Mace in February. (Samuel Corum/Getty)
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Nancy Mace made headlines in recent weeks with her ugly, transphobic attacks on Democratic Rep.-elect Sarah McBride. Her attention-seeking stunts, such as performatively tearing down transgender flags while on camera, represent new lows in what has been a years-long chase for that next sweet cable news hit.
Before McBride was even sworn into office, Mace introduced a resolution that would ban transgender women from women’s restrooms at the US Capitol. Mace openly admitted that McBride was the specific target of her resolution even though she never planned to use multi-stall bathrooms at the Capitol in the first place. Mace didn’t even bother addressing her concerns directly with McBride before exploiting her identity for her latest 15 minutes of fame.
Source: twitter
Mace’s bigoted actions and rhetoric have little to do with any actual ideology. Indeed, in the distant past of just last year, she described herself as “pro-transgender rights.” She stated in a 2023 interview, “If they wanna take on a different pronoun or a different gender identity or grow their hair out, or wear a dress or wear pants, or do those things as a minor — those are all things that I think most people would support. Be who you want to be, but don’t make permanent changes as a child. They may decide as an adult, ‘Hey, instead of being Johnny, I want to be Jill’ — that’s OK. But let them figure that out and make that decision when they can consent.”
This is a stark departure from Mace’s current position — she’s referred to trans people as “mentally ill” during her recent flood of bigoted posts on social media — but it’s not inexplicable. Mainstream Republicans have escalated their attacks against trans people over the past few years.
Mace has gone to cringy lengths on X to portray herself as a fighter for women.
During the 2024 GOP primary, for instance, Nikki Haley framed her opposition to trans equality as “the women’s rights issue of our time” and called Dylan Mulvaney “a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women.” Trump, for his part, made crude transphobia a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign — a contrast with his first presidential run, when he actually said trans people should be able to use whatever bathroom they want.
At a glance, it seems as if Mace simply hopped on a hateful bandwagon. But a closer examination of her congressional career reveals that she has no true political position beyond her own ambition.
In 2020, Mace defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham in South Carolina’s first district by less than 6,000 votes. (Republicans have since redrawn the district to make it solidly Republican, which involved removing thousands of Black voters.) For a moment, it looked as if Mace would serve as a centrist alternative to incoming far-right representatives like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Mace was not one of the 147 Republican House members who voted to reject Trump’s loss. In fact, she was the only Republican House member from South Carolina who voted to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. She told NPR’s Steve Inskeep on January 7 that “when you read the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 explicitly states, in black and white, that Congress’s role here is merely to count the votes of the Electoral College.”
“Everything that he’s worked for — his entire legacy — was wiped out yesterday,” she said at the time. She told Meet the Press that Trump put “all our lives at risk.”
That was during the brief period when it seemed as though Republicans might finally break with Trump, and Mace swiftly positioned herself as the face of the brave new post-MAGA order.
“I want to be a new voice for the Republican Party, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve spoken out so strongly against the president, against these QAnon conspiracy theorists that led us in a constitutional crisis,” she told Meet the Press. “It’s just wrong, and we’ve got to put a stop to it.”
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The Daily Beast obtained Mace’s 2021 strategy memo that presented her as “THE freshman thought leader on federal issues.” She was so obsessed with raising her profile that she even dubbed herself “NATIONAL NANCY.” She tasked her staff with “winning (Mace) as much exposure as possible.” This led one former senior aide to wonder, “Are we in a PR firm, or working for a member of Congress?”
Mace’s communications team was required to book her on a national TV outlet “between one and three times per day — a staggering nine times per week, at a minimum, according to former staffers who had seen past handbooks — and on local TV channels at least six times per week,” the Daily Beast reported.
She’d often tailor her positions and entire persona depending on where she was booked. In an especially egregious example from November 2021, Mace praised vaccines during a CNN interview but promoted “natural immunity” on Fox News, both on the same day. Even Fox News took notice of Mace’s pandering and grilled her about it during a subsequent interview. (Watch below.)
Mace sought out publicity in bizarre ways. Former staffers claim that during the January 6 Capitol attack, she pitched the idea that she’d confront the MAGA mob with the goal of getting punched in the face so her battered image could propel her to prominence. (Saner heads ultimately prevailed.)
Meanwhile, Mace learned the lesson that publicly beefing with prominent Dems is a good way to get attention and money. As Trump was reestablishing his dominance over the GOP in the the winter of 2021, Mace picked a fight with AOC, cynically accusing her of lying about her traumatic experiences on January 6.
Mace tweeted, “I’m two doors down from aoc and no insurrectionists stormed our hallway” — a claim AOC never actually made. AOC pushed back, but Mace pivoted to hitting up her email list for cash and portraying herself as a victim: “[AOC can] pressure me all she wants, but I’ve never backed down, and I won’t start now.”
A few months later, Mace claimed that her house on Daniel Island, an affluent Charleston suburb, was vandalized with antifa symbols and profanity. Before police even charged anyone, Mace had already starting blaming the “the radical left” in her fundraising appeals. (Mace has also shamelessly fundraised off her attacks on Rep. McBride.)
Mace has contempt for anyone she thinks hogs the spotlight she craves, including far-right Republicans like Greene and Boebert. During a late 2021 hit on CNN, Mace condemned Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks about Ilhan Omar. Greene fired back by tweeting that Mace “is the trash in the GOP Conference. Never attacked by Democrats or RINO’s (same thing) because she is not conservative, she’s pro-abort. Mace you can back up off of [Boebert] or just go hang with your real gal pals, the Jihad Squad. Your [sic] out of your league.”
