Madison Cawthorn isn’t a name you hear a lot anymore. He was elected to succeed Mark Meadows in Congress, when Meadows became Donald Trump’s chief of staff in 2020 — even though neither Meadows nor Trump had endorsed Cawthorn in the primary. That year, Cawthorn became the youngest person elected to the House of Representatives in modern history. For a while, it looked like he would become a major insurgent figure on the Right — sort of like the conservative version of A.O.C., with a few dozen more I.Q. points. But then everything changed. And it changed very quickly.
Starting around early 2022, Cawthorn began saying things that were extremely unpopular in Washington, among both Democrats and Republicans. For one thing, Cawthorn described Ukraine’s government as corrupt, and he suggested that we probably shouldn’t write them blank checks indefinitely. That was a big no-no. Even more alarming to the power centers in the nation’s capital, Cawthorn publicly began talking about what he called, “the sexual perversion that goes on in Washington.” As CNN reported at the time, “Cawthorn claimed that he has been invited to an orgy in Washington and had personally seen leaders in the efforts to curb drug addiction doing cocaine.”‘
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