A top Democrat has predicted that Sen. Eric Schmitt’s career is effectively over on the day it started because of a humiliation he caused.
Before his public embarrassment, Axios had published a buzzy short piece asserting that Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, had grown close to Vice President JD Vance, enough so that Vance thought of him as a “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and deft political operator” who could potentially be his vice presidential pick come 2028.
But that high pedestal was short-lived, after Schmitt embarrassingly tried to catch former special counsel Jack Smith in a “gotcha” moment by citing Smith’s texts, only to be caught in one himself.
All of Schmitt’s evidence of the apparent “perjury” he accused Smith of committing was hinged upon Smith attending an Atlanta Hawks game in Georgia, but Schmitt had completely gotten the team, city, and even level of sport wrong.
It was later revealed that Smith had been texting about attending a University of Iowa women’s basketball game in the D.C. suburbs to see the Iowa Hawkeyes, and was not living large in Atlanta with Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who was prosecuting Trump at the time, as Schmitt had hoped.
The entire exchange has Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin saying that the once-unknown Republican has effectively dug his own political grave the same day he supposedly emerged onto the scene.
“Look, nobody ever heard of Senator Schmitt before,” he said on CNN. “And nobody’s gonna ever hear of him again.”
“He’s basically disgraced himself and identified himself with this ridiculous little stunt where he thought he was going to perform some major service to Donald Trump,” he said, adding that Schmitt’s line of questioning was “all about being the most obsequious sycophant you can be. And he proved that he was.”
“And he doesn’t even understand how much he’s utterly humiliated himself in the eyes of the country,” Raskin noted.
Schmitt, meanwhile, has tried to double down on his assertion that Smith could have been truly in Atlanta, claiming the Hawks were the only NBA game that night—even though it has been proven he was not at an NBA game, nor was it even the only professional basketball game going on that evening.
MAGA media hacks immediately tried to spin Schmitt’s questioning as some kind of slam dunk that Smith and Willis were colluding together.
The hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show plowed ahead and acted like Schmitt came out on top.
“Jack Smith is a total dirtbag, um, and you caught him out on this NBA game, too, by the way, in Atlanta,” Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet told Schmitt, as co-host Blake Neff nodded in agreement. “It was a great moment, so good for you on that.”
Kolvet later cleaned up his comments, telling the Daily Beast in a statement, “Do I stand by my comments about the Senator’s question about the Hawks game? No, not if it’s not true. Do I stand by comments that Jack Smith is a dirtbag? Yes.”
Some right-wing commentators, including serial plagiarist Benny Johnson and Fox News host Sean Hannity, were actually caught deleting posts celebrating Schmitt for what they thought was his big moment.
