When Madison Cawthorn was elected to represent North Carolina in the House of Representatives last week, he made history. The 25-year-old Republican, a motivational speaker who campaigned on a message about overcoming adversity, became the youngest person elected to Congress in nearly 200 years. He marked the momentous occasion with a simple tweet, encapsulating both his congressional run and this moment in national politics: “Cry more, lib.”
Despite his youth, inexperience, and a campaign plagued by scandal after scandal, Cawthorn trounced his Democratic opponent by 12 points.He’s part of a young, insurgent generation of GOP politicos forged in the heat of MAGA and the slimy crucible of its culture wars. Like any number of college Young Republicans roiling their campuses nationwide with increasingly radicalized rhetoric, Cawthorn is a young man who’s demonstrated racist views and been accused of misogynist behavior — and hasn’t let either stop him in his quest for power. Add in a photogenic set of cheekbones and a marked tendency to pose with girth-y rifles, and you arrive at the message the GOP has imprinted on its rising stars: one of instinctual cruelty and little else. It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that this is the future of the Republican Party, and the main of what it has to offer.
After winning his primary by running to the right of Trump’s pick, Cawthorn became a Republican Party star overnight. He made sycophantic comments emphasizing his love for Trump and was invited to give a rousing speech at the RNC. He was also beset by a series of scandals that might have sunk a congressional campaign in pre-MAGA times. In August, Jezebel turned up social-media posts from 2017 in which Cawthorn had enthused about a visit to the Eagle’s Nest — an estate used for Nazi meetings — referring to it as “the vacation home of the Fuhrer,” adding that the destination had been on his “bucket list for awhile.” Cawthorn, who uses a wheelchair after a near-fatal car crash left him paralyzed at 18, criticized “the disgusting members of the media who would try and affiliate a disabled man, like myself, with a movement that would have had me exterminated,” and denied supporting Hitler.
Soon after, he was accused of sexual misconduct by three women who claimed he forcibly kissed or touched them, and alumni of a private Christian college he briefly attended alleged in an open letter that he had “established a pattern of predatory behavior” toward women during his time there, driving female students to secluded places and making unwanted advances. (Cawthorn denied the allegations). And then, to top it all off, a website paid for by his campaign made a racist attack against a journalist, Tom Fiedler, who had covered the campaign of Cawthorn’s opponent, Moe Davis. “Tom Fieldler [sic] who works with Moe Davis’ advocates, is working to tear down Madison Cawthorn,” the website, moetaxes.com, read.
“He quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” (Fiedler is a former Boston University dean and had volunteered for Booker’s presidential campaign.) Cawthorn later clarified, unconvincingly, that the sentence was the result of a “syntax error” that was “unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker.” Ten days later he won his election.
He is a Trumper. He is a Republican. He is a monster.