It’s not breaking news that Republican politicians are afraid of Donald J. Trump, or that he enjoys humiliating his intraparty critics more than anything this side of a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. The landscape is littered with major GOP figures who once disrespected the 45th president and then had to crawl on their bellies into his presence to avoid his wrath and possible excommunication from a MAGA-dominated party. Ted Cruz, for example, cannot possibly have any pride left after forgiving Trump’s nasty slurs on his wife and his father during the 2016 primaries and becoming one of his chief defenders in the Senate.
But freshman congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina has now taken the cake a day after Trump called her an “absolutely terrible” and “very disloyal” candidate, and endorsed her primary opponent, Katie Arrington. Mace’s original sin was to criticize Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021 even as she battled to substitute a censure resolution for the House impeachment measure that was ultimately approved. But she probably guaranteed a primary opponent by getting into a scrap with Trump’s buddies on the House Freedom Caucus over her criticism of Islamophobic comments by Colorado MAGA firebrand Lauren Boebert, whose friend Marjorie Taylor Greene called Mace “trash” and a “RINO.”
Mace’s response to Trump’s harsh words was worthy of Ted Cruz: She got herself to the street in front of Trump Tower and filmed a video reminding viewers of her service in the former president’s 2016 campaign and her appreciation for his very successful presidency, which she praised in detail.
Her Trump-endorsed primary opponent, averred Mace, was essentially an instrument of Nancy Pelosi’s “radical far-left D.C. Democrat agenda,” since she’d lose the seat to a Democrat in November. Presumably poor Trump didn’t realize that, or he wouldn’t have sought to do in the incumbent.
Now, I would not begin to suggest a lack of personal courage by Mace, who is the first woman to graduate from The Citadel and a sexual-assault survivor to boot. But she has to dance with the Republican Party that took her to Congress, and that party is deeply in thrall to the 45th president and his nastier acolytes. There’s no telling how much self-abasement the former president will consider sufficient to slake his thirst for vengeance, and I fear Nancy Mace may test previously unplumbed depths to find out. Maybe her next video will be shot at the gates of Mar-a-Lago.
