Madison Cawthorn

Cawthorn became the first member of Congress born in the 1990s and describes himself as a Christian and a constitutional conservative.

He is a member of the Republican Party.

David Madison Cawthorn (born August 1, 1995) is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 11th congressional district from 2021 to 2023.

Cawthorn was born on August 1, 1995, in Asheville, North Carolina, to Priscilla and Roger Cawthorn.

He was home-schooled in Hendersonville, North Carolina, through 12th grade, and played football with the Asheville Saints, a league that includes home-schooled high school students.

As a teenager, he worked at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.

Rep. Meadows had nominated Cawthorn to the United States Naval Academy in December 2013, but his application was rejected.

In 2014, at age 18, Cawthorn was seriously injured while returning from a spring break trip to Florida.

He was riding as a passenger in a BMW X3 SUV near Daytona Beach, Florida, when his friend Bradley Ledford fell asleep at the wheel.

The vehicle crashed into a concrete barrier while Cawthorn's feet were on the dashboard.

From January 2015 to August 2016, Cawthorn worked as a staff assistant in U.S. Representative Mark Meadows's district office.

He told the Asheville Citizen-Times he worked there "full-time", but it was a part-time position.

Cawthorn is the owner and CEO of SPQR Holdings, LLC, a real estate investment firm in Hendersonville.

During the fall 2016 semester, Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College, studying political science, but earned mostly D grades and dropped out.

He said his grades were low primarily because his injuries had interfered with his ability to learn.

Cawthorn said in a deposition, "You know, suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely I think it slowed my brain down a little bit. Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult."

He also said he withdrew due to "heartbreak" after his fiancée broke up with him.

In a 2017 speech, Cawthorn said that Ledford left him "to die in a fiery tomb", which Ledford has disputed.

Ledford said in a sworn deposition for insurance litigation that he pulled an unconscious Cawthorn from the wrecked vehicle immediately after getting out himself; in Cawthorn's deposition, he stated that he had "no memory from the accident".

In the same 2017 speech, Cawthorn stated that he was "declared dead on the scene" of the accident, but the official accident report listed him as "incapacitated".

The injuries from the accident left Cawthorn partially paralyzed, requiring the use of a wheelchair.

He said he accrued $3 million in medical debt during his recovery; he received that amount as settlement from an insurance company, as well as other payments, and as of February 2021 was seeking $30 million more.

Cawthorn had acknowledged in 2017 under oath that he had been turned down before the accident.

The firm was started in August 2019 and reported no income; Cawthorn is its sole employee.

After working as a staffer for U.S. Representative Mark Meadows, Cawthorn was elected to succeed Meadows in 2020.

His tenure was marked by various controversies, including allegations of insider trading, improper payments, bringing a handgun to an airport, and appearing in a leaked nude video.

Cawthorn lost his reelection bid in the 2022 Republican primary to Chuck Edwards, who won the general election.

Although this happened before his injury, he claimed in advertisements for his 2020 congressional campaign that the accident "derailed" his plans to attend the Academy.

When asked in 2020 about the discrepancy, he said, "I never said I was appointed or accepted to the academy, I knew that I'd only been nominated at that point. I fully expected to be accepted and to be appointed, but at that point I hadn't received it."

As of August 2020, the company had been involved in only one real estate transaction, purchasing a 6-acre property for $20,000, in a foreclosure auction.

In the March 2020 Republican primary for North Carolina's 11th congressional district, Cawthorn finished second behind Lynda Bennett, who had been endorsed both by President Donald Trump and Meadows, who had become White House Chief of Staff.

But Bennett did not receive the required 30% of the vote to avoid a runoff and Cawthorn won the June runoff overwhelmingly.

He was supported by many local leaders and endorsed by Mark Walker, the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference.

His victory has been called an upset.

Cawthorn benefited from false and misleading claims that Bennett was a "Never-Trumper".

In a July 2020 event at the Texas border, Cawthorn declared, without providing evidence, that there was "a large group of cartels, kidnapping our American children and then taking them to sell them on a slave market, a sex slave market".

During the 2020 general campaign, his Democratic opponent drew attention to a 2017 Cawthorn Instagram post with a picture of his visit to Adolf Hitler's vacation residence Eagle's Nest, which he said had been on his "bucket list for a while", generating allegations of far-right sympathies.

He had referred to Hitler as "the Führer", which had been Hitler's official title, and called Hitler "a supreme evil".

In response, Cawthorn called the allegations that he was a white supremacist ridiculous, saying that he "completely and wholeheartedly denounce[s] any kind of white nationalism, any kind of Nazism".

The Anti-Defamation League's analyst Mark Pitcavage said he did not see much merit in the accusations against Cawthorn.