Nancy Mace’s political career is likely over and will almost certainly be quickly forgotten. But the South Carolina Republican had the chance five years ago to create an enduring legacy by risking her office to steadfastly oppose Donald Trump’s “big lie” and self-coup attempt after he lost the 2020 election. Instead, she chose a squishy middle path between standing up for her country’s democratic legacy and pleasing the deranged boss of her party. And that path led her nowhere.

Mace chose not to run for a fifth term in the House so she could pursue the top job in the Palmetto State’s government, but after failing to qualify for the runoff in the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday, the odds of her political ambitions reaching any higher have dimmed considerably. Though he didn’t attack her by name as he did with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Trump endorsed one of Mace’s primary challengers after she was one of four Republicans who signed a discharge petition forcing a vote to release the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files in 2025. 

This wasn’t the first time Mace stood up to Trump. On Jan. 6, 2021, she published an op-ed in The Post and Courier before Trump incited a MAGA mob, in which she wrote, “Today, I will solemnly cast my vote to certify the results of the Electoral College,” adding, “If Congress ever had the power to singularly throw out the Electoral College, we would set a dangerous precedent that the ruling class can disenfranchise millions of voters across the country. Does anyone really want to give Nancy Pelosi this kind of power? Certifying the results is the only way to preserve our republic and our Constitution. We must follow this course, even when we don’t like the outcome. Even when we hate the outcome.”

After Trump supporters’ violence on Jan. 6 was finally subdued, Mace went even further, telling CNN, “I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol,” and that “everything that he’s worked for … his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday.”

She added, “And we’ve got to start over.”

But when Mace had the chance to vote to impeach Trump a week after the riot, she demurred, questioning the “constitutionality” of the impeachment process for an outgoing president and lamenting “violence on both sides of the aisle.” 

A closer glance at her Jan. 6 op-ed shows her spreading a whole lot of baseless “big lie” innuendo: “Is there evidence of voting irregularities and voter fraud in multiple states? Yes.”

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Hayes: MAGA’s California fraud lie falls apart instantly June 9, 2026 / 08:11

Mace then spent the next several years as a MAGA-coded culture warrior, taking on Trump’s political targets — especially transgender people — as her own. But her Epstein files rebellion seems to have been the last straw for Trump.

It’s a shame, because what this country needs most in June 2026 — just as it did in January 2021 — is Republican lawmakers and conservative thought leaders plainly rejecting Trump’s thoroughly debunked stories about a massive conspiracy of election fraud across multiple states. Instead, the most powerful and influential voices are spreading democracy-eroding falsehoods — because they can’t believe that 2000s-era reality TV show villain Spencer Pratt didn’t finish higher than third as a Republican in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.

Trump crashed out in an interview last weekend with “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker as he ranted about fictitious voter fraud in California. Vice President JD Vance — infamous for knowingly spreading racist lies about immigrants for political purposes — said the situation in California “seems pretty shady to me.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said California’s vote-counting process “stinks to high heaven,” adding, “I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”

Elon Musk — MAGA campaign funder, propagator of racist conspiracy theories and beneficiary of untold billions in government subsidies — posted to X, “The real reason they don’t want voter ID is to commit voting fraud. That is the obvious truth.”

Glenn Beck posted about California election laws: “A lot of the fraud is LEGAL. It’s a rigged system.” Rod Dreher, columnist for Bari Weiss’ MAGA-adjacent Free Press (who reportedly until recently was a paid propagandist for former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government), posted that the “official story” of the LA mayoral primary results “is simply impossible to believe” and that “The problem is that many, many, MANY of us simply cannot believe it. It seems for all the world like fraud. This matters, & is going to matter more.”

To be sure, California’s vote-counting methods are, as The New York Times put it, “notoriously time-consuming, in part because of the state’s reliance on mail-in voting, and a requirement that officials do extensive work to check signatures, open envelopes and inspect ballots.”

But let’s be very clear about this. These Republican and conservative leaders are spreading baseless fictions meant to undermine any election that doesn’t go their way. And when it’s all said and done, for all the destruction Trump’s two administrations will have reaped upon the country and the world, the cynical deployment of voter fraud lies may end up yielding the most permanent damage. 

