In which Mace declares that Trump may have endorsed her primary opponent but she still endorses him.

The Nancy Mace saga has been sad since day one — or day three, rather. She was sworn in as a member of the House on January 3, 2021, having already announced that she wouldn’t object to certifying Biden’s electoral votes on January 6. That put her in the minority of the GOP House caucus but Mace seemed keen at the time to establish herself as a voice of sanity in a Trumpified GOP. She calculated, it seems, that the base’s infatuation with Trump would fade and the party would turn the page once he left office.

Three days later, the Capitol was attacked. Mace kept her promise that night not to object to Biden’s victory and talked tough about Trump the next morning. “[His] entire legacy was wiped out yesterday,” she told CNN on January 7. That afternoon she went on Fox News and said she didn’t think Trump had a future in the party.

She was mistaken. And within a week, she had realized it.

By January 13, the day the House voted on impeachment, Mace had lost her nerve. She contrived a procedural reason to vote no on impeachment, insisting that the process had been rushed and should have gone through committee. In the aftermath, she piped down about Trump’s “legacy” and eased off her criticisms of QAnon, another staple of her interviews in the weeks before she joined Congress. She started voting the MAGA way on litmus tests, opposing the Democrats’ move to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments and supporting the ouster of Liz Cheney from the House GOP leadership. Having miscalculated about Trump’s waning influence over the party, she was obviously scrambling to get back onside. And reporters noticed, all but mocking her for how easily she switched from “bold independent-minded truth-teller” to “loyal party soldier” as circumstances warranted.

Yet Mace couldn’t completely suppress her contempt for Trumpism. In October she surprised everyone by voting to support the contempt resolution for Steve Bannon after he defied a subpoena from the January 6 committee. A month later, after Lauren Boebert jokingly compared Ilhan Omar to a suicide bomber, Mace called it “disgusting.” When Greene attacked her for it, Mace swung back, starting a war of words that would last for days. Greene decided to run to daddy, tweeting that she’d just had a long conversation with Trump about Mace — an obvious hint that he’d be endorsing a primary challenger to Mace in South Carolina’s First District.

She was right. Last night the news broke:

Trump backs Katie Arrington, challenger to freshman Republican Nancy Mace.

Says Mace, who was very outspoken in the immediate aftermath about 1/6 but didn't vote to impeach, "has been very disloyal" to GOP.

His full statement, including a dig at Mark Sanford ("Mr. Argentina"): pic.twitter.com/0MdrSGblUY

— aaron navarro (@aaronlarnavarro) February 10, 2022

If Arrington’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was the GOP nominee in Mace’s district once before. She successfully primaried another Trump enemy, Mark Sanford, in 2018. That summer she was involved in a terrible car crash, hampering her ability to campaign, and ended up losing the general election to Joe Cunningham by a point and a half in the Democrats’ midterm wave year. It was Cunningham whom Mace defeated in 2020. Now Arrington’s back to try to take out Mace, with Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement.

How do you spin that if you’re Mace, knowing that Trump has unseated a far better known Republican in your district in recent memory for crossing him? You could simply ignore it and hope that your constituents aren’t paying much attention, but that would be tricky: Trump’s planning to campaign in South Carolina soon so word’s going to get around that you’re not his pick. You could go the Liz Cheney route and embrace open defiance, which would be good for the soul but not so good for one’s reelection prospects. And Nancy Mace cares a lot about reelection. If she cared more about principle than she did about her career, she would have voted to impeach and accepted the consequences, no?

What she chose to do was … this. The Brian Kemp strategy, claiming that she rather than her opponent is the true MAGA candidate in the race, never mind what Trump himself may have to say about it. But Kemp at least had the dignity not to stand in front of Trump Tower while kissing Trump’s ass in order to woo his voters. Mace kissed dignity goodbye a year ago:

I’m standing in front of Trump Tower with a message this morning…#SC01 #LowcountryFirst pic.twitter.com/CpmMYA63qt

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) February 10, 2022

What was accomplished by traveling to New York to cut this video? Does having Trump Tower in the background add some special resonance to Mace’s pitch? “I love Trump so much I’m willing to stand across the street from his building.”

Oh well. Everyone’s probably better off with Arrington winning that seat at this point. If Mace is willing to grovel this abjectly in the name of staying in the House, it’s a cinch that she’ll do Trump’s bidding every bit as slavishly going forward as Arrington would if she’s reelected.

She had a choice on January 13 between war, in the form of a primary, and dishonor. She chose dishonor and now she’ll have war. Good riddance.

Exit question: Is Nikki Haley going to switch her endorsement in this race? Haley backed Mace a few days ago, but Haley is even more palpably terrified of Trump tanking her career than Mace is. Trump should demand that she endorse Arrington immediately. Let’s see what Nikki’s made of.