“This is, suffice it to say, one of the weirdest political scandals in recent memory,” said Late Night host Seth Meyers at the top of Thursday evening’s “A Closer Look” segment.
Meyers was, of course, referring to how Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) “casually accused his colleagues of inviting him to orgies and doing cocaine.”
Wearing a backward baseball cap and T-shirt with the words “Warrior Poet” emblazoned across the chest, Cawthorn said during an interview, “The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington—I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington… I look at a lot of these people, a lot of them I’ve looked up to through my life—I’ve always paid attention to politics… then all of a sudden, you get invited to, ‘Well, hey, we’re gonna have a sexual get-together at one of our homes. You should come!’ and I’m like, ‘What did you just ask me to come to?’”
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“And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that there’s some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and you watch them do a key-bump of cocaine in front of you.”
“One thing is for sure: Cawthorn is the first dude with a backwards baseball cap who calls it a ‘sexual get-together.’ Did you accidentally time-travel to a 1970s swinger party?” cracked Meyers, adding, “Just say orgy. That’s gross too, but at least when you say it, it gets over faster.”
The comments attracted the attention of House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who dressed down Cawthorn in a closed-door meeting, calling his behavior “embarrassing” and “unbecoming.”
One Republican who was present told Politico, “Cawthorn clarified that multiple members were not involved in orgies but did maintain that one member of Congress invited him to a sex party with his wife. Despite McCarthy and others in the room pressing him to reveal a name, Cawthorn refused, this Republican said.” (Cawthorn, it should be noted, is an alleged sexual predator who’s been accused of harassing and attacking a number of women while he was in college.)
“This is exactly what they deserve, because it’s not like Republican members of Congress can just say, ‘That’s a crazy conspiracy theory,’ when so many of them ran on crazy conspiracy theories,” explained Meyers. “What’s Marjorie Taylor Greene going to say? ‘Use your head! There are no cocaine orgies. Now, moving on, we have some good news on the Jewish space lasers…’”
Meyers also found it telling that this is the scandal that has the GOP up in arms and not the recent revelation that there is a seven-and-a-half-hour gap in Trump’s official White House call logs on the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol—one that he fomented.
