This interview with Madison Cawthorn by Olivia Nuzzi shows that he’s both stunningly shallow and stupid but also has his finger on the pulse of the right wing. In other words he’s one of the true heirs to the Death Cult:
Cawthorn won his primary by 30 points. “Madison had decent name ID because he became a local hero after his accident, and people love a hero overcoming adversity,” the Meadows aide said with casual cynicism. By the time Cawthorn won the general election, he looked, to liberals, almost like a mini-Trump, adept at owning the libs and racking up liabilities that would have ended most political careers. He visited the U.S.-Mexico border and appealed to QAnon with a claim that children were being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery across the Rio Grande; he was accused of sexual misconduct (Cawthorn maintains he did nothing wrong) and of spreading a lie that, if not for his car crash, he would have attended the Naval Academy (he was rejected prior to the accident). His campaign launched a racist attack against a member of the press; he posted a photo at Hitler’s vacation home with a caption about how seeing where “the Führer” (umlaut and everything) went to decompress had been on his “bucket list.” And on and on.
Cawthorn’s ideology is an almost convincing patchwork of conservative slogans and concepts, expressed with a child actor’s poised delivery — designed to charm elders and scare off peers. But it is shallow and contradictory. In one breath, he proposes a retreat from identity politics. In the next, he cites Trump’s appointing an openly gay Cabinet official as proof that he is one of the greatest presidents ever. He describes his version of “America First” foreign policy as humanitarian dovishness: “We should be leading with wells, not warheads.” Then he says he wants to cut foreign aid, the less than one percent of the budget that theoretically goes toward well digging.We advised him, ‘Keep your head down for the first year,’ ” says one former aide. “ ‘Don’t try to be a celebrity. It rarely works out.’
During an interview with the columnist John Solomon (famous for spreading Ukrainian-themed conspiracy theories ahead of the first Trump impeachment), Cawthorn described his new station in magical terms. “You think of a Harry Potter or a Gandalf in one of these great works of fiction,” he said. “They’re handed a wand. And you as the viewer, you don’t exactly know what they can do with that wand, but you know it holds incredible power. That’s a lot what it’s like coming into Congress, because there’s really no limitations onto what you can and cannot do in Congress. Aside from what the Supreme Court will allow you to do.”
“You almost can’t help, with him, doing some armchair psychoanalysis,” said Tom Fiedler, the Miami Herald journalist who derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign and three decades later retired to Asheville and found himself covering the rise of Cawthorn for a local nonprofit. After Fiedler reported critically on aspects of Cawthorn’s biography, the campaign created a racist website to highlight that the journalist, who is white, “quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker.” Fiedler said, “He has a very Trump-like quality: He sees himself as charismatic and able to persuade everyone to come to his side. He feels he is the anointed one.”
In Washington, Cawthorn’s ambition is to replicate on the right what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has achieved on the left. (When we spoke in his office, Cawthorn said he considers her a “genius.”) As he understood things, that meant being famous, even if it required disregarding the wisdom of his elders. “We advised him, ‘Keep your head down for the first year,’ ” the former Meadows aide said. “ ‘Don’t try to be a celebrity. It rarely works out.’ ”
Now, with Cawthorn’s fame tied up in accusations that he helped incite a violent insurrection and with opponents calling for him to be expelled from the House after just days on the job, basic survival instincts are kicking in. I asked him about a tweet sent just after his election — “Cry more, lib” — that had helped make him a right-wing star. “That’s the thing I regret most,” he said. Wait a minute — isn’t this the party of “Don’t retreat, reload?” Of never admitting any wrongdoing so that you never have to be accountable? Cawthorn said many Republicans have encouraged him to hold the line. “I get so many texts from a lot of people who feel like they’re great advisers, saying, ‘Never apologize! We never back down! We never do this!’ ” he said, raising his voice.
But that’s not going to work for him anymore, not in the environment he feels forming in the void left by Trump. “I think that’s bad for the country,” he said. “I really think that us just saying whatever the fuck we want to say and then — please don’t quote the ‘fuck’ — just saying whatever we want to say and then never apologizing for it, never saying, ‘Oh, you know what? That was wrong. This is actually wrong because this is actually not factual; here, let me fix that.’ I think that hurts our party, and it hurts us as humans and Americans because it makes people just so angry and aggressive toward one another. I don’t think it makes you weaker to apologize.”
To be clear, Cawthorn is talking about contrition in theory; he is not saying he is sorry for his participation in Trump’s rally. In fact, he thinks his speech to the mob may have saved his colleagues’ lives. “Maybe my remarks that day led to a thousand less people, or ten less people, who didn’t storm the Capitol,” he told me. “Maybe that number would’ve been enough to breach the House floor, and congressmen could have died or more police officers could have died. I think my comments there led to less violence.”
Here, Cawthorn is almost certainly in uncharted waters, which is his analogy, not mine. “I feel a lot like Magellan,” he said. “You know — the great explorer during the Age of Exploration.”
I fear he will go far in the Republican Party. He’s got it all.
If you can, read the whole article. There’s a lot more…