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Rep Madison Cawthorn was greeted like a conquering hero at a Trump rally in North Carolina on Saturday night where he called for President Joe Biden to be impeached.
Chants of ‘USA, USA, USA’ erupted as he took the stage in Selma.
Cawthorn opened by chastising his party leadership for being too moderate and failing to stand up for ordinary Americans.
‘We have so many in the national party… who believe that the key to saving our nation is cheapening our platform and going after these non-existent middle ground voters,’ he said.
‘My friend, there is no middle ground with Marxists.’
‘The key to save your nation is not going after these voters that don’t exist, but it’s going after the disenfranchised men and women in our country, the people that don’t even bother to vote because it’s been proven to them time and time again that the government will never work on their behalf.
His criticism comes after he came under fire from his Republican leader in the House of Representatives for wild claims about orgies and cocaine in Washington.
Rep Madison Cawthorn was greeted like a conquering hero at a Trump rally in North Carolina on Saturday night where he called for President Joe Biden to be impeached
Cawthorn opened by chastising his party leadership for being too moderate and failing to stand up for ordinary Americans
Last month, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said the 26-year-old had lost his trust after admitting his claims about Washington were exaggerated.
And he said he may take further action over the comments, which caused an angry outcry among Hill Republicans.
Yet Cawthorn was received as a conquering hero in his home state.
He told the story of how he was told he would never stand again after a car crash seven years – and then rose out of his wheelchair to deliver the rest of his speech on his feet.
‘We will restore the Second Amendment by repealing the National Firearms Act,’ he said.
‘We will secure our borders and finally my friends. We will impeach Joe Biden for his dereliction of duty.’
The cheers showed he was among friends and being dressed down in Washington.
The row erupted when Cawthorn, at 26 one of the youngest and most controversial House members, claimed he had seen evidence of ‘sexual perversion’ in Washington during an interview with John Lovell for the ‘Warrior Poet Society.’
He was asked whether D.C. resembled Netflix show House of Cards, and its elements of ‘corruption, power, money and perversion.’
Chants of ‘USA, USA, USA’ erupted as he took the stage in Selma
‘The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington … being kind of a young guy in Washington where the average age is probably 60 or 70, I look at all these people – a lot of them who I’ve looked up to throughout my life … then all of a sudden you get invited to like, “well hey we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes. You should come,” like, what did you just ask me to come to?
‘And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy,’ he said.
‘There’s some of the people that are leading the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine in front of you and it’s like wow, this is wild.’
In North Carolina, few in the crowd doubted his story.
‘Personally I believe everything he says,’ said Ginny Simmons, 61, a hairdresser who had driven two hours to attend the rally.
She described how her granddaughter went to college in Cawthorn’s district and turned her on to the young congressman.
‘What I like about him is how he relates to a lot of young people.
‘And like the other speakers we know he stands for guns and freedom – all the things they are trying to take away.’
Mark Bertoldi, 65, a retired businessman, was less sure.
‘I think he was telling the truth. Now we know what’s going on behind the curtain,’ he said about his Washington comments.
‘But originally I thought he was a pretty upstanding candidate but now I’m not so sure about his character.’
He added that he suspected Cawthorn might say anything to get a headline.
In Washington the result was anger among Republicans and a telling off from his boss McCarthy.
‘I just told him he’s lost my trust, he’s gonna have to earn it back, and I laid out everything I find is unbecoming,’ McCarthy told Axios and other outlets.
‘And, you can’t just say “You can’t do this again.”
‘I mean, he’s, he’s got a lot of members very upset.’
And McCarthy said Cawthorn admitted he had exaggerated his claims.
‘In the interview, he claims he watched people do cocaine. Then when he comes in he tells me, he says he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away,’ McCarthy said.
‘It’s just frustrating. There’s no evidence behind his statements.
‘And when I sit down with him … I told him you can’t make statements like that, as a member of Congress, that affects everybody else and the country as a whole.’
