Nancy Mace remade herself as an anti-trans culture warrior. Trump chose her opponent for governor

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace shifted her positions on transgender rights and rebranded herself from a moderate Republican to a MAGA culture warrior. In the end, it didn’t help her secure President Donald Trump’s endorsement in South Carolina’s race for governor. In popular terms, a leopard ate her face. After reshaping her political identity around Trump and the grievances that animate his base, she discovered that loyalty runs only one way.Instead of supporting Mace, Trump threw his support behind South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pam Evette in the Republican primary. “She never wavered, never let me down, and was the only South Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate to Endorse me as soon as I launched my 2024 Presidential Campaign,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.Apparently, that loyalty mattered more to Trump than Mace’s yearslong effort to reinvent herself as one of Congress’s most visible anti-trans politicians. Mace has referred to LGBTQ+ people as “tr***ny protesters” through a megaphone outside the Capitol. She also chased a cisgender woman from a public restroom, wrongly believing she caught Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress, daring to use the women’s room.Related: Nancy Mace considers quitting Congress to take her transphobia statewide in South CarolinaDuring the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Mace initially tried to “stay out of it” as other Republicans challenged Trump for the nomination. She ultimately endorsed Trump in January 2024, according to POLITICO, but only after previously suggesting his legacy had been “wiped out” by the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Her evolution on LGBTQ+ issues has been equally dramatic. In 2021, she told CBS News she was “pro-transgender rights, pro-LGBTQ.” A year later, she successfully pressured House Republican leadership to restrict restroom access based on sex assigned at birth and later introduced legislation to i