Nancy Mace, Big Disgrace, Ex-Staffers Pouring Tea All Over The Place
We told you she was crazy!
Pull up a log by the campfire, and let us toast marshmallows together with New York Magazine’s Jake Lahut over the dying embers of the political career of Rep. Nancy Mace, that South Carolina Low Country Babadook who rose to prominence with wild-eyed culture-warrioring hate, only to be undone by evidently being not just pretend crazy for TV, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but real crazy, as in “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried. We’re short-circuiting somewhere,” ratted a staffer who’d recently jumped ship.
Once upon a time, back in August, Mace announced she was running for governor of South Carolina, and did not file to be on the ballot again for her House seat. Her campaign is not going well! She’s slipped to somewhere around third or fourth in GOP primary polls (SC Attorney General Alan Wilson is first), and though she has the strongest name recognition in polls, her unfavorability rating is more than twice as high as anyone else’s! YOWCH. To know her is to not like her, it seems.
And a Trump endorsement is not likely after she joined with Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Epstein survivors to endorse releasing the Epstein Files.
Even Republicans on the House Ethics Committee find her ethics questionable; since June of last year she’s been the subject of an inquiry about her “lodging expenses and reimbursement practices” for charging taxpayers for costs associated with a $1.6 million DC townhouse while at the same time earning income renting out the same place on Airbnb.
Even the few people who have worked with Mace and still wish her well also wish she’d leave public life. Austin McCubbin, a former consultant: “Unlike her disgruntled ex-staffer crew, I actually don’t hate her. 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.”
And now with Mace’s career as good as dead and buried, even more of her formerly loyal staffers are spilling about her outrageous demands, like bottles of tequila at two a.m. — Mace posted on X she does not drink, “I have a lifelong genetic affliction which prevents me from consuming much alcohol. It's called HEMOCHROMATOSIS” — rule-breaking all-night parties, making her staff clean up her property like janitors, and demanding staff create burner accounts to go on Reddit forums discussing the subject of the “hottest women in Congress” to boost her standing in the rankings and comment about her hotness, holy fucking awkward workplace.
From the NYMag story:
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.
It was probably Women of the Right subreddit, she’s been featured there a lot, often posted under the plain and un-enthused title, “Nancy Mace.”
Staff also says she was cruel and capricious:
“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.’”
Or pick better ones.
Indeed, her staff turnover is among the highest in the House, and she is currently without both a chief of staff in her House office and a campaign manager in South Carolina, uh oh! Though she does have at least one employee left, one Cameron Morabito, director of operations, who responded to Lahut’s questions with “I hope she sues you for every dime you got paid to write this defamatory bullshit.”
Nancy Mace was always rabid culture-war-MAGA-type crazy, but what seemed to send her extra-spiraling was the breakup with her fiancé, Patrick Bryant, the guy her former aide and political adviser Wesley Donehue testified in a deposition that she had tasked them with blackmailing.
REFRESH!
Among her other hypocrisies, the woman who preaches family values and fiscal responsibility made one of the worst decisions a person can make: she and Bryant bought two properties together worth about $5.5 million to live in sin together in, evidently with no kind of legal agreement in place about how said joint properties were to be disposed of should the personal partnership not work out.
And it did not. Mace got suspicious Bryant was cheating on her, and snooped on his phone. Which is never ideal in a relationship, sure, but Mace had interests to protect, and Bryant does look a bit like Greg from White Lotus.
And Mace claims she found evidence of not just dating profiles, but of sexual assault and other crimes by Bryant and four other men on his devices.
If true (Bryant and the men say it’s not), what Mace coulda shoulda done was call law enforcement right away, then had no more contact with Bryant, called a lawyer and gotten the lawyer to make some kind of fair deal with Bryant to divide the properties, and moved on. But she did none of that! Though at some later point Mace did go to South Carolina law enforcement, which opened an investigation of the accusations in December of 2023 but was unable to find any evidence to charge anyone with anything.
But instead of calling 911 right then, she downloaded the contents of Bryant’s devices (which is secondhand data that’s of no use to law enforcement) and then, according to former aide Donehue, tasked him with blackmailing Bryant with the contents of his devices in exchange for Mace’s one hundred percent of both properties!
Nancy Mace was surely never in a position to have been buying million-dollar real estate all by herself on her $174k a year civil servant’s salary and book royalties, not even with government reimbursements in DC, Airbnb landlording and forcing her staff to be her maid service.
And however Bryant responded to the alleged threat didn’t appease Mace, and so in February of ‘24 she went on to accuse Bryant and his friends of horrific sex crimes from the House floor.
Four days after Mace’s house speech, their DC townhouse sold for $1.98 million, but the togetherness time is not over for Mace, Bryant and their lawyers! Bryant is suing Mace, as are some of the men she accused, and she’s suing some back, forcing her to pay legal fees every time her lawyers go to huff “Speech and Debate Clause” in a courtroom; any profit she might have made on the real estate has probably gone to them already.
They say the opposite of love is indifference.
PRÉCÉDEMMENT!
And Mace has been getting more unhinged ever since. She’s also suing the TSA and American Airlines for allegedly forcing her to have a screaming, cursing meltdown at agents last October after they neglected to meet her at the curb at the local airport (she was in a different-colored car than her staff had told them), which was bad enough to even make Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott publicly rebuke her. Luckily, she is being represented in her lawsuit by Larry Klayman, the greatest lawyer in the world.
So, yes, sounds like Mace does seem to need to step away from public life, as her private life has become all-consuming. It is not the trans people forcing you to (allegedly) drink all that tequila and make drama with your ex, lady! They aren’t the ones posting embarrassing AI animations of their ex on social media.
Move on! Let go! Go love yourself!
[New York Magazine archive link]
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“I have a lifelong genetic affliction which prevents me from consuming much alcohol. It's called HEMOCHROMATOSIS”
For some reason I imagine her yelling this, slurred, at barstaff who refuse to serve her any more.
Nancy Mace - the woman whose personality most closely resembles her surname.