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (pictured) plans to sit down with 26-year-old GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn to talk about claims he made including that he was invited to orgies and cocaine use was rampant in Washington, D.C.
Cawthorn, 26, was asked during an interview with the Warrior Poet Society how closely his experience on Capitol Hill aligns with House of Cards, specifically its elements of ‘corruption, power, money and perversion’
Cawthorn said that he once heard a former president say the only thing that was unrealistic about the Netflix show was that Congress would ever be able to pass a piece of legislation that quickly, and he agreed with the sentiment
Politico reported Tuesday that Cawthorn’s Republican colleagues stood up and aired their grievances during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting earlier in the day, complaining that the North Carolina Republican made party members out to be sexual deviants and drug users.
CNN reported that colleagues wanted Cawthorn to name names because his comments could otherwise unfairly malign the whole party.
The 65-year-old Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack told the group that he rarely speaks up during the weekly meetings, but did so Tuesday because he’s getting questions from constituents about Cawthorn’s claims of orgies and drug use, Politico said.
Womack remarked that many lawmakers go to bed at 9 p.m. and use flip phones and fax machines, calling it inappropriate that Cawthorn would paint his Congressional peers with a broad brush.
Sen. Richard Burr, the senior Republican senator from North Carolina, was asked by CNN about Cawthorn’s job performance.
‘That’s for his constituents to figure out but clearly he’s been an embarrassment at times,’ Burr replied.
Cawthorn in December announced the he and his wife of eight months were filing for divorce.
Cawthorn, a staunch conservative not known for his friends across the aisle, is seemingly accusing his fellow Republicans of the illicit behavior. He has recently sparked controversy for calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and ‘alcoholic’ and Ukrainian President Zelensky a ‘thug’
Cawthorn in December announced the he and his wife of eight months were filing for divorce
The young congressman, a staunch conservative not known for his friends across the aisle, is seemingly accusing his fellow Republicans of the illicit behavior.
The ‘former president’ Cawthorn seemingly referred to was Democratic President Bill Clinton.
In 2015, actor Kevin Spacey, the lead on House of Cards, said that he and Clinton were close friends and play poker together. Spacey told Gotham Magazine at the time that Clinton had told him the show was accurate.
‘Kevin, 99 percent of what you do on that show is real. The 1 percent you get wrong is you could never get an education bill passed that fast,’ Clinton told Spacey, according to the actor’s comments to the magazine.
Earlier this month Cawthorn suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is an alcoholic.
Cawthorn said of the California Democrat at a campaign event: ‘I’ll tell you I have to work with her every single day so please do pray for me. The theories of alcoholism are very true and it’s very sad,’ he said, according to video posted by Patriot Takes.
His line got chuckles during the event.
Pelosi, 81, doesn’t drink, and hasn’t for years.
Her daughter Christine attacked prior slurs about her mom’s alleged alcoholism in 2019, tweeting: ‘Republicans and their conservative allies have been pumping this despicable fake meme for years! Now they are caught.
‘#FactCheck: Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!’
Also last month a video surfaced showing Cawthorn calling Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a ‘thug’. He said his government was ‘corrupt, incredibly evil’ and ‘pushing woke ideologies’.
He appeared to be discussing the US sending military aid to Ukraine before lashing out at leaders in Kyiv — who refused to flee the country despite reports that many are on a Russian ‘kill list’ including Zelensky and his family.
In December 2021, Cawthorn announced that he and his CrossFit athlete wife Cristina Bayardelle were getting a divorce after just eight months together.
‘When Cristina and I were engaged, I was not a member of Congress. I felt called to serve and we both agreed that I should run. Our victory was unprecedented, but overnight our lives changed,’ he said in a statement posted by his spokesman.
‘That change has been both hectic and difficult, it’s neither the pace nor the lifestyle we had planned for.’
In December 2021, Cawthorn announced that he and his CrossFit athlete wife Cristina Bayardelle were getting a divorce after just eight months together