The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.
On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.
“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”
Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.
“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.
“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”
At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.
Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.
On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.
“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”
On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”
Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.
On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”
While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.
Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.
Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”
Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.
Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”
In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.
She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”
In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.
Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.
The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”
The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.
A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.
“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.
Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”.
