The way he told it, Madison Cawthorn was set to go to the prestigious US Naval Academy before a car crash left him partially paralysed.
According to Cawthorn, he had also been accepted into Harvard and Princeton, and worked full-time for a congressman, before being elected to the House of Representatives.
Like Cawthorn’s repeated allegations of election fraud, none of those things were wholly true. Yet that hasn’t stopped the North Carolinian, who at 26 is the youngest member of Congress, from becoming one of the fastest-rising stars in the Republican party.
The pro-Trump Republican was among speakers at the Save America rally which prefaced the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. His combination of fiery if often inaccurate political rhetoric and big-chinned, all-American looks have wooed Maga Republicans and inflamed Democrats in equal measure.
In the past couple of weeks, however, Cawthorn has found himself condemned by some on his own side.
First, he verbally attacked Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president who has been widely praised for his response to Russia’s military onslaught.
“Remember that Zelenskiy is a thug,” Cawthorn told an audience in a video obtained by WRAL News. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
The response was swift. For Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican, it was “not a defensible comment”. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, declared: “Madison is wrong.”
The furore forced a spokesperson for Cawthorn to claim the congressman was “expressing his displeasure” at how Zelenskiy had “used false propaganda”. The spokesman added: “[Cawthorn] supports Ukraine and the Ukrainian president’s efforts to defend their country against Russian aggression, but does not want America drawn into another conflict through emotional manipulation.”
Cawthorn has also courted trouble by telling a podcast he had been invited to orgies in Washington and had seen senior figures using cocaine. Amid complaints from Republicans in Congress, McCarthy and the party whip, Steve Scalise, gave Cawthorn a dressing down – but did not immediately take disciplinary action.
With such bombastic remarks and seemingly unquenchable thirst for media coverage, Cawthorn appears to be building himself in Donald Trump’s image. And in some ways, his career to date mirrors that of the twice-impeached former president.
Both have been accused of misrepresenting their ties to the military. Both have been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. Both continue to lie about election fraud. They also share a passion for the spotlight and a generally tenuous relationship with the truth.
“He planned on serving his country in the navy, with a nomination to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis,” boomed a Cawthorn advert during his 2020 primary. “But all that changed when tragedy struck.”
The tragedy was the car crash that paralyzed Cawthorn. But in fact, Cawthorn had been rejected from the Naval Academy before then, as revealed by AVL Watchdog.
Cawthorn was elected anyway. On 6 January 2021, he appeared at the pro-Trump rally near the White House which preceded the Capitol attack. He told the crowd: “The Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice.”
‘Predatory behaviour’
Cawthorn was raised in the tiny city of Hendersonville, in the mountainous south-west of North Carolina. He was homeschooled and played football but when he was 18 a car his friend was driving crashed into a concrete barrier. Cawthorn has used a wheelchair since.
Before entering Congress, he had little work experience. He had worked at Chick-fil-A and part-time – though he has claimed he was a full-time staffer – for a congressman, Mark Meadows, earning $15,000 in 2015 and $3,000 the next year, according to the Washington Post. Cawthorn would succeed Meadows in North Carolina’s 11th district – after Meadows resigned to become Trump’s chief of staff.
It was while at Patrick Henry College that Cawthorn allegedly sexually harassed fellow students. In October 2020, a month before his election, more than 150 women signed an open letter accusing Cawthorn of “predatory behaviour”.
“His modus operandi was to invite unsuspecting women on ‘joy rides’ in his white Dodge Challenger,” the letter said. “Cawthorn would take young women to secluded areas, lock the doors, and proceed to make unwanted sexual advances. It became a regular warning in the female dorms not to be caught alone with Madison Cawthorn.”
In February 2021, BuzzFeed News spoke to more than three dozen people who described instances of sexual harassment or misconduct by Cawthorn.
“Looking back now in hindsight, I would have changed how I acted,” Cawthorn told Time.
Cawthorn dropped out of Patrick Henry College after one semester, according to the Ashville Citizen-Times, after accumulating “mostly D grades”, which he attributed to continuing pain and a brain injury from the car crash.
