Nancy Mace Privately Belittled Intelligence of Trump Voters, New Expose Reveals

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Not everyone appreciated the literary reference Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) made last year, and she reportedly complained that anyone who didn’t get it were probably “Trump voters.”

Slate’s Jim Newell published a new profile of the “thirstiest Member of Congress,” as he called her, outlining the chaos of her time in the House of Representatives. Newell spoke to eight of Mace’s former staffers noting that “there are several dozen, because Mace’s Washington office has an exceptionally high turnover rate.” But the first anecdote he used to illustrate the disconnect between Mace and basically everyone around her was when she wore a t-shirt with a red “A” on it, a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which was about a woman in the 17th century being branded an adulteress by her community and publicly shamed. Mace wore the symbol after she was one of eight representatives to vote to oust former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA):

Her staff, still picking up the pieces from Mace’s bombshell vote against McCarthy the previous week, was completely baffled.

“I thought it was just some fashion statement,” one staffer recalled. “I was like, OK, well, maybe this is an Abercrombie shirt or something.” Only after seeing Mace on camera at a meeting of House Republicans—swarmed by reporters—did the staffer put it together: The scarlet-letter outfit “was another attempt by her to be a part of the story.”

Or, as a second staffer remembered, it was an attempt to become the star of the story: “She wanted every single person to think — when they thought of the McCarthy ouster vote, not to think of the eight, but to think of Nancy Mace,” the staffer said.

Behind the scenes, not everyone understood the statement Mace was trying to make:

Mace, closely monitoring the reaction to her stunt, privately griped to her staff that those who didn’t get it weren’t smart — they were probably “Trump voters,” she said.

The profile pointed out that Mace’s support of former President Donald Trump seems to depend on what looks good for Mace at the time:

The day after the Capitol riot, Mace — who had worked for Trump’s 2016 South Carolina campaign — said in a television interview, “Everything that he’s worked for, … his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday. And we’ve got to start over.” She did not vote for Trump’s impeachment, despite sharing, in a floor speech, her belief that “we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”

It didn’t take too long for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. Within a month, she was picking a fight with a proper Capitol Hill star on the left, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)], over what had happened on Jan. 6. That landed Mace an appearance on Fox News.

Mace’s antics have provided the media with ample fodder, including a recent accusation by Mace that her former staff members were “spying” on her. In response to that story, a former staffer told Newell: “I think that article makes her look pretty nuts.”