Nanct Mace is seen here in an undated photograph in a swimsuit and with a glass in her hand. She urged staffer to boost her in "Hottest Women of Congress" Reddit forums.
Right up until she lit the fire, some of Representative Nancy Mace’s own staff and
advisers didn’t know what she was going to say on the House floor in
February 2025, let alone that it would be a pivotal moment in her life.
That speech now appears to be a before-and-after moment, separating
Mace’s once-promising (if often bizarrely colorful) career from the
seemingly irredeemable mess it has become.
Flanked
by a metal safe and an in-home security camera, with Representatives
Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida seated
behind her, Mace wore a white dress and three necklaces, one with her
Congressional member pin and another with a thick cross. She also had
crosses on her earrings, but her engagement ring was nowhere to be seen.
Mace proceeded to accuse her ex-fiancé, Patrick Bryant,
of secretly filming her, physically assaulting her, and engaging in a
conspiracy to drug, rape, and film other women. She declared she was
going “scorched earth” on Bryant and three of his associates.
“So,” Mace declared, “let the bridges I burn this evening light our way forward.”
It is not customary for lawmakers to make such personal accusations on the floor, even if Mace, a rape survivor,
had made countering sexual abuse and trafficking an integral part of
her political identity. Bryant would go on to vehemently deny Mace’s
allegations and sue her for defamation (though by making her remarks on
the floor, she could ostensibly retain immunity from a defamation
lawsuit under the speech and debate clause of the Constitution). He did
not return a request for comment and is under a gag order, as is Mace,
barring them from discussing their ongoing legal battle. Many of her
former staffers are inclined to believe her allegations of abuse against
Bryant, even if they never saw anything untoward, but the chaotic and
highly public fashion in which she has gone after him makes them
question her judgment and overall well-being. “She’s not okay,” said a
former staffer. “There’s nothing here I can point to and say, ‘Oh, this
is normal.’”
“Looking
at the floor speech and what went on there, it’s very clear that that
was the breaking point to me,” the former staffer added. “Because you’ve
now gone from standing up for people — whether rightfully, wrongfully,
performative or not — you were on this mission, and now this is about
you. The whole frame shifted, and she centered herself in it all. That’s
when it became apparent to me that this is broken.”
A second former staffer told me they had concluded that “she’s deteriorated, and it sucks.”
Mace has continued to shed much of her staff, torched
her relationship with President Donald Trump, and torpedoed her bid to
become governor of her home state of South Carolina. Her erratic
behavior burst into view in October when she had a meltdown while going through security at the Charleston airport
during the government shutdown. Irate at her police escort for not
meeting her at security, Mace started “loudly cursing and making
derogatory comments to us about the department. She repeatedly stated we
were ‘Fucking incompetent,’ and ‘this is no way to treat a fucking U.S.
Representative,’” according to a police report I obtained.
Airport-gate
has since become a major news saga in South Carolina, hurting her
standing in the Republican gubernatorial primary. In the polling since
October, Mace’s support has been cut nearly in half, and she has slipped from nearly tied for the lead down to third or fourth place.
Mace
is also now the subject of a House Ethics Committee inquiry. The
committee did not release any specifics in its statement released
January 16, but Mace’s office responded with a letter from her attorney
about her “lodging expenses and reimbursement practices.”
A source familiar with the matter told me Mace’s use of her House
office staff for campaign purposes may be the reason why the committee
is considering taking up a formal investigation.
It
didn’t have to be this way, according to Mace’s former staff members
and Republicans who know her. While many of these sources say they would
never bet against Mace wiggling her way out of a jam, they increasingly
think her career might be beyond redemption. “Unlike her disgruntled
ex-staffer crew, I actually don’t hate her,” said Austin McCubbin, a
former consultant for Mace who has known her for years. “I want the best
for her. I think the best thing for her is to no longer be in the media
all the time, and to enjoy private life outside of electoral politics.”