In response, Mace — without a trace of irony — dismissed Greene as an attention-seeking phony, a “grifter of the first order.”
“If you say something that’s crazy, you say something extreme, you’re going to raise money,” she told reporters. “And that is the only reason that she does that … she does it to raise money. She takes advantage of vulnerable Americans and vulnerable conservatives and makes promises she cannot keep.” (Watch below.)
In December 2021, Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic wrote a profile on Mace headlined, “The Republican Congresswoman Taking on Lauren Boebert.” The piece asked, “Why is a South Carolina Republican policing her party’s far-right flank?”
But Mace’s faux-moderate branding wouldn’t last long.
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Mace’s public feud with Greene eventually caused then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy to intervene, but it was the party’s true leader who threatened to end Mace’s career before it really got going.
As Godfrey observed, Mace’s actual “position in the GOP ecosystem” was hard to nail down. She didn’t please the bigot wing of the party with her (at the time) tolerant positions on LGBTQ issues. She provoked her diehard MAGA peers while trying to remain on Trump’s good side. She didn’t vote to impeach him after the insurrection, nor did she support the January 6 Committee. But she did vote to hold former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon in contempt of Congress.
Although outspoken Trump foe Liz Cheney held a fundraising event for Mace in April 2021, Mace voted to remove her as GOP conference chair a few weeks later.
“Any disagreements we have with each other within our Party should be discussed internally, and not dragged out into public for all to see,” she said in a statement.
This explanation was transparently hypocritical — not just because of her later feuds with Boebert and Greene but because Trump himself doesn’t follow Ronald Reagan’s supposed 11th Commandment about never criticizing other Republicans. MAGA only obeys a single commandment — thou shalt have no other gods but Trump.
Trump didn’t forget Mace’s public criticism of him after January 6. He endorsed her 2022 primary challenger, Katie Arrington. Trump outright trashed Mace, calling her “disloyal,” “crazy,” and a “terrible person who has no idea what she’s doing.” At a 2022 rally, he even encouraged the crowd to boo the very mention of her name. (Watch below.)
Instead of standing up for herself, Mace immediately shifted into debasement mode. She recorded a humiliating video of herself standing outside Trump Tower, where she asserted her MAGA bonafides and kissed up to dear leader, saying “I believe in putting America first.”
Source: twitter
Trump mocked her groveling performance, saying “it was untruthful just like everything else she does.”
But there was an upside — Trump targeting Mace helped her comms team meet their quotas. This included an extensive profile in Mace’s hometown newspaper, The State. When she managed to defeat Arrington, she received more fawning coverage in the press, and she boasted on CNN that she was “one of the only Republicans in the House who defeated the former president in a primary last year.” Even the New York Times bought her act with a puffy profile written by Annie Karni, who apparently interviewed Mace over margaritas.
Emboldened by her victory, Mace further promoted her fabricated outsider image.
“I am a Republican, but I am a caucus of one,” Mace told Vanity Fair in a March 2023 profile headlined, “Welcome To Nancy Mace’s Island, Where She Gives ‘Zero F-cks.’”
“It’s been a very lonely start to the year. I represent a district of islands, but I literally feel up here on the Hill that I am living on an island alone. And it is very lonely,” Mace said, vowing to “rein in some of the craziness that is happening.”
In a January 2023 Semafor article headlined, “America’s Next Top Moderate: Which House Republican wants the title?” Mace was listed as one of the “five members who’ve taken on the role of quasi-spokespeople for the Mod Squad” — a group billed as a contrast to the extremist Freedom Caucus, which had thrown the House into chaos over McCarthy’s protracted speakership bid. But by October, Mace had joined Matt Gaetz and other far-right Republicans in their successful bid to oust McCarthy.
As Republicans scrambled to replace McCarthy, Mace showed up for a conference meeting wearing a white t-shirt with a red “A” on the front. She told CNN’s Anna Grayer, “I’m wearing the scarlet letter after the week that I just had, last week, being a woman up here and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.”
Mace consistently plays the victim in this cynical way. During a memorably disastrous interview earlier this year on ABC, she absurdly accused George Stephanopoulos of “shaming” her as a rape victim because he dared ask how she could support Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist. (Watch below.)
In recent weeks, as Mace has viciously attacked McBride, she’s turned reality upside down by proclaiming that she won’t be “bullied into submission” while sending out fundraising messages bragging that “the Trans Mob wants to k*ll me but I FOUGHT BACK and WON.”
Last June, after surviving a McCarthy-backed primary challenge, Mace declared, “I hope I drive Kevin McCarthy crazy.” She’s branded herself as an anti-establishment maverick, when she’s actually an egocentric chaos agent.
The Daily Show roasted Mace’s transphobia last month, but the show had previously fallen for her PR offensive when she was booked for an interview in October 2023. She’d billed herself as “not your typical Republican,” which is probably true but not in a positive way.
Three years after Mace was willing to take a punch to the face to brand herself as fully anti-Trump, she demonstrated the opportunistic disloyalty Trump correctly identified by going all in for his third presidential bid.
“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate. And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee,” she said in a post on X. “To be honest, it’s been a complete shit show since he left the White House.”
Mace actually believed she had a shot to become Trump’s running mate, but Trump had no reason to trust her. Even if he’s no longer attacking her at rallies, she’s proven that she prioritizes her personal brand more than loyalty to him or anything else.
AOC recently posted on Bluesky that when she privately confronted Mace about the lies she told about her and January 6, Mace responded glibly, “Whatever. You know it’s a game, just points on the board.” It’s a deeply cynical view of public service, and now that Mace has chosen to “score points” through shameful attacks on a vulnerable group, the only question that remains is how much lower she can go.
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