from Instagram

In October of 2017, in a second deposition in a separate accident-related
lawsuit, Cawthorn admitted under oath that what he had said in his first
deposition about having been accepted to Harvard and Princeton wasn’t true. He
was no longer living with his parents but in an apartment in Asheville with
Stephen Smith, a slightly younger distant cousin who was becoming his best
friend and primary helper who provided the assistance Cawthorn needed in part
because of thick carpet that made it hard to wheel around. He didn’t have a job.
He wasn’t going to school.

“Tell me,” one of the attorneys said to Cawthorn, “just sort of what you have
been doing, you know, on a daily basis, since you got back to North Carolina.”

“Well, sir,” he said, “I think it’s mainly just trying to figure out what I want
to do with my life.”

“If you finish your degree at some point in political science, do you plan on
going into politics?”

“That’s the plan, sir,” he said. “You know, politics is always a changing game,
so I can’t speak as to the future. But that would be the plan.”

Scenes from Cawthorn’s neighborhood, including his church in Flat Rock (top
left) and a depository for retired American flags (bottom right). | Amanda
Greene for Politico Magazine

Throughout 2018 and 2019, he continued to give motivational speeches at colleges
and churches. He started what he called a real estate investment company through
which he purchased for $20,000 a single 6-acre lot in rural Georgia. On
Instagram, he talked excitedly about training for the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo,
one of his posts a slow-motion video set to patriotic country music of Cawthorn
straining in a racing chair. “Haunted by ambition,” he wrote. It became a source
of some confusion and amusement among actual Paralympians who didn’t know him
and didn’t see him or his name at events or on lists that would lead to such a
feat. Overall, though, he began curating on social media a more upbeat,
inspirational, in retrospect almost proto-political persona — wearing camo,
smoking cigars, shooting guns and bows, doing dips in the gym with his
wheelchair lashed to his waist. “Wake up determined to throat punch life,” he
said in one post. “Go America,” he said in another. “God is good.”

And Cawthorn traveled, sometimes with his parents, sometimes with his cousin,
sometimes with the woman he would marry, to Boston, to Cuba, to the Swiss Alps.
He jet-skied in Miami, scuba-dived in Mexico, pumped his fist while swimming in
the Dead Sea and drank shirtless from a pineapple in the Bahamas.

Cawthorn is pictured wearing lingerie during a game on a cruise, in photos
provided to POLITICO.

He liked cruises, too, and in 2019 he boarded one on which he played a big part
in a risqué late-night game show called Quest. Cawthorn ended up dressed in
women’s lingerie. Luke Ball, Cawthorn’s spokesperson, says this cruise left from
Miami in early 2019 — “waaay before I ran for Congress” according to Cawthorn —
but two people told me after POLITICO was the first to publish photos of the
event that they were on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas that left Port
Canaveral in Florida on Dec. 8, 2019, and that Cawthorn was on the cruise with
them. They were at the Quest show, too, they said, and have specific
recollections of Cawthorn.

“He was one of the contestants, but he emerged as the winning ‘star,’” said
Melissa Burns, a woman from Tennessee who was on the cruise and at the show.
“Women helped him change into lingerie and put makeup on.”

“When we got there, the host announced from the very beginning that if you are
easily offended, then this is not the show for you and gave people time to
leave,” said a man from North Carolina named Matt who declined to give his last
name. There were 300 to 400 people in a theater on the ship, he said, and they
were divided into about 10 teams. Those teams vied for points based on “which
team does the craziest the fastest,” he said. In the end, Cawthorn’s team was
“declared the winner.”

But Cawthorn in particular stood out. The winners of Quest, Colleen McDaniel of
cruisecritic.com told me, often are simply the most eager to be the most
outrageous. “People certainly do emerge as sort of the most outgoing or
ambitious,” she said, due to “what they’re willing to do.” And Cawthorn was so
memorable to Melissa Burns and Matt not because of the lingerie. He was
memorable because of the wheelchair. He was, as Matt put it, the “disabled guy
who got applause.”

“We concede that Madison is a ‘winner’ and a ‘star,’” Ball told me in an email
this week. “We concede that he does often ‘get applause.’”

Days after the Harmony of the Seas returned from the Caribbean to Port
Canaveral, Mark Meadows announced he was opting not to run for reelection,
ostensibly to put himself in position to be Trump’s fourth White House chief of
staff. Cawthorn, ready or not, the following morning filed his first papers with
the FEC. He proposed marriage to his girlfriend the week after that. He
officially announced his candidacy the week after that.

