2 Losers Who Overcame Huge Obstacles To Win Positions Where They Do Great Evil: Madison & Lauren

“I miss my life,” he said. “I miss being able to defend myself … being able to dress myself … being able to use the bathroom without someone helping me … I miss not peeing the bed because I have no control over my penis … not having to have pills keep me alive … being able to compete … being checked out by girls … I miss my pride as a man … the pride my father swelled with when he spoke my name … I miss,” he said, “not having to convince myself every day not to pull the trigger and end it all.”

The scope of Cawthorn’s troubles is broad, the implications transcending mere politics. More than 70 interviews with people who know Cawthorn, who have worked for him and against him, allies and enemies, activists and operatives and longtime watchers of politics here in the mountains of western North Carolina, paint a picture of a man in crisis. Cawthorn, they say, is an immature college dropout with a thin work resume, a scofflaw and serial embellisher who was neither qualified nor prepared for the responsibility and the scrutiny that comes with the office he holds. They describe him as a person whose ongoing physical pain and insecurities have made him unusually susceptible to the twisted incentives of a political environment and a Trump-led GOP that prizes perhaps above all else outrage and partisan attack.

“He’s not OK,” said Michele Woodhouse, the former Republican chair of the 11th District who’s now running against him. “He’s very unwell,” said a Republican strategist familiar with Cawthorn. “The recovery is not complete,” said David Rhode, a fellow Hendersonville native who knew Cawthorn pre-politics but now works for Wendy Nevarez, another one of Cawthorn’s current opponents. “He’s got some deep issues that will probably never go away,” said Chuck Archerd, a Republican who ran against him in 2020. “It’s never going to be just totally fine,” said a friend.

The consequences are mounting. Cawthorn long ago lost the trust and support of some of the most influential Republicans in and around Henderson County, without whom he would not have gotten elected in the first place. More recently he’s lost the backing of the top two Republicans in the state Legislature, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger; the state’s GOP senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis; and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in Washington. And while Cawthorn widely is seen as a favorite of Donald Trump-- he spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and appeared at a recent Trump rally near Raleigh-- Trump in 2022 conspicuously has not issued an endorsement email for Cawthorn the way he has for scores of other candidates.

Polling shows Cawthorn sagging but still in the lead, his closest competitor being Chuck Edwards-- a state senator from the area who has the backing of Tillis and some of the best, most experienced strategists in the state. Needing to get at least 30 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff in July, Cawthorn is running out of money, running no ads on local TV and barely campaigning-- and all but trying to hide when he does.

...Cawthorn was struggling. The year before, on his 19th birthday, in the last week he spent at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal cord injury rehabilitation, he had told his family he would be “standing up for you” the next time they sang him happy birthday. Here he was, though, three weeks past the date he turned 20, the handsome, “charmed” second son of an “upper middle class” financial adviser father and a homemaker mother who doubled as her boys’ teacher, a onetime football linebacker, avid weightlifter and duck-hunter, cheerful Chick-fil-A cashier. He was paraplegic.

...Cawthorn’s congressman at the time was Mark Meadows, and he had gotten a part-time job as an assistant in Meadows’ Hendersonville office, starting in January of 2015. He had said during the deposition he was full-time-- he would tell the Asheville Citizen-Times the same thing during the campaign-- but he wasn’t. Even in his part-time capacity, according to a fellow member of that staff, he didn’t do much. “He worked for us and answered the phone, and couldn’t even do that, just to be honest,” this person said.

...In the fall of 2016, he enrolled at Patrick Henry College, a school in Loudoun County, Va., with fewer than 400 students that “exists to glorify God” and prepare “Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture.” The Saturday of Thanksgiving, a few weeks after Trump’s election, Cawthorn struck a pose in front of the U.S. Capitol. “As a child I thought I wanted to rule the world,” he said in an Instagram post. “As a young adult I know I do.”

But his time on campus was a disaster. His “average grade in most classes was a D,” he later said in a deposition. In a speech he made to the student body in a chapel on campus, he falsely suggested he had gotten into the Naval Academy before the accident, and he said Ledford had left him to die in the car “in a fiery tomb” — when Ledford in fact had helped pull him out. Most seriously, though, in his short time at PHC Cawthorn “established a reputation for predatory behavior” and “gross misconduct towards our female peers,” taking them on “joy rides” to secluded areas where he locked the doors and made “unwanted sexual advances,” according to an open letter 148 former students wrote and signed. “He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing who made our small, close-knit community his personal playground of debauchery.” (“I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life,” Cawthorn has said.)

