Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) argued on Thursday that her desire for a president who will protect survivors of rape is why she’s voting for Donald Trump, who last year was found by a jury to have raped E. Jean Carroll.
Asked in a Fox News interview how she feels about “the whole gender thing” factoring into the election, Mace replied, “I’m voting for Donald Trump because I am a woman.”
She went on to mock Kamala Harris for sitting down with CNN alongside her running mate, adding, “Nothing says ‘I’m a woman, hear me roar,’ like having your first national interview sit-down with a man by your side.”
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Mace, herself a sexual assault survivor, said that she wanted to vote for a candidate who would protect “women like me, who are survivors of rape,” as well as victims of incest and single mothers.
She gave a cursory rundown of Trump’s policies she believed would do that—“lowering taxes for the middle class, expanding the child care tax credit, looking at the spending of the federal government”—before dragging the conversation back into culture-war territory.
“I’m voting for Donald Trump because I want to be sure that biological men aren’t in the locker room showering next to my underage daughter,” she insisted. “I want to make sure men aren’t stealing women’s achievements in sports or academics or their scholarships, and that’s why, as a woman, I support Donald Trump.”
Last May, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, with a jury determining that he’d assaulted her in a Manhattan department store decades prior.
The former president’s legal team immediately jumped on the fact that the jury hadn’t used the word “rape” in its decision. “This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that—made other findings,” attorney Joe Tacopina told reporters outside the courthouse.
But a judge, in rejecting the Trump team’s motion for a new trial, said the terms “rape” and “sexual abuse” did not differ in any material, real-world way.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote.
“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
At least 25 other women have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct, ranging from groping to rape, over the last five decades.
Mace has nevertheless repeatedly gone to bat for the former president, including as his trial was playing out in New York.
In a March appearance on ABC’s This Week, the congresswoman grew increasingly combative as host George Stephanopoulos asked how she could support Trump in light of the Carroll case.
Mace accused Stephanopoulos of trying to “shame” her with the question.
“I will tell you that I was raped at the age of 16, and any rape victim will tell you I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame,” she spat. “I didn’t come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt, and it’s a shame that you will never feel, George, and I’m not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim. I’m not going to do that.”
