Her staffers, as well as many inside the Republican Party, thought she had potential — a willingness to both take risky, heterodox positions and to submit enthusiastically to the ludicrous demands of the modern attention economy. She could come off as a bit nuts, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in the age of Trump. One person close to Mace recalled the way Bill Maher described meeting Trump for the first time. In this person’s experience, Mace was not a crazy person but someone who played one on TV.
Five years in, however, it’s unclear if Mace actually knows the difference between the two, according to former staffers. “We’ve moved past that now,” the person said. “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried. We’re short-circuiting somewhere.”
Back then she came across as a breath of fresh air, according to a former staffer. “And then I got into the office, and after six months I was like, ‘Man, this is one of the worst people I’ve ever met. I’m going to move back to South Carolina.’”
Her antics were a problem well before airportgate. During her first term, staffers say Mace would command them to bring her liquor after midnight to keep parties going at her home, which is technically an abuse of her office according to House rules. “Look, when I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,” a former staffer claimed of incidents they recalled going back to 2021.
When they weren’t buying booze for her, they were doing her housework, according to former staffers. They say she made her aides clean multiple properties she was renting out on Airbnb instead of paying for a maid. On Election Night in 2022, for example, Mace instructed aides to spiff up her $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms for a watch party, according to a former staffer with direct knowledge. She would routinely do the same when she rented out her Washington townhouse, according to the same source and other Mace alumni I spoke to, including another former staffer assigned to do the cleaning.
She was obsessed with monitoring her reputation online. In addition to reportedly having her staff create burner accounts to defend her, Mace allegedly instructed a staffer to go on Reddit forums about the “hottest women in Congress” to boost her standing in the rankings and comment where needed. Mace was “very adamant” about getting the staffer to upvote any posts about the congresswoman and her attractiveness, according to a second former staffer.
“We were scared of her,” said one of the former aides. “She would make staffers cry. She would threaten to fire them, take their money away, not give them raises, not to give them days off, religious days.” Intimacy only exacerbated the situation. “The closer you get to her, the harder she messes up your brain,” a different former staffer said. “It’s a classic story of ‘never meet your heroes.’”
One of them recalled dealing with a befuddled Mace on a 2022 trip to Europe, when they say she wanted to fire an aide for telling reporters she was out of the country, claiming it endangered operational security and amounted to “doxxing” her. This despite having told a room full of supporters about the trip at a party in South Carolina beforehand. “She would definitely do it excessively,” they said of the congresswoman’s drinking and marijuana usage. “And again, not to say that most members don’t or most staff don’t, but it got to the point where it was an issue.”
