Two of North Carolina’s Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., have been in the news lately, giving the state Republican Party a chance to show where it stands. And it did so, as the Arizona Republican Party did before it. And as the national Republican Party has done.
Sen. Richard Burr voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection. State party chair Michael Whatley swiftly decried Burr’s vote as “shocking and disappointing.”
Rep. Madison Cawthorn, on the other hand, gets a pass from the North Carolina Republican Party. The list of things for which Cawthorn needs that pass is getting rather long.
Cawthorn has lied repeatedly about his background, suggesting that the car accident that partially paralyzed him was what kept him from attending the U.S. Naval Academy, when in fact he’d been rejected before the accident. He lied about the accident itself, claiming he was left “to die in a fiery tomb” by a friend who in fact helped pull him from the wreckage. He claimed to be training for the Paralympics, which he was not.
But there are far more serious allegations against Cawthorn than resume-fluffing or even lying about a friend’s life-or-death betrayal. Those lies may be easy shortcuts to show the quality of the man’s character, but it’s more serious that on Jan. 6 he went from giving a rally speech rhapsodizing about a crowd that “has some fight in it” to trying, in Congress, to overturn the election results. And when we talk about Cawthorn’s background, his single unsuccessful semester at Patrick Henry College deserves a lot of attention.
During Cawthorn’s election campaign, more than 150 alumni of Patrick Henry College signed a letter opposing his candidacy.
”Cawthorn’s time at PHC was marked by gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” the letter said. “During his brief time at the college, Cawthorn established a reputation for predatory behavior.”
This is a college established for homeschool students, one with an overwhelmingly if not entirely Republican student body. Alumni touted by the college go on to “shape culture for Christ as a tech entrepreneur” or work in an anti-abortion Christian crisis pregnancy center. Several worked in the Trump White House—including former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah. Cawthorn’s behavior was bad enough to draw more than 150 of them to oppose his election as a far-right Republican. His behavior was so bad that resident assistants in the Patrick Henry College dorms took to warning women students to stay away from him and, in particular, never to get into his car.
One woman who attended PHC has said that Cawthorn groped her, while two women who were not students at PHC have said that he forcibly kissed them (and bear in mind, for the evangelical homeschool community a kiss is a big deal), and, BuzzFeed reports, a former friend of Cawthorn’s “said that Cawthorn would talk about how he would get women to sit in his lap, and at a party at his house one night, he told a story about a fellow classmate whom he pulled onto his lap and then put his finger in between her legs as she squirmed. Diego said he remembered Cawthorn saying, ‘Girls like that stuff.’” Very fitting for a follower of “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump. The same former friend of Cawthorn’s also described him telling a grossly racist, sexist joke. On multiple occasions he verbally abused women in public settings.
Madison Cawthorn is a sexual predator as well as a serial liar.
The North Carolina Republican Party has had nothing bad to say about him.
The Washington Post doesn’t appear to have had trouble finding individual North Carolina Republicans—even prominent ones, including a sheriff who helped get Cawthorn elected to begin with—who will criticize him. Chuck McGrady, a former state representative, calls Cawthorn “embarrassing,” but it’s the behavior of other Republicans that seems still more embarrassing as he describes it: “Step away from the cult of personality and then you get criticized. There seems to be very little in the way of accountability.” Specifically, condemning Cawthorn might be perceived as disloyalty to Trump.
”It is what you would expect from a Trumpified party,” a longtime Republican official told the Post. “One of the regrettable lessons Republicans have learned from the Trump years is there’s no need to apologize. The shame or embarrassment can get in the way of your political ascendancy. They don’t feel the need to explain themselves because might makes right.”
Except they’re all about apologies or condemnation when disloyalty to Trump is the issue.
This is the Republican Party Donald Trump made: Lying and sexual assault are welcomed. A vote of conscience against violent insurrection is not.