Nancy Mace Has a Wild New Defense for Endorsing a Rapist for President
Representative Nancy Mace is still defending Donald Trump—but won’t parse out her reasoning in the wake of the GOP presidential pick’s judgment in his E. Jean Carroll trial saga.
Instead, the South Carolina Republican took to Fox News on Sunday to defend a viral interview she gave last month with ABC’s This Week, which went south when anchor George Stephanopoulos prompted her to explain a contradiction: how could she, a rape victim, support the presidency of someone who had been found liable for sexual abuse?
Explaining to Fox News host Howard Kurtz, Mace branded the line of questioning as “10 minutes of rape-shaming,” and accused the network of flagrantly bringing up the issue while her “underage daughter” was with her.
Except Stephanopolous’s question was based on Mace’s own account, which she brought up during an abortion debate while serving as a lawmaker in South Carolina’s legislature in 2021. Mace said that the video clip This Week played of her own story had “sabotaged” her.
“But at the same time, it really exposed the left because if you don’t succumb to their ideology or prescribe to the way that they think, if you don’t think the way they want you to, they will bully you,” Mace said. “They will shame you. They’ll shame you over being raped.”
“As a man, George Stephanopoulos tried to mansplain rape to me,” she continued. “I don’t need some man telling me how I should feel about rape. I don’t need some man telling me as a rape victim that I can’t vote Republican and vote for the man I believe that can save our country.”
Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC last month to prove that he was just a sexual abuser—not a rapist, as Stephanopoulos had said during the viral interview. Mace also insisted Sunday that Trump “never was” found guilty of rape.
It’s unclear how Trump’s verbiage suit will play out in court, though his unexpected specificity flies in the face of another precedent set by the court. In July, Judge Lewis Kaplan clarified that although New York penal law has a “far narrower” definition of rape, the jury still found Trump to have raped Carroll in the modern sense of the word.