Eric Schmitts the Bed
The Bulwark · C · trust 38/100
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William Kristol , Andrew Egger , and Jim Swift September 30 Upgrade to listen 17 minutes 1,019 402 116 For Republicans trying to outrun a blue wave, the verdict is in: The Dallas midterm convention was a stinker. Don’t take it from us, take it from Texas GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton. “To be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” Paxton said in leaked audio reported today by the New York Times . “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
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Senate Judiciary Committee members Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) display a sign accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of meeting with Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 29, 2026. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Hawkward by Andrew Egger
Poor Eric Schmitt. It had all been going so well. The junior senator from Missouri had been working hard building a MAGA-pleasing brand as a staunch Trump ally who wasn’t afraid to play footsie with the blood-and-soil right. Just yesterday, Axios reported that Schmitt was “seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate” for JD Vance. Then, just hours later, his big break seemed to have arrived—the moment that he thought he was about to launch his MAGA brand into the stratosphere.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had hauled former Special Counsel Jack Smith in for questioning. Republicans’ goal going in was clear: to harass and belittle a man in the top tier of Donald Trump’s enemies list, and to catch him in a perjury trap if they could.
When Schmitt’s time came to question Smith, he embarked on a bizarre line of questioning intended to link Smith with another Trump enemy: Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis. Hadn’t he traveled to Atlanta in February 2024, just as a scandal was engulfing Willis’s parallel election-fraud prosecution of Trump? Hadn’t he attended an Atlanta Hawks game that very same week? Was it possible he had gone there to meet with Willis, no doubt for some nefarious purpose?
But Smith did something Schmitt hadn’t expected. He denied having attended the Hawks game in question at all. The senator couldn’t believe it. He and his colleagues had hoped to catch Smith in some lie that could be used as a pretext to prosecute him. And now, he thought, he’d been the one to catch him.
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Schmitt could barely conceal his smug glee as he proceeded: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors–Hawks game on February 3, 2024?” he asked, a grin tugging at his mouth. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself. . . . I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” A few minutes later, he wrapped up his testimony by calling Smith a “dirtbag.”
Unfortunately for Schmitt, he was wrong about all of it. Smith hadn’t been in Atlanta for a Hawks game on the day in question. He’d been in Maryland, watching the Terps women’s basketball team take on the visiting Iowa Hawkeyes . Minutes later, a visibly furious Schmitt was blustering wildly as Sen. Amy Klobuchar icily rubbed his nose in it: “I think people should get their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong. You had the teams wrong, sir.” Amazingly, Schmitt refused to apologize, insisting he’d just been asking questions.
I’ll be honest: It was all highly enjoyable to watch. (If you want to watch us having fun watching it, Sam and I did a video breakdown after the fact yesterday.) JVL likes to say it’s great to watch bad things happen to bad people. Sometimes I see what he means.
But to understand just how bad of shape we’re in as a country, consider this: It’s not clear that this humiliation will hurt Schmitt’s aspirations to higher office in the slightest.
On one side of our great informational divide, Schmitt’s blunder is already going down in infamy. It was extraordinarily viral all day yesterday, with many Hill reporters at a loss to remember the last time a lawmaker had whiffed so hard during testimony. For most of professional Washington and for most people with a mainstream-to-liberal information diet, it will likely be their first association when they think of Schmitt for years to come.
Over the divide, however, things look very different. Schmitt’s apparent “gotcha” moment buzzed quickly around right-wing media. Podcaster Benny Johnson tweeted that Schmitt 1 had “pulled out the receipts” and “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity shared the same moment. Both later quietly deleted their posts, but neither posted any acknowledgment that they’d gotten the story backwards—or even commented on Schmitt’s mistake at all.
Some went even further through the looking glass. After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on the popular Turning Point USA podcast still called the Charlie Kirk Show. The exchanges on the subject are surreal: The interviewers themselves don’t acknowledge that Schmitt’s original gotcha was factually wrong. In fact, they don’t even seem to know it themselves. “You caught him out, by the way, in this NBA game in Atlanta,” one host says. “Yeah,” Schmitt replies.
“Gotta give you your flowers,” the host added again later. “So you had text messages from his team confirming he was going to a Hawks game, and he sat there acting dumbfounded and completely clueless?”
“It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game at that…
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