‘AN EXTREME VERSION OF SUCCESSFUL PERSON SYNDROME’

Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, speaks to Cawthorn, then a
candidate for his former congressional seat and a former part-time staffer in
his office, before a Trump speech in Mills River, N.C., on Aug. 24, 2020. |
Angeli Wright/Citizen-Times

Cawthorn is a member of Congress because he got 18,481 votes in a primary, which
was 1,016 votes more than the candidate who finished third, which was enough to
get to a runoff, which he won. “Charisma and sympathy,” said a North Carolina
GOP consultant working for one of his many opponents, “in a very, very
low-voter-turnout election.” Really, though, Cawthorn is a member of Congress
because he didn’t run as the person he’s been since he won.

Although he cast himself with the standard identifiers of a conservative
Christian Republican — for freedom, liberty and the Second Amendment, against
the “socialists” and “radicals” on the left — his pitch at the start of his rise
often had a markedly different tone.

Before the primary on Super Tuesday in the first week of March 2020, Cawthorn,
for instance, was the only one of the dozen Republican candidates to speak up at
a forum at a community college in Asheville on behalf of reporters the rest
wanted to kick out. “I think the press should be allowed to stay,” he said, “so
people can hear what we have to say.”

Three wooden crosses and a sign for a gun show are located a few miles from
Cawthorn’s residence. Cawthorn has cast himself as a standard conservative
Christian Republican, though his tone has evolved. | Amanda Greene for Politico
Magazine

“I was truly impressed,” George Erwin, the politically influential retired
Henderson County sheriff, told me. “I told him I would support him and try and
help him all I could.” He called all his contacts — sheriffs, county
commissioners, other elected officials — and talked to them about Cawthorn. “I
said, ‘Listen, I think this young guy can get in a runoff. If he does, and your
person doesn’t, will you support him?’ And they said, ‘We’ll take your word for
it.’”

“We’re going to win in silence,” Cawthorn told Kyle Perrotti from the
Mountaineer newspaper in Waynesville one week into the campaign to the runoff.
“We don’t want to be arrogant.” He chided his opponent, Lynda Bennett, whom
Meadows and Trump had endorsed, for refusing to commit to debate him. “I
believe,” Cawthorn said, “that is the best way the voters will make an informed
decision.”

“You did see,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina
University who has tracked Cawthorn as intently as anybody and is at work on a
book about the district, “a spark of a potential for a different kind of
Republican.”

And in late June he won. By a lot.

Days later he was on “The View.”

“He is just 24 years old, his name is Madison Cawthorn, and he scored one of the
big upsets in the primaries on Tuesday in North Carolina,” said Whoopi Goldberg.

“We kept all politics local,” he said. “We were just focused on caring about the
people I want to represent.”

He talked to the New York Times. “I believe I can carry the message of
conservatism in a way that doesn’t seem so abrasive,” he said. “For so long
we’ve just kind of been the party of ‘no’ without offering a lot of really good
answers.”

Top" Cawthorn sits at the front and center as House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy poses with the freshman members of the House Republican Conference on
the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 4, 2020. Bottom right: Cawthorn holds up a copy
of legislation during a news conference outside the Capitol on April 21, 2021. |
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP, Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/AP, and Ting Shen/Getty
Images

Interviewers keyed in on the comeback story he had leaned on throughout his bid.
“I have experienced more pain and more suffering than the overwhelming majority
of people go through,” he told the Washington Examiner. “That has taught me
something that is, I believe, absolutely missing in conservative politics, and
that is empathy.”

“To liberals, let’s have a conversation. To conservatives, let’s define what we
support, and win the argument in areas like health care and the environment,” he
said from the stage at the Republican National Convention that August. With a
walker and the help of his pals, he stood up from his chair at the crescendo of
his speech. Noting he had been “touted as a future star of the party,” CNN’s
Chris Cillizza said it was “moving.”

In September, speaking with Jewish Insider, Cawthorn praised Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. He disagreed with her policy platform, he said, but in other ways
he admired the woman who had become a standard-bearer for young progressives.
“She is influencing an entire generation,” he said. “I’m sure her and I will get
along when I get to Congress.”

