Republican Rep. Nancy Mace is not having a great few months. Colleagues on both sides of the aisle have openly expressed concerns about her, particularly in the wake of a bizarre speech on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in which she accused her ex-fiancé and three of his friends of sexual crimes against her.
An anonymous House Republican told CNN that “the general feeling is there is something unwell about her.” A former staffer said, “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried.”
An eye-opening new Politico profile of Mace certainly doesn’t exactly help matters. It opens with the interviewer noting a dry-erase board in her office that has “C–T”, “B—H”, “WHORE,”, and “F–K YOU” written on it. Perhaps understandably, they ask what the deal with this is. Mace replies, “We were workshopping replies to certain messages on social media”. Oh, okay.
New this morning for @POLITICO and @POLITICOMag. https://t.co/LsffKkLEIp
— Michael Kruse (@michaelkruse) February 27, 2026
Then there’s a blizzard of details that sound… uh, concerning. Mace apparently rarely sleeps, describing “an engine” inside her she “can’t control” that is “going to go and go and go.”
She also feels the need to get new tattoos simply to experience the needle repeatedly piercing her skin, saying it’s “the pain that I need to feel.” Well, if politics doesn’t work out for Mace, it seems a glowing second career as a Cenobite is just around the corner.
“Something snapped in her mentally”
The interviewer underlines that pretty much everyone who knows her thinks she’s gone totally bonkers, describing her as “unstable”, “unhinged”, and “unwell.”
Republican consultant Chris Drummond believes “Something snapped in her mentally”, and Democratic Senator Ed Sutton said even interviewing her was hazardous: You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to understand a crazy person.”
The Politico profile then details Mace’s genuinely traumatic-sounding past, ending with an admission that she’s currently in “intense therapy” for what she’s been through. When asked if she’s okay, she explains, “I don’t know that I’ll ever be OK with myself … There’s no end of the story where I’m whole.”
I mean, it really sounds like Mace has been through the wringer and back, and I feel as sorry for her as I would anyone else who seems to be experiencing a very public mental health crisis. However, it is also probably not good for a country to have senior politicians getting tattoos simply because they crave pain.
Published: Feb 28, 2026 08:39 am