In October of 2017, in a second deposition in a separate accident-related lawsuit, Cawthorn admitted under oath that what he had said in his first deposition about having been accepted to Harvard and Princeton wasn’t true. He was no longer living with his parents but in an apartment in Asheville with Stephen Smith, a slightly younger distant cousin who was becoming his best friend and primary helper who provided the assistance Cawthorn needed in part because of thick carpet that made it hard to wheel around. He didn’t have a job. He wasn’t going to school.

...Cawthorn is a member of Congress because he got 18,481 votes in a primary, which was 1,016 votes more than the candidate who finished third, which was enough to get to a runoff, which he won. “Charisma and sympathy,” said a North Carolina GOP consultant working for one of his many opponents, “in a very, very low-voter-turnout election.” Really, though, Cawthorn is a member of Congress because he didn’t run as the person he’s been since he won.

...Interviewers keyed in on the comeback story he had leaned on throughout his bid. “I have experienced more pain and more suffering than the overwhelming majority of people go through,” he told the Washington Examiner. “That has taught me something that is, I believe, absolutely missing in conservative politics, and that is empathy.”

“To liberals, let’s have a conversation. To conservatives, let’s define what we support, and win the argument in areas like health care and the environment,” he said from the stage at the Republican National Convention that August. With a walker and the help of his pals, he stood up from his chair at the crescendo of his speech. Noting he had been “touted as a future star of the party,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza said it was “moving.”

In September, speaking with Jewish Insider, Cawthorn praised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He disagreed with her policy platform, he said, but in other ways he admired the woman who had become a standard-bearer for young progressives. “She is influencing an entire generation,” he said. “I’m sure her and I will get along when I get to Congress.”

“Black lives matter,” Cawthorn said that month during a debate with his Democratic opponent Moe Davis, a retired Air Force colonel and former prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. “I was unhappy with the way the president treated the death of George Floyd,” he said of Trump, according to the coverage of the debate in the Cherokee Scout, “and the lack of empathy he showed after that death happened.”

Even in late October, speaking with a reporter from the Hendersonville Lightning, Cawthorn sounded totally different from how he sounds today.

“The reason President Trump didn’t endorse me,” he said of the lack of his nod in the primary and runoff, “is because I’m willing to be strongly critical of him whenever he messes up. I’m not planning to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.”

And he said he didn’t care for Trump’s tweets. “It does more to add to the partisan divide rather than try to heal it and unite us all as Americans,” Cawthorn said. “It makes people enemies of each other instead of saying we are Americans first and let’s work towards the future.”

Throughout, though, that summer and fall, scrutiny intensified-- in particular the beginning of the news of his pattern of sexual behavior included a report in which one teen from his area recalled trying to pull away when he tried to “forcibly” kiss her and getting her hair stuck in his wheelchair-- all the while Trump and people in his orbit now in the wake of Cawthorn’s rout of a win saw a star. He was invited to the White House. Trump’s Washington hotel. The RNC. (Cawthorn denied being “forceful,” and his spokesperson at the time said there was “a big difference between a failed advance and being forceful, to the extent that’s possible when you’re paraplegic.”)

In November, when the by-then-Trump-endorsed Cawthorn won, he sent that night a very Trump-esque, red-meat tweet.

“Cry more, lib.”

In interviews with outlets ranging from local newspapers to Jewish Insider to CNN, Cawthorn expressed regret. “I have to represent everybody now, so I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

But for Cawthorn’s older, more experienced advisers, the tweet was one of the first signs of a stark, disquieting change. Chief among them was Erwin, the sheriff who had helped Cawthorn from the start. Erwin was in line to be Cawthorn’s district director-- until Cawthorn in the aftermath of his victory called Erwin “a coward” and “a little bitch.”

The disagreement began, Erwin said, when he wanted an older, more experienced woman to be hired for a position in the district office, and Cawthorn wanted a much younger woman instead. “And so he started communicating with other people and said that I couldn’t handle a disagreement between two girls-- and it wasn’t two girls; it was a young lady and a woman-- and that I was just a coward and a bitch, and he didn’t know if he wanted me to be his district director,” Erwin told me. “And that’s when I told him, ‘Look, all due respect, I’m going to have to pass on this position.’” (Cawthorn declined to comment.)

“He has an extreme version of what I always call successful person syndrome,” said a Republican strategist familiar with Cawthorn and the campaign, defining it essentially as a first taste of success going to somebody’s head. “I’ve seen this through the years, but not to this degree, because people I think just don’t have the trauma that he has.”