“Black lives matter,” Cawthorn said that month during a debate with his
Democratic opponent Moe Davis, a retired Air Force colonel and former prosecutor
at Guantanamo Bay. “I was unhappy with the way the president treated the death
of George Floyd,” he said of Trump, according to the coverage of the debate in
the Cherokee Scout, “and the lack of empathy he showed after that death
happened.”

Even in late October, speaking with a reporter from the Hendersonville
Lightning, Cawthorn sounded totally different from how he sounds today.

“The reason President Trump didn’t endorse me,” he said of the lack of his nod
in the primary and runoff, “is because I’m willing to be strongly critical of
him whenever he messes up. I’m not planning to vote for Donald Trump or Joe
Biden.”

And he said he didn’t care for Trump’s tweets. “It does more to add to the
partisan divide rather than try to heal it and unite us all as Americans,”
Cawthorn said. “It makes people enemies of each other instead of saying we are
Americans first and let’s work towards the future.”

Cawthorn spoke at the 2020 virtual Republican National Convention, standing up
from his wheelchair at the end of his address. | RNC via Getty Images

Throughout, though, that summer and fall, scrutiny intensified — in particular
the beginning of the news of his pattern of sexual behavior included a report in
which one teen from his area recalled trying to pull away when he tried to
“forcibly” kiss her and getting her hair stuck in his wheelchair — all the while
Trump and people in his orbit now in the wake of Cawthorn’s rout of a win saw a
star. He was invited to the White House. Trump’s Washington hotel. The RNC.
(Cawthorn denied being “forceful,” and his spokesperson at the time said there
was “a big difference between a failed advance and being forceful, to the extent
that’s possible when you’re paraplegic.”)

In November, when the by-then-Trump-endorsed Cawthorn won, he sent that night a
very Trump-esque, red-meat tweet.

“Cry more, lib.”

In interviews with outlets ranging from local newspapers to Jewish Insider to
CNN, Cawthorn expressed regret. “I have to represent everybody now, so I
shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

But for Cawthorn’s older, more experienced advisers, the tweet was one of the
first signs of a stark, disquieting change. Chief among them was Erwin, the
sheriff who had helped Cawthorn from the start. Erwin was in line to be
Cawthorn’s district director — until Cawthorn in the aftermath of his victory
called Erwin “a coward” and “a little bitch.”

> “I’ve seen this through the years, but not to this degree, because people I
> think just don’t have the trauma that he has.”
>
> George Erwin, retired Henderson County sheriff

The disagreement began, Erwin said, when he wanted an older, more experienced
woman to be hired for a position in the district office, and Cawthorn wanted a
much younger woman instead. “And so he started communicating with other people
and said that I couldn’t handle a disagreement between two girls — and it wasn’t
two girls; it was a young lady and a woman — and that I was just a coward and a
bitch, and he didn’t know if he wanted me to be his district director,” Erwin
told me. “And that’s when I told him, ‘Look, all due respect, I’m going to have
to pass on this position.’” (Cawthorn declined to comment.)

“He has an extreme version of what I always call successful person syndrome,”
said a Republican strategist familiar with Cawthorn and the campaign, defining
it essentially as a first taste of success going to somebody’s head. “I’ve seen
this through the years, but not to this degree, because people I think just
don’t have the trauma that he has.”

“He hears you,” Erwin said, “but he doesn’t listen.”

‘IT IS PAINFUL TO WATCH HIS SPIRAL’

A defaced Cawthorn campaign sign sits between signs for his opponents near the
congressman's home in Hendersonville, N.C. | Amanda Greene for Politico Magazine

The most charitable way to see Cawthorn’s first month in Congress is that it was
the last gasp of his best self.

On Jan. 3, 2021, he was sworn in. The first thing he did was contest the
election of Joe Biden. He tweeted it was “time to fight.” On Jan. 6, at the
“Save America” rally at the Ellipse, he was one of the speakers who revved up
the crowd. “My friends,” he said, “I want you to chant with me so loud that the
cowards I serve with in Washington, D.C., can hear you.” During the storming of
the Capitol, he called into the radio show of right-wing talker Charlie Kirk and
said he believed some of the ransacking mob were “antifa” and “people paid by
the Democratic machine.”

And yet he spent parts of the following few weeks, as Congress moved swiftly
toward impeachment of the outgoing president, saying he was sorry.

