The South Carolina congresswoman needs to learn the value of being ignored and forgotten.

Representative Nancy Mace apparently drove from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., today wearing nothing but her clingy pajamas — showing how determined she is to vote for Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or some such nonsense — and daring the world to care. And I don’t, but I can at least stir myself on the occasion to register a final judgment on her character as a congresswoman and sign off on this beat permanently.

Just today, in fact, I mentioned to someone that I’ve quietly made it a point to no longer write about Mace — once an early figure of fun for me — despite the fact that her various recent publicity stunts would otherwise make great fodder for a man with my peculiar taste for public political ridiculousness. There is a reason for that, and it goes all the way back to the first piece I ever wrote about her, in 2023, in which I portrayed her as forever tipping upon the wheel of inconstancy: Something about her inexplicable political gyrations — not the standard accommodations all Republican politicians have made to the Trump era but rather her deliriously sudden unreliability — gave me the quiet shudders.

Something simply felt wrong with her, on a level of basic human judgment — a wild card, not in a pleasant way but more in a “Charlie Kelly cuts the brake lines” way. Back then, I had a fine Renaissance analogy I could deploy as a cloak for these deeper misgivings, but eventually I felt hypocritical if I even wrote about her to mock or dismiss her: Why give her what she (so foolishly and self-destructively) seemed to want? Beyond the fact that nobody likes playing the patsy for a politician’s PR attempts, I felt like I would also be encouraging her unhealthy obsession, the downward spiral of a brittle, fragile mind. Nancy Mace is a person who, if anything, needs to learn the value of being ignored and forgotten for a long time — and after this I intend to do just that, for her sake as much as ours.

Keep in mind, I have no problem with mere workaday political stupidity and clownery; I in fact depend on it. But the combination of ambition, recklessness, and naked calculation — all wildly imbalanced, as if she were hurtling through her public career on permanent “tilt” — suggested a person who was . . . perhaps unwell in other ways. Nothing since then has persuaded me otherwise, and the escalation of her public pleas for attention — from mere clumsy attempts to gain attention to public allegations of sexual misconduct made while under legal cover of congressional privilege — has confirmed it.

The more attention she seeks, the less inclined I am to give it to her, not merely because I believe her to be irresponsible, incompetent, and indifferent to her actual legislative job — that describes roughly 80 percent of the present Congress — but also because the grotesque falseness of her entire affect shouldn’t be rewarded.

Some publicity hounds have a natural gift for it because of their unfeignedly genuine stupidity: I stand by my characterization of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as authentic American fools in their own different ways, morons truly unto the manner born. Meanwhile Jasmine Crockett’s phony “street” affect (as an upper-middle-class daughter of privilege who went to the most prestigious private all-girls’ school in her state) grates just as falsely as Mace’s inauthentic pretenses and repeated attempts to invade the spotlight. On top of everything else, Mace is selling herself out — whether temperamentally imbalanced or not, she is not stupid, and the fact that she knows better makes her performative blunders clank that much harder. She is too self-conscious to convincingly play the fool; instead she comes off as unstable. Unless that accurately reflects an unavoidable reality, it is a terrible PR trade for a professional in the field (as Mace was prior to Congress) to make, and I prefer not to participate in such degradations. I want the real thing.

So I will only say this about Nancy Mace’s most recent political stunt: She should wear work clothes to work. (I said the same about John Fetterman, and I still believe it.) And now I shall speak of her no more, not even as an entrant in my ongoing Carnival of Fools. Those players earned their time on the stage through honest-to-goodness Important Idiocy. Nothing about Mace feels earned at all.