‘You’re trying to shame me’: Nancy Mace spars with Stephanopoulos over Trump support

Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace says she is unbothered by her choice to support Donald Trump’s run for a second presidency despite previously arguing that he should not hold office again because his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

“I listened to my voters in South Carolina, and they’ve moved beyond January 6th,” Mace said Sunday on ABC News’s This Week, alluding to how the former US president dominated the recent presidential preference primary in that state as well as others. “Voters held him accountable through our Republican primaries this year. He’s won overwhelmingly.”

Mace on Sunday also vociferously defended throwing her support behind Trump despite him being held civilly liable for sexually abusing magazine columnist E Jean Carroll. Mace has previously spoken about surviving a rape when she was a teenager, and she accused This Week host George Stephanpolous of trying to shame her about her past by grilling her about her support for Trump, though he denied it.

Trump is the Republicans’ presumptive nominee to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, despite facing more than 90 criminal charges for subverting the outcome of his failed 2020 re-election bid, retention of classified information, and hush-money payments. In addition to a civil jury verdict finding him liable for the sexual abuse of Carroll, Trump has also been adjudicated a business fraudster in a New York state attorney general’s lawsuit centering on his entrepreneurial practices.

Mace had said Trump ruined “his entire legacy” immediately after his supporters launched the Capitol attack in protest of his defeat to Biden. She also pleaded with her fellow Republicans “to start over”, find a “new voice” and “hold