He said the people who attacked the Capitol were “pathetic,” “weak-minded”
“thugs,” and that what happened on the Hill that day was a “despicable”
“perversion of patriotism.”

“And the worst part was they’re all waving these American flags and these MAGA
flags, and you want to say, ‘You don’t represent me at all. That’s not my
movement. You’re not part of my party,’” he told Olivia Nuzzi of New York.
“There’s no excuse for it.”

“I have no problem calling that out, even though a lot of those people probably
would’ve voted for me,” he told Cory Vaillancourt of the Smoky Mountain News.
“It’s definitely time for the president to concede.”

“The election was not fraudulent,” he said on CNN on Jan. 23. “Joseph R. Biden
is our president.”

He was one of 17 GOP House freshmen who sent Biden a letter on Inauguration Day
saying they wanted to work with him to try to “rise above the partisan fray.” He
told Story Hinckley from the Christian Science Monitor he was praying for Biden
and Vice President Kamala Harris and that the member of Congress he most wanted
to have lunch with was Nancy Pelosi.

The longer, though, he’s been in office, the less penitent he’s been.

He started selling Covid masks that said “USELESS.” In a speech on the House
floor about the Second Amendment, he said, “In real America, when we say, ‘Come
and take it,’ we damn well mean it.” When Liz Cheney of Wyoming was booted from
her House leadership position for her pro-democracy views, he tweeted, “Na na na
na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.” He called Dr. Anthony Fauci “a
punk.” He called Biden “a geriatric despot.” He said Biden’s vaccine outreach
efforts were really so the government could come take people’s Bibles and guns.
He called on Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment and oust Biden from office in a
letter in which he misspelled her name. He cleaned a gun during a Veterans’
Affairs committee hearing on toxic burn pits on Zoom. He went to the airport in
Asheville with a gun. He went to a school board meeting in Hendersonville with a
knife. Months after he called them “thugs,” he said the insurrectionists in jail
were “political prisoners.” Months after he said the election was “not
fraudulent,” he said, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and
continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.” In
the midst of redistricting he tried to shift to a district that would have
stretched east to the much larger Charlotte market before coming back when the
maps were shot down. He was pulled over going 89 miles per hour in a
65-mile-per-hour zone in Buncombe County. He was pulled over going 87 in a 70 in
Polk. He told mothers to raise their sons to be “monsters.” He disparaged the
Ukrainian president. Republicans from the mountains to Raleigh to Washington
finally had begun to think enough was enough when he accused his Capitol Hill
colleagues of participating in orgies and doing “key bumps” of cocaine. And that
was before the pictures and videos started to make their way around social media
and even into campaign ads.

This photo provided by the Transportation Security Administration shows the
handgun that officials say was found in Cawthorn's carry-on bag at a Charlotte
Douglas International Airport security checkpoint in April. | TSA via AP

“Madison Cawthorn has fallen well short of the most basic standards western
North Carolina expects from their representatives,” said Tillis. “On any given
day, he’s an embarrassment,” said Burr. “He’s reckless,” said Tim Moore, the
North Carolina House speaker. McCarthy said he needs to “turn himself around.”

One night late last month at the Lambuth Inn, a Christian retreat on Lake
Junaluska, he was absent at the Haywood County GOP’s forum for the candidates
running for his seat. The seven other candidates spent the first half of the two
hours delivering expected Republican fare — tax cuts, Joe Biden, inflation,
their respective anti-establishment, Christian cred — before they finally got to
what this election actually is. It’s a referendum on Cawthorn.

“There’s an elephant in the room that we haven’t been talking about, and that is
the empty seat,” said Woodhouse, the former district GOP chair who’s now running
against him. “I’m as disappointed as anyone in the headlines that we’re seeing
and the behavior and the decisions of our sitting congressman.”

“Madison,” said Rod Honeycutt, a retired Army colonel who’s been running since
last summer, “is a young man in trouble.”

Cawthorn's campaign headquarters are in a repurposed former auto repair shop in
Hendersonville, N.C. | Amanda Greene for Politico Magazine

When it was over, I sought out Matthew Burril, who casts his candidacy in a
decidedly faith-based light. Cawthorn had sought his support in 2020. “As a
Christian,” Burril said, “it is to me very painful to watch his spiral.”