What America really needs right now is a few honorable conservatives to stand against these despicable tactics with a clear voice. Mace had the chance to be one five years ago. Instead, she’ll leave the stage as just another Republican who briefly stood up to Trump, then vacillated, then rebelled again, but ultimately prioritized currying favor with the demagogic boss of her party over standing on principle.

For her efforts at placating Trump and MAGA, Mace is a replacement-level, power-hungry politician looking for a job.

The post Nancy Mace lost the South Carolina governor’s race. But her legacy of failure runs much deeper. appeared first on MS NOW.

President Donald Trump and his family have cashed in big since he won the 2024 election. Of the billions of dollars they have accrued over the past 18 months, the lion’s share has reportedly come from cryptocurrency assets that bear the president’s name or his family’s endorsement. The technology may be novel, but crypto lets the Trump family play the age-old game of separating fools from their money, all while leveraging Trump’s position in the White House to boost the sales pitch.

According to an in-depth investigation from Reuters, whose reporters reviewed thousands of documents, disclosures and blockchain records, the price of the crypto offerings Trump is marketing have plummeted — but not the profits that the Trumps have pocketed. Investors who trusted Trump’s business acumen have been left unable to achieve the profits they assumed were coming or even offload the assets as their worth collapsed. In effect, a predatory market that should be subject to stricter regulation from the government instead has been a massive cash cow for the president and his family.

(Reuters helpfully published a full methodology for how it calculated the gains and losses on the notoriously opaque crypto market. The White House did not comment directly on Reuters’ reporting but said in a statement: “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”)

Trump has long preferred projects in which he features his name prominently but takes on little, if any, financial risk. The Trump Organization’s longtime M.O. has been licensing his name to real estate projects and reaping the benefits, even if the projects failed. Trump has also stamped his name on mattresses, wall sconces and slabs of meat. He even added his name to Bibles during the 2024 campaign.

At least all those were physical products. But in 2022, when he was out of the White House, Trump got involved in the burgeoning digital marketplace. The nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, sold for $99 each featuring his name and image as part of another licensing scheme. The cash flowed into Trump’s bank account before a “digital trading card” was sold. As a result, the latecomer entry into the NFT market, after months of decline in the NFT market’s value more broadly, mattered little to him when he had already extracted whatever value he could from the deal.

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Steve Rattner: Trump triples net worth to $6.5B with help of crypto May 1, 2026 / 11:57

Trump and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. fully entered the world of cryptocurrency in late 2024. Leading up to his inauguration, the three hawked the $TRUMP meme coin and “governance tokens” for their crypto business, World Liberty Financial. The resulting surge in interest in those offerings and two crypto companies with the sons’ backing have generated a massive flood of new revenue for the Trumps. The report Reuters published Tuesday highlighted how the influx of funding for the Trumps left behind those hoping to join in the windfall:

While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members — notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr. — hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds such as exchange-traded funds with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.

We shouldn’t ignore that, per Reuters’ calculations, the Trumps have profited at least as much money as outside investors have lost. World Liberty has sent 75% of the net revenue from token sales to the Trumps. Those tokens were meant to provide those who own them a say in the “new financial system” the company promises to eventually develop — though there’s been little progress on that front.

The price for those tokens, along with the $TRUMP meme coin, another straight-up licensing venture, have crashed. Investors have been barred from selling most of the coins they have accumulated, meaning even those who bought in early are unable to make money from their purchase or even cut their losses. Reuters interviewed an investor whose $2,000 investment in $TRUMP is now worth less than $120. (A spokesperson for World Liberty disputed the methods Reuters used to calculate the losses retail investors have seen.)

Buyers of this meme coin had even more reason to beware than investors in general given the volatile nature of the crypto market and Trump’s history of flimflam. As with most crypto tokens available to purchase, the World Liberty “governance token” and the $TRUMP meme coin also included fine-print disclaimers that their tokens are not an investment and that purchasers shouldn’t expect a profit. But that’s hard to square with the president’s marketing and him offering perks to investors including dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate and the White House.

After hyping a product with almost no real value, the president and his sons have in effect siphoned billions of dollars away from investors who hoped to profit themselves. Anyone else who did this would be accused of running a classic pump and dump scheme. But when it’s the president of the United States behind it all, the people who bought in have nowhere to turn. Instead, they’re left holding the bag.

