During an 18-minute Fox News interview, after an all-day Twitter feud with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Charleston-area Rep. Nancy Mace accused the New York Democrat of being “very good at politicizing things to her advantage.”
A few hours later, a Mace fundraising email landed in supporters’ inboxes.
It started Wednesday night, a tweet from Mace’s official account took issue with media attention from Ocasio-Cortez’s account of being holed up in her office on Jan. 6 as pro-Trump extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol.
“I’m two doors down from @aoc and no insurrectionists stormed our hallway,” Mace followed on Thursday morning. On Jan. 6, both Mace and Ocasio-Cortez were confined to their offices in the Cannon Office Building as the attack unfolded across the street at the Capitol itself.
From there, the first- and second-term reps traded tweets, with Ocasio-Cortez calling Mace’s initial tweet, “A deeply cynical and disgusting attack.”
Ocasio-Cortez posted a series of videos earlier this week recounting the fear she felt when she heard a Capitol Police officer came into her office searching for her, not knowing it was law enforcement on the other side of the door. Some news reports attempted to fill in the blanks in Ocasio-Cortez’s account, incorrectly placing intruders in the New York rep’s office.
On Fox’s afternoon programming, the freshman Republican maintained that her initial attacks were over the general media reaction. After Ocasio-Cortez responded, Mace tweeted, “I deal in facts. Unlike you, apparently.”
Mace’s office did not respond to the City Paper‘s requests for clarification about what facts were in dispute.
During her first few weeks in Congress, Mace was the subject of a number of stories following the Jan. 6 insurrection, recounting the fear she felt and putting the deadly attacks at the feet of outgoing President Donald Trump. As the press hits added up, “A new voice for GOP” appeared in her Twitter bio in late January.
During the Fox appearance around 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Mace mostly resisted hosts’ attempts to aggressively target Ocasio-Cortez, claiming she was simply stating the facts that attackers never entered the Cannon building.
Mace’s dispute over how close pro-Trump revolutionaries came to her office a month ago comes as House Republicans grapple with violent extremism in their own ranks. Later Thursday afternoon, Mace voted with Republicans against removing Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees over her history as a QAnon believer and school shooting denier, among other things.
In between her Fox appearance and the vote, a Mace campaign fundraising email asked people to “chip in any amount.”
“It’s time for a new GOP voice in Washington,” the email read.
“And it starts by calling out the B.S. and holding Washington accountable to the people once again.”
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