The youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a member of the Republican Party, Cawhorne had previously attracted a lot of attention in China and the United States for his extreme anti-China stance. Just recently, an indecent video of him was leaked, causing his painstakingly shaped "persona" to collapse dramatically.

At the beginning of his political career, Cawthorne's apparent resume was impeccable. According to himself and his team, Cawthorne, who was born in 1995, was involved in a serious car accident when he was just 18 years old and could no longer stand after his injuries, causing him to give up his dream of attending the U.S. Naval Academy and instead "serve the American people" by running for Congress. With such a story, Cawthorne was successfully elected to the U.S. Congress in 2020 representing North Carolina's 11th district, becoming the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives in history and the first "post-90s" member of the U.S. Congress.

But it didn't take long for Cawthorne's story to be "disproved": long before his car accident, the U.S. Naval Academy rejected his application because of poor grades and other reasons, and he was elected not "from nothing," as he put it, but largely with the support of Meadows, who had been White House chief of staff.

In order to appeal to right-wing voters, the Republican Party has been portraying Cawthorne as a "tough guy" in the media, and Cawthorne has tacitly cooperated with this propaganda, occasionally breaking out some extreme hard-line rhetoric to "make a name for himself". After the outbreak in the U.S., he first claimed that "China put the virus on the U.S." and then advocated the confiscation of all Chinese assets in the U.S. to "compensate" the U.S. for its losses in the outbreak.

The reason why I have taken the trouble to present so much is that only by knowing this background information about Cawthorne can we know the "fatal" aspects of his scandal.

As a scandal-ridden political figure, Cawthorne's previous negative stories, such as carrying a gun on a plane and calling Hitler "Führer" during a visit to a Nazi base in Germany, have also highlighted his "right-wing" colors and even helped him attract support from extremists.

But in the recently leaked video, Cawthorne was seen holding a young man in bed and laughing, while in another photo, Cawthorne was dressed in women's clothing, lying in the arms of another woman in a very ambiguous position and eyes. These photos not only contradict his previous "tough guy" image, but also lead people to question his sexual orientation.

Information shows, American Republican voters are relatively more anti-gay and promoting a conservative Christian lifestyle in American society, and the extreme right-wing American voters whom Cawthorne attracted by his extreme statements are even more so. But now their own "idol" was suddenly exposed to such a scandal, so that many supporters of Cawthorne feel very confused.

Cawthorne argued that he was "playing with another man" when he "pinned him down," but that argument apparently did nothing to reverse the collapse of his persona, as a Twitter account with many followers who opposed Cawthorne mocked: "Is that how you justify your actions, is that how you admit to sexually assaulting someone in order to argue that you're not gay?

In addition to public criticism and backlash from supporters, U.S. Republican leader in the House of Representatives Mackenzie also spoke out to rebuke Cawthorne, saying that Cawthorne had lost his trust and that he needed to earn back his trust and everyone else's with his actions.