But if the voters of the 11th district were aware of such accusations, they didn’t seem concerned. Cawthorn won a runoff in the Republican primary and then took the congressional seat, even if his share of the vote, 54.5%, was lower than Meadows achieved in his four terms in office.
Cawthorn’s bid was aided by $500,000 from an out-of-state Super Pac, days before the vote.
Since entering office, Cawthorn has often been lumped in with hard-right Trumpists like Lauren Boebert, from Colorado, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia. But some of his oeuvre is more reminiscent of traditional politicians.
“His voting record is not on the right side of the Republican party,” said Chris Cooper, a professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University and a close watcher of Cawthorn’s 13th district.
“He’s rhetorically extreme, but his voting behavior doesn’t look out of the ordinary at all. So is he ultra-conservative? No. Is he rhetorically extreme? Absolutely.”
Still, that hasn’t stopped Cawthorn from jumping on rightwing hobby horse issues like the alleged liberal ideology being forced on school students and Joe Biden’s mental acuity. Cawthorn has also continued to claim the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and “rigged”.
Last August, he told a crowd: “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen then it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.”
‘A bigger footprint’
All that has brought immense media attention. But Cawthorn could now be in trouble, due to a mess of his own making.
In 2021, he said he would run for a different district – only to do an about turn and file for re-election in the 11th district. A raft of Republican challengers have jumped into the race, however, and they are not going away.
On Veterans Day last year, Cawthorn announced that he would seek election in the newly rejigged, Republican-friendly 13th congressional district, hundreds of miles from his Hendersonville home.
The shift would have brought Cawthorn from the relative obscurity of the far-west of the state to a more densely populated area.
“It would have given him a bigger footprint statewide. It would have brought him into the Charlotte media market,” Cooper said.
But at the start of February, the North Carolina supreme court ordered that the state’s district map be changed, placing more Democratic voters in the 13th district, rendering it a much less certain Republican victory. Cawthorn turned tail, and filed paperwork to run in the 11th district.
If that upsets some voters, Cooper said Cawthorn does have a flair for bringing in cash.
“I’ve never seen a politician so adept at fundraising,” Cooper said. “Although he is perhaps even more adept at spending.”
Some of those expenditures have raised eyebrows. One of Cawthorn’s most unusual receipts in 2021 was $1,700 to a taxidermist – apparently to create “gifts to be given out to fundraising hosts”. According to OpenSecrets, $2.6m of the $2.8m Cawthorn raised through the end of 2021 has been spent, $1,405,918 on more fundraising.
Other receipts were filed for trips to California and Florida, excursions which wouldn’t appear to have much to do with the prosperity of the 11th congressional district of North Carolina.
‘Juvenile, ill-informed, belligerent’
As well as facing credible challengers in his own party, Cawthorn has drawn attention from Democrats. A group called Fire Madison Cawthorn has urged North Carolina Democrats to change party affiliation so they can vote in the Republican primary for Wendy Nevarez, a less rightwing candidate.
“Madison Cawthorn is a clear and present danger to our nation whose re-election must be fought every step of the way,” wrote David Wheeler, president of the American Muckrakers Pac, which is funding the effort.
It remains to be seen how much impact such efforts will have, but it is clear there is some dissatisfaction with Cawthorn. In the wake of his “thug” comment about Zelenskiy, two of North Carolina’s most influential newspapers criticized Cawthorn. The Winston-Salem Journal was particularly vigorous.
“Of all the many, many, many reasons we could find to legitimately criticise North Carolina’s gift to Crazytown, Rep Madison Cawthorn … it’s perhaps his latest exploit that has us truly seeing red,” an op-ed said.
In his own district, Cawthorn has been savaged by columnists in the Ashville Citizen-Times.
“What we’ve learned about Cawthorn since his election in 2020 is this: he cares about Madison Cawthorn,” John Boyle wrote on 12 March.
“He’s a juvenile, ill-informed, belligerent man who spews untrue conspiracy theories, encourages mothers to raise ‘monsters’, inspired the January 6 rioters on to their insurrection and barely bothers to pretend to represent his district.”
