That’s my congressman
Accounts differ, but it appears my Republican congressman, Chuck Edwards, smacked an unidentified audience member with a clipboard on his way out of a Rotary District 7670 conference after his speech Saturday night in Asheville. The man called the police.
Rotary clubs are intended not to be partisan or sectarian. So Guy Gooder, the district’s community service project chair and a corporate sponsor of the event, said he had concerns as soon as he learned Edwards was a speaker, but he didn’t expect what he witnessed Saturday night.
Gooder, a graphic designer from Franklin, said Edwards was invited to speak about Helene relief and recovery, as Buncombe County Board of Commissioner Chairwoman Amanda Edwards — who is not related — had done the night before. He said she stayed on script. Edwards did not.
Gooder said Edwards used his speech to defend President Donald Trump’s administration, including on tariffs and cuts to federal agencies.
Gooder said while Edwards said he might try to restore funding to the State Department to help the Rotarians’ cause of polio eradication, he also spent his speech “insulting” the federal agencies the Rotarians work with most closely.
Edwards’s tone did not go over well with some Rotarians.
“He spent 30 minutes basically insulting the Rotarians’ intelligence in his speech,” Gooder said. “He insulted many of the programs that we partner with, agencies like the State Department, and the WHO, which is polio eradication, insulted those departments, talked about maybe we can get some funding back to the State Department for polio, so our efforts can continue.”
Gooder, a critic of Trump who is registered as an unaffiliated voter, serves on the Franklin Tourism Development Authority board. Gooder stresses the importance of Rotarians to check their views on politics at the door when they walk into Rotarian events.
Gooder told McClatchy he did not witness the encounter. But after 30 minutes of bashing Rotary’s partners, Gooder said, “they’re probably going to insult you back.” Someone did as Edwards exited down the center aisle between the tables.
TPM & The Assembly have more:
“He got into an argument at one of the tables with another Rotarian and Chuck got upset and hit the guy with a binder and said ‘love you man’ as he walked out,” said a Rotarian, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize his relationship with the organization.
[…]
The man exchanged words with Edwards after the congressman delivered his remarks, Gooder said. “Chuck stops and kind of bends over, kind of in-his-face type of stuff,” Gooder told McClatchy, saying Edwards “hit the guy with his clipboard” while the man was still seated. According to Gooder, the two men then exited the conference room.
Neither Edwards’ D.C. office nor his district office responded to our requests for comment as of Monday night.
McClatchy reported on early accounts of the incident on Sunday, including a statement from Edwards claiming he had “refused to engage with an intoxicated man that was cursing” after his speech.
There seems to be no video of the exchanges.
In a text message, Rotary District 7670’s Governor Connie Molland said it was her understanding the Buncombe County District Attorney’s Office decided “there was not enough probable cause and that they were dropping the investigation… It was a pretty vague situation.”
As I observed at Edwards’s Asheville town hall event in March, Edwards seems to enjoy trolling his constituents on Donald Trump’s behalf. He appears to have brought that same energy to the Rotary speech. He’s a class act.
Edwards feels near-bulletproof in his R+5 district he won again by 14 points in November. Trump won the state by 3.2 points. The last Democrat to flip the district (as then drawn) was Heath Shuler in 2006 who held it for three terms. (I worked that campaign for NCDP.) Republicans Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and Edwards followed.
Trump visited the area in January and named Edwards to a “special task force to speed up recovery in Western North Carolina.” Asheville Watchdog’s Tom Fiedler last week likened Edwards to Charlie Brown and the football:
He announced that Edwards, Republican House colleagues Virginia Foxx and Tim Moore, and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley would constitute a “task force” to examine FEMA’s performance, recommend reforms and accelerate recovery. Putting the words “task force” in quotation marks is purposeful.
Edwards and his colleagues raced to send out news releases announcing the great responsibility and opportunity entrusted to them. “It is an honor to be named by President Trump to the FEMA task force to fix how this broken agency works,” Edwards stated.
Edwards prepared a report for the White House on his district’s Helene recovery needs and asked Trump to reply within seven days. And then?
Since that seven-day deadline Trump has diligently churned out such new executive orders demanding that university accreditation boards cease requiring DEI policies as a positive factor; requiring commercial truckers to speak and write English (a potential problem with French-speaking truckers if Canada becomes a state); threatening “sanctuary cities” with losing federal funds and, this week, proposing to tax movies produced overseas (threatening future remakes of “D-Day,” “Sands of Iwo Jima” and maybe “Titanic.”).
Nothing referencing Helene recovery.
As a final humiliation, the White House last week released the list of appointees to the “Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency” that Trump announced January 24.
Neither Edwards, Foxx nor Moore were on the list. (Repeat the above-referenced image here).
When asked why Edwards’s name was missing, his office said the media failed to understand the distinction between the FEMA “council,” which was officially created by the January 24 executive order from which he is omitted, and the “task force” consisting of the three GOP House members and Whatley, a Trump loyalist with no experience in disaster management.
Leaving the Group W backbencher “flat on his back.”
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