Candidate Bruce O’Connell, the owner of the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge
Parkway, was standing near the exit with Karen Wilson, his partner and campaign
coordinator. “I voted for Madison originally, I donated to him originally, I
like him — but he’s … self-destructing,” O’Connell told me. The night before, he
said to my surprise, he and Wilson had gone out to dinner with Cawthorn. Most of
the others running had been at an NAACP forum in Hendersonville, including the
handful of Democrats, but O’Connell and Cawthorn had opted to go to the meeting
of the Republican club of Swain County. Afterward, he said, they ended up
together at an Italian restaurant in Bryson City called Pasqualino’s.

Wilson told me she left their dinner with Cawthorn wondering whether in some
small way if he didn’t win, he would be …

The primary in the district is essentially a referendum on Cawthorn. | Amanda
Greene for Politico Magazine

“Relieved,” she whispered.

“I got that clear sense,” she said.

“Think about it, what he’s gone through,” she continued, mentioning his
accident, his candidacy in 2020 that took him in a little more than eight months
from a no-name who had just gotten off a cruise to a primetime speaking slot at
the RNC, the dizzying year and a half he’s been in Congress, his quickly broken
marriage. She told me the ways Cawthorn visibly had shifted uncomfortably in his
wheelchair. She said he had talked a lot about his hope for miraculous
advancements in spinal cord repair. “He’s in pain when he’s sitting there with
you. He has to do things,” she said, “because he’s in pain.”

“He struggles,” said Woodhouse.

“Madison is in a lot of pain,” said Rhode, the Hendersonville native who knows
Cawthorn but is working for Wendy Nevarez, another of the candidates running
against him.

“A lot of folks I’ve talked to, they think when he was in that accident there
was something that happened to him beyond his physical impairment,” said Erwin.

“I feel like he thinks that he could have done so much more had the accident not
happened,” said Hunter Clark, a former intern in Cawthorn’s district office.

At a campaign event at a gun store in Cherokee County on May 6, the driver of
the SUV Cawthorn arrived in — as well as a Cawthorn supporter with a pickup
truck — unsuccessfully attempted to block the view of POLITICO's photographer.
When he first ran for Congress, Cawthorn spoke up for reporters who other
Republican candidates wanted to kick out of a public forum. “I think the press
should be allowed to stay,” he said, “so people can hear what we have to say.” |
Amanda Greene for Politico Magazine

“You don’t just wake up being paralyzed and go through a really hard time and
then all of a sudden you’re better,” a friend of Cawthorn’s told me. “It’s never
going to fully go away.”

“Based sort of on my background as a minister, largely I see him as a young man
who has been through a very traumatic, life-changing event and who has been
politically radicalized by the far right, in a way where he also gains access to
significant power and resources, and who’s now deploying that influence in very
dangerous ways,” said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, who’s running in the Democratic
primary explicitly to try to “defeat insurrectionist Madison Cawthorn.”

“We know,” she said, “that young men in particular are susceptible to
radicalization when they feel isolated and invisible.”

“The guy,” said Jim Blaine, a North Carolina-based Republican consultant who’s
done polling on this race, “clearly needs to figure out who he is.”

In the middle of last week, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a
campaign, his main district office was locked. “WORKING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY,”
said a sign on the door. His campaign has more debt than cash on hand. He had a
fundraiser shooting skeet last Monday. He had a fundraiser at a restaurant in
Hendersonville on Wednesday. On Friday, at a meet-and-greet at a gun store in
Cherokee County, a supporter positioned his pickup truck to block the view of a
photographer from POLITICO. Rod Honeycutt saw Cawthorn over the weekend at the
Asheville Gun & Knife Show at the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center in
Fletcher. “Stayed probably 20 minutes,” he told me, “and then rolled on out of
there.”

Cawthorn has said in mailers and text-message blasts that he has Trump’s
endorsement, but Trump has yet to put out a formal statement doing so, as he has
for other candidates he supports.

