Why do Republican women like Katie Britt and Nancy Mace subject themselves to this?

Early last year, I spoke with Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace about the fallotut from the 2022 midterm and the Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

She is mostly known these days for wearing an “A” on her shirt after she and a band of rogue Republicans voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. But Mace’s story is at times both devastating and inspiring.

After being raped as a teenager, she dropped out of school before she returned to school, became one of the first women to graduate from the Citadel miltary acadedmy in South Carolina before she flipped a Democratically held seat in 2020. As a single mom, she has occasionally broken with her party on protecting birth control, and told me that the GOP was “not going to win hearts and minds over by being a******* to women.”

But on Sunday, Mace came under fire when she appeared on on This Week with George Stephanopolous and faced tough questioning about supporting Donald Trump despite him being held liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll. In response, Mace accused Stephanopolous of “shaming” her and said that, as for the finding of Trump’s culpability, “it was not a criminal court.”

All of this came after Mace had vocally criticised Trump in the days after the January 6 riot, which led to Trump endorsing her primary opponent in 2022, leading to her shooting a video of herself in front of Trump Tower, which the ex-president himself mocked. She also openly said about fellow Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2021, “bless her f***ing heart,” which any Southerner knows is not a compliment below the Mason-Dixon line.

Conversely, at the beginning of last year, after she was sworn in, Senator Katie Britt of Alabama took