“He hears you,” Erwin said, “but he doesn’t listen.”

The most charitable way to see Cawthorn’s first month in Congress is that it was the last gasp of his best self.

On Jan. 3, 2021, he was sworn in. The first thing he did was contest the election of Joe Biden. He tweeted it was “time to fight.” On Jan. 6, at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse, he was one of the speakers who revved up the crowd. “My friends,” he said, “I want you to chant with me so loud that the cowards I serve with in Washington, D.C., can hear you.” During the storming of the Capitol, he called into the radio show of right-wing talker Charlie Kirk and said he believed some of the ransacking mob were “antifa” and “people paid by the Democratic machine.”

And yet he spent parts of the following few weeks, as Congress moved swiftly toward impeachment of the outgoing president, saying he was sorry.

He said the people who attacked the Capitol were “pathetic,” “weak-minded” “thugs,” and that what happened on the Hill that day was a “despicable” “perversion of patriotism.”

“And the worst part was they’re all waving these American flags and these MAGA flags, and you want to say, ‘You don’t represent me at all. That’s not my movement. You’re not part of my party,’” he told Olivia Nuzzi of New York. “There’s no excuse for it.”

“I have no problem calling that out, even though a lot of those people probably would’ve voted for me,” he told Cory Vaillancourt of the Smoky Mountain News. “It’s definitely time for the president to concede.”

“The election was not fraudulent,” he said on CNN on Jan. 23. “Joseph R. Biden is our president.”

He was one of 17 GOP House freshmen who sent Biden a letter on Inauguration Day saying they wanted to work with him to try to “rise above the partisan fray.” He told Story Hinckley from the Christian Science Monitor he was praying for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and that the member of Congress he most wanted to have lunch with was Nancy Pelosi.

The longer, though, he’s been in office, the less penitent he’s been.

He started selling Covid masks that said “USELESS.” In a speech on the House floor about the Second Amendment, he said, “In real America, when we say, ‘Come and take it,’ we damn well mean it.” When Liz Cheney of Wyoming was booted from her House leadership position for her pro-democracy views, he tweeted, “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.” He called Dr. Anthony Fauci “a punk.” He called Biden “a geriatric despot.” He said Biden’s vaccine outreach efforts were really so the government could come take people’s Bibles and guns. He called on Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment and oust Biden from office in a letter in which he misspelled her name. He cleaned a gun during a Veterans’ Affairs committee hearing on toxic burn pits on Zoom. He went to the airport in Asheville with a gun. He went to a school board meeting in Hendersonville with a knife. Months after he called them “thugs,” he said the insurrectionists in jail were “political prisoners.” Months after he said the election was “not fraudulent, he said, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.” In the midst of redistricting he tried to shift to a district that would have stretched east to the much larger Charlotte market before coming back when the maps were shot down. He was pulled over going 89 miles per hour in a 65-mile-per-hour zone in Buncombe County. He was pulled over going 87 in a 70 in Polk. He told mothers to raise their sons to be “monsters.” He disparaged the Ukrainian president. Republicans from the mountains to Raleigh to Washington finally had begun to think enough was enough when he accused his Capitol Hill colleagues of participating in orgies and doing “key bumps” of cocaine. And that was before the pictures and videos started to make their way around social media and even into campaign ads.

“Madison Cawthorn has fallen well short of the most basic standards western North Carolina expects from their representatives,” said Tillis. “On any given day, he’s an embarrassment,” said Burr. “He’s reckless,” said Tim Moore, the North Carolina House speaker. McCarthy said he needs to “turn himself around.”

...Electorally, come Tuesday, he could still win. Politically he might already have lost.

“What is going on with him?” Sean Hannity said on his radio show the other day. “Look,” Hannity said, “I never like to celebrate people’s decline or misery, and I don’t like to pile on-- I don’t know what he’s going through-- but … something is going on here, and it sounds to me like he needs some type of intervention or help.”

In January 2004, when she was 17, she went bowling with the 24-year-old man she would later marry. It wasn’t exactly a fairytale courtship. At the bowling alley that night, Jayson Boebert exposed his penis to two teenage girls. (In a witness statement, a victim claims that before Jayson exposed himself, he commented on her fading ankle tattoo, saying, “Well, I have a tattoo with your name written on my dick.”) Jayson pleaded guilty to public indecency and lewd exposure and spent four days in jail, followed by two years on probation. A month after the bowling alley incident, Jayson pleaded guilty to a domestic violence charge-- reportedly against Lauren-- for which he would spend seven days in jail.

