The audacity of dope.

F or years, a famous Washington joke had it that the most dangerous place to find yourself on Capitol Hill was between Chuck Schumer and a camera. Even in a town professionally and politically driven largely by media coverage, Schumer was legendarily hungry for the spotlight — and it’s hard to argue that such an approach didn’t work out for him. It was early last spring when I heard that same joke applied for the first time to an obscure House Republican backbencher named Nancy Mace. It would not be the last time.

And in fact, it wasn’t too long after I heard that joke that Nancy Mace proved the premise by awkwardly shoehorning herself into the headlines. Last October, during the Kevin McCarthy speakership crisis, she staged a hilariously desperate bid for public relevance whose comedy came from how pathetically obvious was her desire to be “part of the story.” It was the political equivalent of a photobomb, someone poking her head into the frame to make sure she’s memorialized in a historic picture of other, more important people.

Recall that McCarthy was ousted from the House speakership by Matt Gaetz and a gang of like-minded malcontents who had objected to his winning the job in the first place. Mace, notably, had not been one of that original band — most likely because she perceived no margin in it then. But once she realized McCarthy was going down regardless, she grabbed headlines by casting an extra symbolic vote against him. (She later offered a hastily confected reason for joining the rebels, having to do with McCarthy’s failure to advance one of her legislative priorities, which convinced exactly nobody within her own caucus.) The media collectively rolled their eyes out of their sockets at Mace’s flailing inconstancy, took note of her amateur-hour stab at being a political player, and quickly moved on to more important matters.

This was, of course, the worst outcome imaginable for Mace, for whom the most important political matter in America is forever herself. So a week later, after everyone had moved on, she decided to show up at the U.S. Capitol wearing a skin-tight T-shirt with an “A” clumsily drawn on it and to walk the halls for cameras, cajoling reporters to ask her questions about it. It was her “scarlet letter,” she said to anyone who would listen, one she willingly chose to wear as a symbol of how it felt to be viewed by others after her “brave” vote against McCarthy. In other words: the proverbial response to a question nobody even asked.

Leaving aside the fact that the metaphor made no sense to anyone who has read Hawthorne, the stunt was primarily memorable for how nakedly it revealed her pathological, grasping need to be the center of attention, an insecurity that verged on delusion. That she was also rather obviously trying to draw attention to her chest felt trashy in the utmost, calculated in its inappropriateness even for a congresswoman who once opened a prayer breakfast with an enthusiastic paean, for the ladies in attendance, to the joys of morning sex.

Now comes Mace’s newest attempt to create a viral moment. She claims to have been hit on by Michael Eric Dyson, the bloviating CNN commentator, after an appearance on the network a month ago. They argued on-air about mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name — both did their typical cable-news kayfabe shtick — and then afterward Mace approached Dyson and requested a photo of the two together, as a “no hard feelings” gesture. She later texted the pic to him, and he responded by texting, “Shhh don’t tell anybody. We look good together!” Then he complimented her on her looks. And near as anyone can tell, that’s about it. (Mace claims he “begged her for photos” but has not offered any evidence of such; this was the only exchange she has publicly shared.) Now a month later she has decided to emerge from obscurity to officially enter it into the congressional record, as not only an act of hypocrisy — on air he insinuated she was a racist, off air he posed for a cozy snap — but implied sexual harassment as well.

I know this is all pretty milquetoast stuff during a week when Republicans saw their North Carolina nominee for governor revealed as a futanari fetishist and RFK Jr. got caught sexting the industry’s least-admired journalist, but look: Nancy Mace needs attention, right now, so she went with what she had. I can’t know what happened privately between her and Dyson, but I do know that her publicly offered evidence easily admits of a much more pedestrian interpretation than “ultra-woke married black man pervs openly on busty white Republican congresswoman”: He was being polite, and in dispensing a compliment remarked on a noticeable fact about Nancy Mace, which is that she’s quite the looker. (I myself have always preferred “I admire your passion” as a way to kindly excuse attractive fools, but then I was raised in a world of WASPish reserve.)

Either way, she’s now laboring mightily to manufacture a viral moment for herself on social media, and the only reason I’m even writing this piece is to publicly note for the record how unsuccessful she has been. Mace’s highest priority is, by her own confession, achieving fame — not wielding power, or exercising it for good, but garnering positive media coverage and sustaining a sense of “relevance” as an end in and of itself. And for a woman forever on the make, the Dyson kerfuffle is but the latest and most blatant bleat of all.

Mace’s decline is depressing, but perhaps foreordained. She famously wrote a “strategy memo” for herself as a new representative in 2021, where she described herself as “THE freshman thought leader on federal issues,” an assessment we can perhaps charitably characterize as aspirational branding. But in a political party governed enduringly by Trumpism, she quickly gave up on even feigning an interest in governance and embraced her thinly veiled desire for unearned promotion instead. Never quite stupid or indiscreet enough to naturally punch through in the way red-meat GOP heavyweights like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert did, she is now faking it in the most cringe-inducing “How do you do, fellow MAGA people?” way possible.

And that is why watching Mace continue to embarrass herself is both amusing as an observer of D.C. and sad on a human level. She refuses to accept what she is and what she cannot ever be. Like it or not, our current political TV celebrities like MTG and AOC are media stars because they share a natural camera-ready demeanor and a gift for connecting with different segments of the voting public. Their superpower is their lack of self-consciousness: They are morons to the manner born, authentic idiots unburdened by their superegos. Mace, meanwhile, reminds me of nobody so much as Ted Cruz in the agonizingly obvious display of political calculation, as if her every action comes complete with the captions of an ironic narrator. (One way of putting it: Nancy Mace is the Ted Cruz of Lauren Boeberts.)

It is impossible for me to watch Mace’s continued, any-weapon-at-hand quest for attention and media buzz and not be reminded of the classic Onion headline from the late ’90s: “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-to-Door Trying to Shock People.” Few in Congress in recent years have been more transparent about their emotionally insecure need to be in front of a camera. Maybe that’s why the media have found it so easy to pay pronounced inattention to her stunts. Nobody thinks about Nancy Mace at all.