Editor’s note: The following essay first appeared in The Play Typer Guy, Stephen’s newsletter about politics and the arts. –JS

Donald Trump is a rapist. A jury of his unfortunate peers concluded that there was a preponderance of evidence supporting E. Jean Carroll’s claim that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83 million in damages for repeatedly defaming her.

Trump is now the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. It’s his third time overall, but first as a confirmed rapist — a depressing future Trivial Pursuit answer. That’s a tough moral position for his supporters — unless they’re pro-rape, in which case he’s the ideal choice.

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Mace later said on Fox that Trump “wasn’t found guilty of rape anywhere,” but if that’s her standard, she’s suggesting that she was never actually raped herself and that her rapist is otherwise fit to hold public office. That’s grotesque.

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Congresswoman Nancy Mace from South Carolina was a guest Sunday on ABC’s This Week. It’s unclear why she was booked, considering she contributes nothing to the productive running of government. She’s a superficially classier bomb thrower than her foes Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, but she’s just as desperate for attention, so much so that after she voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, she showed up at the Capitol wearing a T-shirt with the letter “A” printed on it. (That’s what happens when you haven’t actually read The Scarlet Letter and fell asleep in the middle of the 1995 Demi Moore adaptation.)

This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos showed a clip of Mace speaking in 2019 about her own experience as a rape survivor after Republicans in the South Carolina legislature dismissed her amendment to an abortion ban bill that would’ve permitted exceptions for rape and incest. This was just before she launched her campaign for the US House.

“From some of us who’ve been raped, it can take 25 years to get up the courage and talk about being a victim of rape,” Mace said at the time. “And the first thing that happens when a woman comes out in public and says she’s been raped, what is the first thing out of someone’s mouth? Is that it didn’t happen. This is why women do not come forward. They are afraid.”

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https://youtu.be/gJoIUD7eInQ

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Stephanopoulos reminded Mace that “judges in two separate juries have found [Trump] liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?”

Mace had prepared a tableside word salad in response: “Well, I will tell you, I was raped at the age of 16, and any rape victim will tell you, I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped. I didn’t come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt.”

“And it’s a shame that you will never feel, George,” she continued, “and I’m not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim. I’m not going to do that.”

Mace has no idea if Stephanopoulos feels the shame she describes. She just said that it took her decades before she’d publicly admitted she was raped. It’s also revealing that she refers to Carroll as a “potential rape victim,” which is scuzzy enough, but two juries have determined that Trump raped Carroll. Mace’s rapist went unpunished, which is consistent with the disturbing statistics about rape: Two out of three sexual assaults go unreported, and only three out of 100 rapists ever spend a day in prison for their crimes.

Mace’s defenders argue that it’s unfair to ask a rape survivor to justify supporting a rapist, and I agree. Every Republican — person, woman, man, camera, or TV — should have to explain why they’ve endorsed a rapist. However, this wasn’t a “gotcha” moment. Mace openly described herself as a rape survivor in a political context and has continued to do so, most recently when arguing that South Carolina shouldn’t execute women who have abortions.

“To see this debate go to the dark places,” she said last year, “the dark edges, where it has gone on both sides of the aisle, has been deeply disturbing to me as a woman, as a female legislator, as a mom, and as a victim of rape.”

No shame in Mace’s pathetic game
Stephanopolus didn’t deliberately set out to shame Mace, but she should feel ashamed that she’s supporting a rapist. Maybe that’s beyond her range of emotion these days, considering that Mace grossly downplayed the judgment against Trump. She said, “It’s not a criminal case, number one,” but she should damn well know that few rapists ever see the inside of a courtroom. Mace later said on Fox that Trump “wasn’t found guilty of rape anywhere,” but if that’s her standard, she’s suggesting that she was never actually raped herself and that her rapist is otherwise fit to hold public office. That’s grotesque.

Then Mace hopped on the Trump defamation train and claimed that Carroll had made a “mockery out of rape” when she joked about how she’d spend the money she’d won in the defamation trial. Four of five psychologists would agree that dancing on the financial grave of your rapist is a perfectly reasonable response.

Mace has trouble keeping staff — former employees describe her as “delusional” — so it’s not a surprise she doesn’t have a competent crisis management team. Rather than let the interview fade from the news cycle, she immediately started attacking Stephanopolous.

“I was asked to speak on 2024 today, NOT my own rape,” she posted on Elon Musk’s blog. “I’ve carried this shame for 30 years, a shame George Stephanopolous will never know. I don’t need @gstephanopolous ‘mansplaining’ rape to me or shaming me on national TV for being a survivor of rape.”

He obviously didn’t “mansplain” rape. He simply asked how she justified supporting a rapist. There were other non-rapist options, including her fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, who nonetheless lost the Republican primary to a rapist.

When anti-Trump conservative George Conway dinged Mace on social media, she clapped back with some MAGA-inspired defamation of her own: “Did you check in with John Weaver before tweeting this out?” she wrote, sharing images of Conway and Steve Schmidt, who is not John Weaver.

Weaver, the Lincoln Project co-founder, was accused of making sexual overtures to young men, including a minor. It seems Mace has no scruples against mocking rape, after all. (I probably could’ve ended that sentence after “scruples.)

Weaver hasn’t been convicted of a crime, either, so Mace should probably consider him presidential material, as well.

The pro-rape GOP
Trump has turned the GOP into an overtly pro-rape party. Republicans had previously scared their voters with the image of Birth of a Nation rapists breaking into their homes, but Trump made rape a major plank in his platform. You’ll recall this passage from the uplifting speech announcing his candidacy in 2015.

The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

He raised the specter of rape again in 2018 when telling a West Virginia audience that he preferred Canada’s merit-based immigration system to America’s lottery system.

With us, it’s a lottery system — pick them out — a lottery system. You can imagine what those countries put into the system. They’re not putting their good ones.

And remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower, when I opened. Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough,’ and I used the word ‘rape.’ And yesterday, it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.”

No surprise, of course, that Trump was lying. It’s what he does. His racist lies are the most spectacular.

Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama and Saturday Night Live breakout character, made rape a featured topic in her bizarre rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. She shamelessly blamed Biden for a young woman’s horrific sexual assault, which didn’t occur during his presidency or even in the US. When independent journalist Jonathan Katz exposed her lie, Britt told Fox she’d used the Mexican woman’s story (without permission) to “bring some light” to an issue that’s apparently so prevalent her best example pre-dates the iPhone.

Trump infamously boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy” prior to taping a 2005 Access Hollywood appearance. When the recording was released in 2016, many Republicans were so repulsed they withdrew their support (for a while, at least). This included Sen. Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire, who said in disgust, “He’s talking about assault of women.” Now, she’s running for governor and has already endorsed Trump. She says Biden is unfit to serve because he’s in obvious cognitive decline, but Trump is the one who confused the woman he raped with his (second) ex-wife.

The Republican Party might’ve briefly hesitated before embracing a presidential nominee who talked about sexually assaulting women. Now, Republicans easily defend and endorse a presidential nominee who was found liable for sexual assault. It’s truly a pro-rape party now.