Nancy Mace Is Not Okay
“Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried. We’re short-circuiting somewhere.”
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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