Whatever gig or job Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) manages to score after he leaves Congress had better offer a incredibly large salary, because it turns out he’s deeply in the hole after spending over a half million bucks on his failed re-election effort, according to The Daily Beast.
A pair of unusual campaign finance reports this week reveal that since 2019, Cawthorn has personally invested a total of $817,000 into his campaign, while recovering only $261,000 of that amount. That leaves him personally in the hole $556,000, more than three times the annual congressional salary of $174,000. The new campaign reports also punctuate a remarkable financial collapse that had been playing out in parallel to Cawthorn’s not-so-slow motion political implosion over the first half of the year.
A closer look at the finance reports show that Cawthorn’s campaign spend thousands on all sorts of questionable items, including fast food restaurants and cigar shops:
Several hundred dollars at Chick-Fil-A and a place called Papas & Beer, $320 to Hendersonville Portable Toilets a week after the primary, and nearly $2,000 to a cigar shop Cawthorn favors, called Casablanca Tobacconist — $584.68 of it the night he lost.
While he was spending wildly, Cawthorn also managed to repeatedly undercut his re-election message by saying and doing incredibly stupid things that led many in the North Carolina political establishment to distance themselves from him.
For example, Cawthorn suggested that his GOP colleagues in Congress were holding “cocaine orgies;” was repeatedly stopped at airports while carrying a gun; and was busted for driving on a suspended license several times.
In the closing days of the North Carolina Republican primary, a series of photos and videos of Cawthorn engaged in lewd behavior were leaked by GOP operatives showing the congressman dressed in lingerie and grinding his crotch against the face of a man who was identified as his cousin.
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