"By February, Mace was picking high-profile Twitter fights, and over the next few months her team would blast out press releases decrying antifa and Democrats’ efforts to “defund the police.” I wondered: Was she trying to change the subject? Was she hoping to regain some credibility in her party? I brought up a particularly bitter exchange with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that had gone viral, in which Mace accused the New York progressive of exaggerating the danger she’d been in during the Capitol riot. The move earned her a six-minute spot on Hannity, where she attacked Ocasio-Cortez some more, and a segment on Fox News Radio, in which, without apparent irony, she lamented the “Jerry Springer Show” state of American politics. Since then, Mace has appeared on Fox News several times a month to riff on a selection of partisan talking points.
Her clash with AOC was, Mace told me, a result of the fact that she is an independent thinker. Her harsh words for Trump afforded her “the moral authority” to criticize Democrats, she said: “Because I held my party accountable, [I can] hold the left accountable.” But when I asked Mace whether she still believed that the events of January 6 should disqualify Trump from further involvement in the Republican Party, as she’d said so plainly in January, she equivocated. “It was the day, the time, the place, and the message. All that. And the rhetoric—and it was rhetoric from multiple people, multiple entities, organizations, individuals leading up to that moment that led to this horrific event that day on our nation’s Capitol,” she replied"
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