Mace
first arrived in Washington just before January 6, 2021. In those early
days, she sought to position herself as a Republican willing to break
with the MAGA wing of the party. She was also in a hurry to distinguish
herself: She told her staff she wanted to go down to the House floor and “get punched in the face by rioters” to get more media attention. In a staff handbook,
she outlined quotas for getting on cable news and local TV — at least
one to three times per day for national outlets, and six times per week
across her home state of South Carolina’s media markets — so she could
build her brand as “National Nancy.”
Her
staffers, as well as many inside the Republican Party, thought she had
potential — a willingness to both take risky, heterodox positions and to
submit enthusiastically to the ludicrous demands of the modern
attention economy. She could come off as a bit nuts, but that wasn’t
necessarily a bad thing in the age of Trump. One person close to Mace
recalled the way Bill Maher described meeting Trump for the first time.
In this person’s experience, Mace was not a crazy person but someone who
played one on TV.
Five
years in, however, it’s unclear if Mace actually knows the difference
between the two, according to former staffers. “We’ve moved past that
now,” the person said. “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried.
We’re short-circuiting somewhere.”
Back
then she came across as a breath of fresh air, according to a former
staffer. “And then I got into the office, and after six months I was
like, ‘Man, this is one of the worst people I’ve ever met. I’m going to
move back to South Carolina.’”
Her
antics were a problem well before airportgate. During her first term,
staffers say Mace would command them to bring her liquor after midnight
to keep parties going at her home, which is technically an abuse of her
office according to House rules. “Look, when I worked for her, our poor
scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring
her bottles of tequila,”a former staffer claimed of incidents they
recalled going back to 2021.
When
they weren’t buying booze for her, they were doing her housework,
according to former staffers. They say she made her aides clean multiple
properties she was renting out on Airbnb instead of paying for a maid.
On Election Night in 2022, for example, Mace instructed aides to spiff
up her $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms for a watch party, according
to a former staffer with direct knowledge. She would routinely do the
same when she rented out her Washington townhouse, according to the same
source and other Mace alumni I spoke to, including another former
staffer assigned to do the cleaning.
She was obsessed with monitoring her reputation online. In addition to reportedly having her staff create burner accounts
to defend her, Mace allegedly instructed a staffer to go on Reddit
forums about the “hottest women in Congress” to boost her standing in
the rankings and comment where needed. Mace was “very adamant” about
getting the staffer to upvote any posts about the congresswoman and her
attractiveness, according to a second former staffer.
“We
were scared of her,” said one of the former aides. “She would make
staffers cry. She would threaten to fire them, take their money away,
not give them raises, not to give them days off, religious days.”
Intimacy only exacerbated the situation. “The closer you get to her, the
harder she messes up your brain,” a different former staffer said.
“It’s a classic story of ‘never meet your heroes.’”
One
of them recalled dealing with a befuddled Mace on a 2022 trip to
Europe, when they say she wanted to fire an aide for telling reporters
she was out of the country, claiming it endangered operational security
and amounted to “doxxing” her. This despite having told a room full of
supporters about the trip at a party in South Carolina beforehand. “She
would definitely do it excessively,” they said of the congresswoman’s
drinking and marijuana usage. “And again, not to say that most members
don’t or most staff don’t, but it got to the point where it was an
issue.”
“These
allegations are so ridiculous they don’t even merit a response,” said
Cameron Morabito, Mace’s director of operations, in response to
questions. “I hope she sues you for every dime you got paid to write
this defamatory bullshit.”
These
former staffers say their concern for Mace’s well-being escalated after
she split from Bryant, which seemed to further unmoor her. As Mace
tells it, she had discovered that Bryant was using a dating app while
they were still together. She said she was shocked by a trove of
material she had extracted from his phone. “One of the first videos I
saw was of a woman. She was incapacitated and she was being raped,” Mace
said in her floor speech. “I found some photos of what appeared to be a
teenager undressed, in the kind of underwear a child would wear. To me,
the facial expression of this young girl looked scared and nervous. I
saw another video of another woman who was naked, clearly on a hidden
camera, unaware she was being filmed.” That woman, Mace went on to
claim, was her.