...[After marriage in 2007] Boebert spent the next few years raising her children and preaching to incarcerated women at the county jail. She said she preached there for seven years and called her work “far more powerful than any government program could ever be.” (Volunteer attendance logs obtained by Colorado Newsline suggest that she only preached for two and a half.)

In 2010, amid the national foreclosure crisis, she and her husband were evicted from their home in Silt, a town just down the road from Rifle, according to housing records. The details of the next several years are murky, but the couple seems to have landed on their feet: In 2013, the Boeberts opened Shooters Grill.

Before Boebert stoked liberal rage on the national stage to forge a political career, she did it to sell hamburgers. Boebert claims that workers at Shooters began to open carry because a man was “physically beaten to death” in the alley outside her restaurant. A man did die on the sidewalk down the street from her restaurant, and police initially investigated his death as a homicide, but they ultimately determined his cause of death to be a drug overdose.

Whatever caused the open carry policy, it garnered plenty of attention. After a local reporter published a story about the restaurant’s gun-toting waiters, CNN and Nightline sent cameras. “Almost all the waitresses pack heat, publicly and proudly,” Nightline anchor Dan Abrams explained in 2014, adding incredulously, “They say it makes them safer.” Boebert claimed her policy was unremarkable: “It is a very common thing here,” she said. “We see people open-carrying all the time.”

Former Shooters employees tell me that, in the early years of Boebert’s fame, people visited the restaurant from across the country, and that the dining room was often packed with tourists on summer days. But they also say that the reality of working at Shooters was far removed from the lighthearted atmosphere shown on TV.

In fact, five former Shooters employees tell me that Boebert frequently failed to pay her employees on time. (Two of the former workers wished to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation; another did not want to be named and publicly associated with Boebert.) “The second the restaurant blew up, her head blew up, and it became something entirely different,” one former waitress says. “And I got to meet a new version of her that is a monster.”

Multiple employees say that they were paid in cash, either out of the register or from Boebert’s husband’s wallet, without any taxes deducted. While many workers were struggling to make ends meet, they say Boebert spent exorbitant sums on breast implants, private schooling for her sons, and a new Cadillac Escalade. They describe her as alternately absent, showing up only when news crews were at the restaurant, or demanding. “If she would come into the restaurant,” one former employee tells me, “everyone just knew we were just gonna have a bad day, because she would just walk around and nitpick.”

Boebert insisted in her television appearances that gun safety was paramount, telling CNN, “There’s no accidents that are gonna happen…There’s no reason a waitress is ever allowed to unholster.” Most workers describe Boebert as consistently safe with guns. Still, one worker says safety was “not how it was perceived on TV.” Another claims that Boebert pointed a loaded gun at him when he said that he would have voted for Obama for a third term. “She would tell it like a joke,” he tells me. “She thought it was hilarious.”

Boebert’s employees say they helped out at her other enterprises, which included a catering service for visitors at the local airport and a now-shuttered restaurant called Smokehouse 1776. Food safety in Boebert’s emerging restaurant empire was not always flawless. Many workers vividly recall the day in 2017 when 80 attendees at a local rodeo catered by Smokehouse 1776 came down with nausea and diarrhea. A report from the county health department determined the cause to be food poisoning from pork sliders sold at an unlicensed mobile stand and likely stored at an improper temperature. Instead of owning up to the accident and apologizing to the community, Boebert lashed out at her critics, publishing an op-ed in the local paper saying the stool samples had been “improperly handled” and suggesting that “the level of filth that was on the grandstands at the fairgrounds” was somehow to blame. “I am sorry so many people have been misled by bits and pieces of stories that were released in an excitement to create some sort of ‘news’ in our uneventful area,” she wrote. Josh Boyington, a former cook, puts it more bluntly: “They poisoned the whole town.”

...Employees tell me they believed that Boebert’s husband, who works as a consultant in the oil and gas industry, was keeping the company afloat. “There were times when we were waiting for him to get his check, so that way she could get us our check,” one former employee says. According to Boyington, “He’s the one who paid the rent, all the bills, everything.”

“Shooters don’t make no money,” Boyington, who says he left the restaurant in 2017, tells me. “I left because I don’t even think we were topping $500 a day.” According to Boebert’s congressional disclosures, Shooters lost $143,000 in 2019 and $226,000 in 2020.