This story about South Carolina Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace called “How a Trump critic fell back in line” says it all. If she was a true patriot, she would have done the right thing. Her first instincts were to do it. And then she decided her political career meant more to her than the country:
It would be hard to come up with a tougher test of willpower than the one Mace received at the Citadel. She was not the first woman to attend: Shannon Faulkner, who waged a long legal battle for admission, preceded her in 1995, but left the school after experiencing unrelenting harassment, not only by cadets but by members of the public. (Popular in Charleston at the time were anti-Faulkner T-shirts reading 1,952 bulldogs and 1 bitch.) As Mace recounts in her memoir, In the Company of Men: A Woman at The Citadel, she endured more of the same when she enrolled in the fall of 1996: Students at the school called her a “dyke” and a “whore” and vowed to keep her from graduating; members of the crowd harassed her at football games; someone wrote, “GO HOME, BITCH” on her bedroom door in shaving cream.
Mace had grown up hearing stories of the Citadel from her father, one of the school’s most decorated graduates. His reminiscences were fond but didn’t exactly paint a rosy portrait. As Mace recounts, they included some rather brutal incidents; once, she writes, her dad shut an insufficiently deferential freshman cadet in a room with an alligator. But in spite of these stories—or maybe because of them—she was obsessed with proving that she could make it through. The summer before she started, she trained so hard for the physical fitness exams that she ended up outperforming all but four men in her battalion. More than anything, Mace dreaded failure: “I would have to face that fear,” she writes, “or I would spend the rest of my life running from risks.” When, on May 8, 1999, she became the first female cadet to graduate from the Citadel, she made headlines around the country; an Associated Press photo from that day shows the 21-year-old grinning like a young Julia Roberts.
You can draw a pretty straight line from that person—the Nancy Mace who survived the Citadel—to the Nancy Mace who responded to December’s death threats by growing more stridently anti-Trump. Maybe she believed that her constituents would share her alarm at the president’s behavior in January. Her district, which runs along South Carolina’s coast from Charleston to Hilton Head, is a somewhat swingy place—more socially moderate and environmentally conscious than most GOP districts—and she’d just been elected on a campaign platform that didn’t line up neatly with those of her Republican peers.
To be clear, she hadn’t exactly shied away from Trumpism during her campaign: In ads, she promised to build the wall and condemned “arson, looting, and anarchy” in a reference to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. To elect her was to guarantee that Trump “will have an ally in Congress,” she assured her constituents. Still, she hasn’t embraced either Trumpism or her party’s policies across the board: While serving in the statehouse and in Congress, she’s supported bipartisan conservation legislation and criminal-justice-reform bills. “You will see me drop cannabis legislation too,” she volunteered in the car after breakfast.
But in trying to establish herself as a born-again Trump critic, Mace had clearly made a miscalculation: State and local party leaders complained about her in local papers. One constituent wrote a letter to the editor saying she felt betrayed by Mace; another person called into Rush Limbaugh’s show to say she was furious at the congresswoman. South Carolinians ranted about Mace on Facebook, and right-wing blogs published takedowns of her. At least one Republican has already promised to challenge her from the right in 2022, and Team Trump is said to be recruiting other primary contenders. Despite her district’s sometimes moderate inclinations, winning reelection will require first winning the Republican primary—and in South Carolina, that’ll be hard to do without embracing Trump. Mace appears to have realized this.
Earlier this summer, Mace posted photos to Twitter showing the sidewalk in front of her home covered in graffiti. The scrawled messages included a fairly straightforward “Fuck you, Nancy” but also the deep-cut anarchist phrase “No gods, no masters.” (Some Twitter users were quick to allege an inside job: One tweeted photos of Mace’s handwriting, while others pointed out that the culprit seemed to have targeted the parts of Mace’s property that would be easiest to powerwash. Mace has denied vandalizing her own home.) It’s not clear who was behind the graffiti; authorities are still investigating. What is clear is that Mace saw an opportunity to score political points and ran with it. Her campaign used the vandalism as an excuse to send out a fundraising email. In an interview with Sean Hannity, she vowed never to back down from her beliefs: “We’re seeing the left burn, loot, and destroy our cities and our property,” she said. She posted to Instagram a video of herself stress-eating a Twinkie, and a photo of herself at a gun shop. “Buying another firearm,” she captioned it. “Feeling safer today than yesterday.”
We know she’s not afraid of the “left.” She’s afraid of Donald Trump’s cult.
If she couldn’t summon the courage to try to save America, she could quit her job and move into a different line of work. Instead, like so many other GOP officials, she’s joined the cult herself. It’s pathetic.
Read the whole thing if you have the chance. She’s just awful.