HBO host John Oliver devoted an entire segment of his latest episode to Rep Madison Cawthorn’s troubled history with the truth.
Mr Cawthorn has drawn widespread condemnation in recent weeks for publicly accusing his fellow lawmakers of inviting him to orgies and doing “key bumps” of cocaine in front of him.
“All of a sudden you get invited to like, ‘Well, hey, we’re gonna have a kind of sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’” the Republican told podcaster John Lovell. “And you realise they’re asking you to come to an orgy.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said there is “no evidence” behind Mr Cawthorn’s claims, and said the freshman congressman admitted to him in person that they weren’t true. On Sunday, Oliver took aim at the remarks as well.
“Now, obviously, no one uses the phrase ‘key bump’ without knowing exactly what it means, so it feels like you’re already telling on yourself a little there,” the comedian began. “Also, I’m pretty sure that people having coke-fuelled orgies don’t call them ‘sexual get-togethers.’”
But the HBO host took Mr McCarthy to task as well, saying Mr Cawthorn had too long a history of falsehoods for the Minority Leader to only now suddenly lose confidence in him.
“Cawthorn’s record with the truth has always been unrelentingly bad,” Oliver said.
The comedian then ran through a long list of Mr Cawthorn’s false statements. The congressman, who is partially paralysed from a car accident, has said he trained for the Paralympics. In fact, he was never even registered for them. He also implied that the car accident stopped him from joining the US Naval Academy. In fact, the Academy had rejected him before the crash happened.
But perhaps most infuriating to the comedian was that Mr Cawthorn, an avid Instagram user, posted a photo of himself with a dessert that he falsely called an “apple cobbler.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it is definitely not a cobbler,” the host fumed. “That’s nothing! That’s f***ing nothing, Madison! Words mean things!”
Oliver then turned his attention to a video Mr Cawthorn posted of himself punching a small tree. Nothing about the video is dishonest, but Oliver did call it “one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my entire life.”
The Independent has reached out to Mr Cawthorn for comment.
