Before he went to Congress, a car wreck changed NC Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s life
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Are they the future of NC?
Since the 2020 election, two of North Carolina’s newest Republican politicians have become known for their unrestrained rhetoric.
But despite their similarities, U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson appear to be on different courses. Cawthorn increasingly is on the outs with more mainstream leaders in his party; Robinson is winning those leaders’ approval — or at least their silence.
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A Chick-fil-A in Hendersonville erupted in claps and cheers as Madison Cawthorn wheeled through the franchise’s doors.
Employees ran out from behind the counter to hug him.
He had worked there since he was 14, and a series of headlines in the local news led them to worry about his well-being.
Tears rolled down people’s faces as they watched their community take turns talking to him.
He ate a spicy chicken sandwich while reporters learned about “the honor, dignity and respect” Cawthorn had always shown to customers.
That’s what The Times-News of Hendersonville wrote when the now-congressman returned home in 2014 for the first time after a wreck in Florida that left him partially paralyzed.
That moment, caught on camera by WLOS, became one of his first glimpses into what fame might look like.
Cawthorn, now 26, is the youngest member of the 117th Congress representing Hendersonville and the surrounding 11th District. Before he became a national figure, encouraged an angry crowd to believe election conspiracies on Jan. 6, 2021, or disparaged the president of Ukraine, he was a teenager who gained attention locally for surviving a tragic car accident.
Growing up in Hendersonville
Born in Asheville, Cawthorn was homeschooled, along with his brother, and played on the Asheville Saints football team, which included home-schooled students.
In 2014, he and a friend went to Florida for spring break. On the way home, his friend took the wheel while Cawthorn slept with his feet up on the dashboard.
As the teens made their way through Florida his friend also fell asleep and crashed into a concrete barricade, according to court records.
The news media covered Cawthorn’s condition, his rehab, changes to his parent’s home to make it wheelchair accessible and his homecoming.
When his parents later sold their house, the Asheville Citizen Times published photos showing the living room, the stairwell, the lines from Scriptures his parents had written on beams holding up rooms of the house and the Bibles they had sealed into the walls above light switches.
Cawthorn’s credibility challenged
At the Republican National Committee in 2020, Cawthorn said his wreck almost made him give up, but a year later he decided he would one day run for Congress.
Federal law doesn’t allow anyone under 25 to hold that position, so Cawthorn had a few years to wait.
By the time he won the Republican primary the first of many scandals began to come to light.
Cawthorn would be accused of what some fellow students describe as predatory behavior toward women at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a school where he under-performed and quickly dropped out, Buzzfeed reported. Cawthorn has denied the accusations.
His credibility would be questioned because of a speech he gave saying his friend left him to die in the car wreck — which both his friend and his own father contradict, People magazine reported — and because of statements he made about surrounding his admission into the Naval Academy and that he was seriously training to be a Paralympian.
He has pushed a false narrative about voter fraud during the 2020 election — the same types of conspiracies that led to an insurrection inside the U.S. Capitol as members of the public tried to stop the election certification of President Joe Biden. He’s been accused of helping incite that riot, though charges have not been issued against him.
Sometimes the controversies come from what he says or the things he writes on social media.
This month, Cawthorn faced backlash from his own party after a video showed the congressman calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” and the Ukrainian government “evil.”
Two years earlier, during his speech at the GOP convention, he told the crowd how he planned to act in Congress.
With American flags all around him, two men helped Cawthorn out of his wheelchair and stand with a walker.
“In this new town square, you don’t have to apologize for your beliefs or cower to a mob,” Cawthorn said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Before he went to Congress, a car wreck changed NC Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s life."