The post Trump’s crypto windfall comes at the expense of his supporters appeared first on MS NOW.

No necesito encuestas para saber que pertenezco a una minoría. Me basta salir de casa y cruzar tres palabras con un semejante para sentirme muy poco semejante a él. La mayoría de los días ni siquiera tengo que hacer tal esfuerzo: con solo leer el periódico, los sentimientos de forastería, extrañamiento, soledad, incomprensión y alucine me borran la ilusión de pertenencia que he soñado por la noche. Pero está bien que los barómetros me confirmen la intuición. El último publicado en este periódico sobre asuntos religiosos determina que los ateos somos en España una minoría formada por el 16,6% de la población. No contamos ahí a los agnósticos, esos moderaditos. Los ateos somos rotundos, apostamos todo a la negación, no tenemos nada que ver con los que se encogen de hombros y se santiguan por si acaso.

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Quizá ayude a explicar lo que ha ocurrido en este país, su nivel de crispación y polarización, el hecho de que Federico Jiménez Losantos, antiguo pope de la emisora de la Conferencia Episcopal Española, la Cope, defina hoy como “satánico”, “monstruo” y “siniestro” al cardenal arzobispo de Madrid, José Cobo, y critique que el Papa venga “a ayudar a Pedro Sánchez”; que no se le ocurra otra cosa mejor que visitar un centro de Cáritas —“esos cristianos rojos, cantera de Podemos”— y que, según él, se haya arrodillado “ante el islam”.

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Hay que ponerse en la piel de alguien que sufra. Alguien que sufra o que vea sufrir a su pareja, a sus padres, a sus hijos, a sus amigos. Día tras día, noche tras noche. Hay que querer ponerse en la piel y tratar de imaginar un dolor indecible, imposible de imaginar. Hay que pensar en quienes hayan llegado al límite de ese dolor y decidan acabar con su vida no porque renuncien a ella, sino en coherencia con su forma de entenderla. Las personas que eligen la eutanasia y que reciben para ella los avales médicos y jurídicos no están en contra del derecho a la vida. Al revés: lo están defendiendo.

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Una periodista, Janet Murray, escribió en X una irónica y poco original crítica contra la serie House. Y el protagonista, Hugh Laurie, contestó con pura flema británica que Murray, inglesa, asumió con resignación. Fue un intercambio cargado de veneno, pero educado, sin descalificaciones. Y algo más importante que eso: con público. Además, un público no sometido a las restricciones habituales de la convivencia. Se hizo ver algo sustancial, que es la diferencia de seguidores y de fama. Debería poder responderse a alguien a pesar de eso, pero en X es exponer a ese alguien, si se trata de una simple periodista, a los miles de fans de una estrella. El caso es que Laurie pidió disculpas. Y lo hizo confesando que, cuando se puso a escribir su respuesta, estaba “ligeramente borracho”. Tengo para mí, por mi vieja experiencia en X, que lo que provocó la borrachera de Laurie no fue escribir su tuit (quizá pasado de sarcasmo pero impecablemente escrito, una contestación correcta —si escribes cosas, bien lo sabemos los articulistas, te expones a que te contesten—) sino la decisión de publicarlo. Ese empujoncito al que ayuda el alcohol, que no es mal empujoncito si no provocase la tradicional tormenta de mierda alrededor. Hay que alabar de Hugh Laurie que, con su sinceridad, haya abierto públicamente una puertita interesante: la de quien, en los espacios públicos y a salvo de miradas (es decir, a salvo de que su rostro o su voz lo delate), escribe borracho o animado, y provoca crisis de todo tipo, no solo las relacionadas con su reputación. Es el que borra el día después, o decide no borrar porque el mismo coraje que te dio el alcohol, te dignifica tenerlo también sobrio. Tengo por lo demás una teoría: el que escribe bebido textos que comprometen a alguien más que a ti, lo hace como esos borrachos que conducen a 30 por hora; es decir, con una prudencia ridícula y fatua. Pero si se trata de tuits es más fácil que salga la agresividad, supongo que excitada por el anonimato (de haberlo). Lo que hizo Hugh Laurie “ligeramente” fue sobreexcitar, con seguridad, a los que no estaban ni “ligeramente” ni dispuestos a admitirlo. Y también a los peores: los que ni siquiera tienen la excusa de haber bebido.