The endorsements page on Cawthorn’s campaign website is a broken link. Just one
endorsement anyway matters the most. Cawthorn has said in mailers and
text-message blasts that he has Trump’s. Last March at Mar-a-Lago Trump cut a
video with him offering “my complete and total, as I like to say, endorsement.”
Last month, at the rally by Raleigh more than four and a half hours from here,
Trump said, “He loves his country, he loves his state, and I’ll tell you, he is
respected all over the place. He’s got a big voice. Madison Cawthorn!” Then
immediately after that Trump said of Bo Hines, a different congressional
candidate in North Carolina, “You know, Bo, you have my complete and total
endorsement, OK?” So far this month, Trump has endorsed in written statements
from his Save America PAC four sitting congressmen from Pennsylvania, five
sitting congressmen from Kentucky, one sitting congressman from Florida and one
sitting congressman from Nebraska. He’s endorsed two people running for Congress
in Georgia. He’s endorsed one person running for Congress in California. He’s
endorsed a person running for the Miami-Dade County Commission. He has not done
it for Cawthorn. Susie Wiles, the CEO of Save America who is heavily involved in
Trump’s endorsements operation, told me Thursday Trump “technically” has
endorsed Cawthorn but not with “the formal statement.” Such parsing if anything
calls more attention to the fact that Trump at the very least has stayed mum
when Cawthorn has needed him the most.

He has court dates in Polk and Cleveland counties in June for speeding and
driving with a revoked license. He now has another one in Mecklenburg County in
October for bringing the gun to the airport in Charlotte.

This week Cawthorn tweeted a prebuttal to this story. He said it would be
“boring.”

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Electorally, come Tuesday, he could still win. Politically he might already have
lost.

“What is going on with him?” Sean Hannity said on his radio show the other day.
“Look,” Hannity said, “I never like to celebrate people’s decline or misery, and
I don’t like to pile on — I don’t know what he’s going through — but … something
is going on here, and it sounds to me like he needs some type of intervention or
help.”

Gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun. Because even power
needs a day off.

‘HE’S NOT OK’: THE ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE UNRAVELING OF MADISON CAWTHORN

By MICHAEL KRUSE

C-SPAN HAS BEEN WALLOPED BY CORD-CUTTING. INSIDE THE NETWORK’S UNLIKELY FIGHT
FOR EYEBALLS.

By MICHAEL SCHAFFER

LIBERALS SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT THE CONSERVATIVE COMEDY SCENE

By IAN WARD

POLITICO Weekend flies into inboxes every Friday. Don’t miss it!

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We and our partners store and/or access information on a device, such as unique
IDs in cookies to process personal data. You may accept or manage your choices
by clicking below, including your right to object where legitimate interest is
used, or at any time in the privacy policy page. These choices will be signaled
to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS DATA TO PROVIDE:

Store and/or access information on a device. Select personalised ads. Select
basic ads. Measure ad performance. Apply market research to generate audience
insights. Develop and improve products. Create a personalised ads profile. List
of Partners (vendors)

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ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY

* YOUR PRIVACY

* STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES

* PERFORMANCE COOKIES

* FUNCTIONAL COOKIES

* TARGETING COOKIES

* SOCIAL MEDIA COOKIES

* GOOGLE

YOUR PRIVACY

We process your data to deliver content or advertisements and measure the
delivery of such content or advertisements to extract insights about our
website. We share this information with our partners on the basis of consent and
legitimate interest. You may exercise your right to consent or object to a
legitimate interest, based on a specific purpose below or at a partner level in
the link under each purpose. These choices will be signaled to our vendors
participating in the Transparency and Consent Framework.
More information

List of IAB Vendors‎

STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES

Always Active

These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched
off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you
which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy
preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block
or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work.
These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.

Cookies Details‎

PERFORMANCE COOKIES

Performance Cookies

These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and
improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the
most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All
information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you
do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and
will not be able to monitor its performance.

Cookies Details‎

FUNCTIONAL COOKIES

Functional Cookies

These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and
personalisation. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose
services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then some
or all of these services may not function properly.

Cookies Details‎

TARGETING COOKIES

Targeting Cookies

These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may
be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you
relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal
information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet
device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted
advertising.

Cookies Details‎

SOCIAL MEDIA COOKIES

Social Media Cookies

These cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to
the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They
are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a
profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on
other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able
to use or see these sharing tools.

Cookies Details‎

GOOGLE

Google

Allowing third-party ad tracking and third-party ad serving through Google and
other vendors to occur. Please see more information on Google Ads here.

* STORE AND/OR ACCESS INFORMATION ON A DEVICE

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Cookies, device identifiers, or other information can be stored or accessed
on your device for the purposes presented to you.

* SELECT PERSONALISED ADS

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Personalised ads can be shown to you based on a profile about you.