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.

Donald Trump on Friday asked a Georgia state appeals court to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from his election interference case, the former president’s latest attempt to delay legal proceedings.

Judge Scott McAfee ruled two weeks ago that Willis could remain on the case she built against Trump if her special prosecutor resigned. Nathan Wade submitted his resignation that same day, and the case could once again proceed.

Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants in the case filed an application Friday with the Georgia Court of Appeals asking it to reconsider McAfee’s decision. They argued that Willis had a personal stake in the election interference case and should step down.

“While the trial court factually found DA Willis’s out-of-court statements were improper and Defendants proved an apparent conflict of interest, the trial court erred as a matter of law by not requiring dismissal and DA Willis’ disqualification,” the court filing said. “This legal error requires the Court’s immediate review.”

“If this law means anything, the trial court’s actual findings here establish an actual conflict.”

Willis’s office has 10 days to respond to the appeal application.

Trump and several of his co-defendants accused Willis of having an improper relationship with Wade, who has billed her office—and thus county taxpayers—for more than $728,000 in legal fees. Trump’s team alleges that Willis and Wade began dating in 2019 and that, over the course of their romantic relationship, the couple took extravagant vacations that Wade supposedly paid for in part by billing Willis’s office.

Willis and Wade, who are no longer together, say they didn’t start seeing each other until 2022, after Willis hired Wade for the Georgia case. Willis also says they each paid their own share of the vacation bill.

During the hearings, the key witness against Willis crumbled on the stand, admitting he didn’t know when Willis and Wade began dating, how their relationship began, or even what trips they took together. But the most important thing to remember, Willis has stressed, is that Trump and his co-defendants are currently on trial for “trying to steal an election.”

McAfee chastised Willis for what he described as a “tremendous lapse in judgment.” But he ultimately refused to throw her off the case, saying she must resolve the “appearance of impropriety” by either recusing herself or removing Wade. And again, Wade has already stepped down.

The former president’s strategy has been to delay every single one of his legal battles as long as possible, in the hopes that he is reelected in November and can use his newfound presidential powers to shield himself from prosecution. His accusation against Willis dragged out the Georgia proceedings for weeks, and if the appeals court accepts his application, legal proceedings could take even longer to get going. A trial date has not yet been scheduled.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s attacks on the judges and court staff overseeing his criminal trials have much deeper legal implications than petty fines. Instead, the attacks—and the responding “passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation”—are actively undermining the entire judicial system, prominent conservative judges are warning.

In a CNN interview Thursday evening, Republican-appointed federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton felt compelled to announce that Trump’s continued attacks could result in “tyranny.” Just hours later, former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, also a conservative, issued his own warning cry, declaring that Trump is responsible for the “dismantling” of the nation’s “system of justice.”

“The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man—the former President of the United States,” started Luttig in a multipart thread on X.

“In the months ahead, the former president can only be expected to ramp up his unprecedented efforts to delegitimize the courts of the United States, the nation’s state courts, and America’s system of justice, through his vicious, disgraceful, and unforgivable attacks and threats on the Federal and State Judiciaries and the individual Judges of these courts.”

“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years.”

Luttig also warned that Trump isn’t accomplishing the task alone. It’s the complicit Supreme Court—and the American people—that are letting Trump get away with it.

“It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first instance to protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system from the reprehensible spectacle of the former president’s inexcusable, threatening attacks, just as it is the responsibility of the respective State Supreme Courts in the first instance to protect their courts and their state judges from the same,” he added. “Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”

Here was Walton’s own dire warning:

Georgia Republican lawmakers, in the dead of night, passed a bill that will make it easier to challenge a voter’s registration, dealing a huge blow to voting rights just months before the 2024 election.

The measure, which has already passed the Senate, also passed the House along party lines early Friday, despite opposition from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. If Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signs the bill into law, it will go into effect on July 1.

The bill increases the number of reasons that a person’s voter registration can be challenged, such as registering in another state or jurisdiction, using a different residence to obtain a homestead tax exemption, or registering at a nonresidential address. In smaller Georgia towns, where there aren’t enough residents in the zip code for the post office to deliver mail to home addresses, many residents use their post office box as their voter registration address. This would also be banned.

The measure would require homeless people to use the country registrar’s office as their voting address, which could be complicated for both the registrars and the people trying to register. This requirement could also violate the National Voter Registration Act.

The bill would make other changes to Georgia’s voting laws, including requiring that the printed text on a ballot be used to count votes, instead of a scannable bar code, and requiring absentee and advanced ballots to be counted within one hour of polls closing on Election Day.

Voting rights advocates have slammed both the bill and Republicans for seeking to create more barriers to voting. Andrea Young, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, warned the bill would encourage “anti-democratic vigilantes to come in and challenge your right to be on the voting list.”

“What we’re saying is that it should be easy for every citizen to vote,” she told The Guardian. “That’s what makes this a democracy. And all of these tricks to try to create barriers for Georgia citizens to have a voice in their government is anti-democracy.”

Since the 2020 election, Republicans across the country have tried to pass restrictions on voting, particularly mail-in and advanced voting. While the GOP lawmakers claim they are trying to protect the integrity of U.S. elections, the real effect of their actions has been to make it that much harder for many people, especially people of color, to vote.

Ironically, the measure passed Georgia’s House of Representatives just days after a judge determined that a state resident had voted illegally. Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of the state Republican Party, violated state election laws when he voted illegally in nine elections from 2008 to 2010. At the time he cast those votes, Pritchard was still on probation after being convicted of a forgery felony in Pennsylvania in 1996.

Party backed-candidates competing in New Jersey’s elections will no longer have a leading edge after a judge ruled on Friday that the state’s controversial balloting system must undergo an immediate redesign, with the “integrity of the democratic process” at stake.

The decision is a major win for Representative Andy Kim, who, along with House candidates Sarah Schoengood and Carolyn Rush, brought the lawsuit to buck the state establishment and a coalition of local party bosses. The decision will level out the playing field in the state’s June 4 primary to replace indicted Senator Bob Menendez, who faces charges of corruption and obstruction of justice for allegedly acting as a foreign agent and accepting bribes in exchange for coordinating business deals between New Jersey real estate titans and Qatar and Egypt. So far, Menendez has refused to resign and has even left the door open for himself to run for reelection as an independent candidate.

The ruling will scrap a feature of the Garden State’s ballot known as the “county line”—an entire column, usually the first, leftmost line—that allowed each county to prominently advertise the candidate that its local party wanted to feature in the ballot’s prime real estate. Candidates who didn’t win the coveted nomination would be relegated to what was referred to as “ballot Siberia,” columns so far away from the county line that they were practically abandoned.

“Plaintiffs have put forth credible evidence not only that their constitutional rights are violated by the present ballot design used in New Jersey, which is used in no other state in the country,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi in a 49-page decision, noting that “defendants would suffer minimal harm in implementing the ballot design requested.”

“The integrity of the democratic process for a primary election is at stake and the remedy Plaintiffs are seeking is extraordinary. Mandatory injunctive relief is reserved only for the most unusual cases. Plaintiffs’ burden on this Motion is therefore particularly heavy,” concluded Quraishi. “Nevertheless, the Court finds, based on this record, that Plaintiffs have met their burden and that this is the rare instance when mandatory relief is warranted.”