Months after her speech on the House floor denouncing Bryant, she showed an image of her naked body
in a House committee hearing, claiming the image belonged to Bryant and
was taken without her consent. She also showed censored images of other
women. Staffers didn’t know what to make of Mace continuing to use her
committee and her office to go after Bryant.
In a five-page letter
filed on January 21, Mace accused the South Carolina judge handling her
civil litigation of enabling perjury and presiding over a “kangaroo
court,” in addition to announcing she would be firing her attorneys. “I
respectfully inform this Honorable Court: I will not be SILENCED,” Mace
wrote in a letter first reported by FITS News.“When
I delivered my floor speech almost one year ago, I brought handcuffs
and said: ‘If anyone would like to arrest me for standing up for women,
here are my wrists.’ That offer stands today.”
Mace
launched her gubernatorial campaign in August at her alma mater, the
Citadel, a military college where she was the first woman to graduate
from the undergraduate program. But morale among her staff was already
cratering, with a former aide describing the mood as “everyone was
checked out and like, Fuck Nancy.” After President Trump posted an AI-slop video showing him in a fighter jet dumping feces on No Kings protesters in October, Mace tweeted a version of her own
where she was in the cockpit of a similar plane doing the same to
Bryant. Later that month, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan
Collins, Mace struggled to defend her behavior during the airport
incident, claiming the report was “falsified” despite an internal investigation confirming the testimony of the officers she berated. It increasingly felt like Mace didn’t know when or how to stop.
Turnover in her office was among the highest in Congress
from 2021 to 2024, and she is currently without both a chief of staff
in her House office and a campaign manager on the trail back in South
Carolina. McCubbin, a respected Trumpworld operative, was her last
connection to the president’s inner circle until McCubbin resigned
in December and declared his boss had “turned her back on MAGA.” One
factor in his departure was her decision not to pay McCubbin for his
services, he claimed.
“I’ll
never have a chief of staff again,” Mace said in one of two
on-the-record comments she made to me. “I’ll never have a campaign
manager. I run a pretty flat organization because I don’t believe in
gatekeepers. Those positions become such filters that you can’t even get
a drip of coffee through.”
The
more bridges Mace burned, the more she seemed surrounded by a ring of
fire. She desperately needed a Trump endorsement in the governor’s race.
And despite her evaporating political capital in Trumpworld, for a
two-day period in November the president was calling her to change her
vote on the discharge petition for the Epstein files, which had divided
the Republican Party between those who wanted more transparency about
Epstein’s connections to powerful people and those who were sensitive to
how these revelations were hurting the White House. Trump advisers
conveyed to her that she could still advocate for victims through her
role on the House Oversight Committee, and there were enough Republican
votes for the discharge petition to pass anyway. But it didn’t matter.
Instead of using her leverage, Mace was sticking to her position.
When
I attended a House subcommittee hearing in mid-December on combating
human trafficking, Mace showed flashes of the promising politician she
once was. In a drab, windowless room inside the Rayburn House Office
Building, she rattled off a series of probing questions and expounded on
gloomy data on child sex trafficking and the technological challenges
around fighting it. This is the Nancy Mace that impressed former allies
in Trumpworld who initially wanted to work for her, as well as staffers
who saw her as a post-Trump maverick. This is the Nancy Mace who
prevailed over what South Carolina GOP operatives literally refer to as
the old boys’ club, arriving in Congress after just one term in the
South Carolina legislature.
“I
feel like I’m at the bottom of the mountain, clawing my way to the
top,” Mace told me. “Some days I’m still that 16-year-old in Goose
Creek, an outsider, just trying to make it. And in many ways, that fuels
me. People with money and power, they get away with everything the rest
of us never could. I know what it means to fight for justice when no
one hands it to you.”
Now,
she’ll be lucky if she doesn’t embarrass herself in the Republican
gubernatorial primary. Most sources I spoke to believe Mace may not even
be the top performer in her own Low Country district when the primary
comes around on June 9. The chances of a Trump endorsement, they say,
have fallen to nearly zero. A source close to Mace told me she realizes
she “probably lost the president’s endorsement” because of the Epstein
vote.
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