Nancy Mace Calls Trump Her ‘Father Figure’ and Sent Polling Numbers to Him in Bid for ‘Approval’

(Win McNamee/Pool Photo via AP)

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), the controversial congresswoman running for governor in the Palmetto State, refers to President Donald Trump as her “father figure” and seeks his “approval,” according to a bracing new Politico profile of her.

“She [Mace] sees herself as a victim — as a survivor, as a kind of avenger turning ‘pain into purpose’ in service of other victims, but first and foremost as a victim herself. Her father who didn’t show her enough love, her molestation by a friend of her swim coach when she was 14, her rape when she was 16, her trying time as a student at The Citadel from which she was the first female graduate of its formerly all-male Corps of Cadets, her speech on the floor of the state house about her first rape not quite six years before her speech on the floor of the U.S. House about what she believes was her second — her trauma as she tells it has been and remains not an impediment to her political ascent and appeal but its fulcrum and fuel,” wrote its author, Michael Kruse. “Her paranoia and her posturing, her antics and her outbursts, her crude talk and her profane provocations, the swings of her political positions, not to mention her moods — the evident consequences of her trauma, mounting, compounding — all of it not only hasn’t stopped her but arguably in some strange ways has helped her. She might be the most Donald Trump-like figure in American politics not named Donald Trump. She, at the very least, she says, considers him a ‘father figure.'”

Kruse drilled down on this dynamic later:

She told me about her fundraising and her polling and the numbers of her followers and her compilation of Google search data and she showed me on the screen of her phone some of the charts that she said she had made. “I did 30 days, I did 90 days, I did a year,” she said. “I’m blue, red is Lindsey Graham, yellow is Tim Scott, green is Nikki Haley,” she said. “I have more name ID and branding than three former people that ran for president,” she said.

“I sent this to the president,” she said.

“You sent all that to your father figure?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Did you send it,” I said, “to your father?”

She stared at me.

“That was cold,” she said. She laughed with a snort. “No,” she said. “I didn’t send it to my dad. I sent it to the other fatherly figure. And I said to him … I don’t know how this happened. I literally said to him in my text, ‘I don’t know how …’”

“So you send that to him hoping for an endorsement,” I said, “or do you send that to him hoping for something more important?”

“What’s more important,” she said, “than an endorsement?”

“Acknowledgment,” I said.

“I think part of it’s acknowledgement,” she said. “Acknowledgment that I’m doing well,” she said. “Approval.”

Mace was elected to the House as a relatively moderate Republican and condemned Trump in no uncertain terms after the January 6 Capitol riot, even going so far as to say he needed to be held “accountable.” She did not, however, vote to impeach him and later endorsed him early in the 2024 GOP presidential primary cycle. Over time, Mace’s politics moved to the right, and she’s become A national figure for her headline-grabbing antics.

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