Nancy Mace Mixes Her Faux Feminism With Fresh Islamophobia
In today’s edition of Where Things Stand, I want to unpack a few examples of the Republican midterms messaging strategy that we’re tracking as the party grasps at increasingly dangerous and racist threads to campaign on in lieu of any cohesive policy platform.
President Trump has, in part, put them in this position with his legislative fixation with the SAVE Act voter suppression bill, but it is also hard to spin any of the legislative work Republicans have done the last two years as making life more affordable for working class Americans when it has, in fact, largely done the opposite (tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting the social safety net, funding ICE’s campaign to terrorize American cities, etc.)
As my colleague Josh Kovensky reported back in April, Republicans in Texas carved out a path earlier in the midterms cycle to resurrect the George W. Bush-era Muslim panic as a winning strategy, both for the primaries and the fall general election, as a handful of Democratic primary winners have campaigned against Israel and the U.S.’s ongoing support for the Netanyahu administration’s war crimes in Gaza.
Republicans in Congress have since taken the messaging strategy to a very dark place. Here’s Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), for example, this week manufacturing hysteria about Sharia law in America in the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan last week.
Mace is not running for anything right now — she lost the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary in June and is not running for reelection — and has said she will return to the private sector when her term is up, so she is just doing Islamophobia for shits and gigs right now. (It’s neither here nor there, but her remarks also come laced with her usual brand of faux feminism where she purports to care about women’s issues while mostly attacking trans people and supporting anti-abortion measures she said she wouldn’t.)
Anti-ICE = Communism Now, Too!
In addition to the recent bout of anti-Islam rhetoric and xenophobia being resurrected by the Republican Party this cycle, I’ve also been tracking how Republicans are labeling anything Democrats support as “communism” amid the recent wave of progressive populist victories.
It began as general fearmongering from President Trump about how the nation is being taken over by godless communists and socialists in response to some Zohran Mamdani-backed candidates beating out incumbents or incumbent-backed Democrats in a few extremely blue New York City congressional districts. But Republican members of Congress have since taken cues from the top and run with it all in increasingly freakish ways. Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) escalated things last week when he claimed that Medicare for All is a “communist” policy.
Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) did something similar in a News Nation interview today when he suggested that humane immigration policies that Dems tend to support are actually “crazy communism.”
It’d be funny if their lack of midterms messaging wasn’t sending the party in such diabolical directions.
Billionaires Will Not Save You, Literally
NBC News has the details on Meta billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht ignoring distress calls from a small skiff in the same waters as the billionaire’s yacht off the coast of Alaska last week. Instead, a 42-year-old tour boat called Wilderness Legacy stepped in to aid the boat in distress. Per NBC:
And when the captain of the tour boat announced Zuckerberg’s cutting-edge cruiser, which cost between $300 million and $390 million to construct, had been closer to the stricken skiff and hadn’t answered the radio call for help, “there was near unanimous booing,” passenger Michael Love posted on Bluesky.
More here: Mark Zuckerberg’s mega-yacht didn’t respond to call for help from small boat in Alaska
On That Note …
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If You Read Anything From TPM Today, Read This
The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda knows no bounds. Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky report on the docs that outline the admin’s plan for changes to political apportionment and Census data collection. It revives a Trump I effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine congressional representation: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated
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Your transgender vegan granddaughter will ride to your house on her electric bicycle and pour public school kitty litter through your mail slot while reciting the Das Kapitalinshallahada if you don’t vote for Ken Paxton. It’s true. I paid Trump $1,000,000 to have the presidential daily briefing forwarded to my hotmail account every morning.