Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmitt shit the bed in a monumental way during this week's interrogation of former special counsel Jack Smith, and the lawmaker cannot seem to escape the humiliation of it all—even from his own hometown newspaper.
Schmitt, who most people didn't even know before this week, attempted to earn his 15 minutes of fame by setting Smith up for what he thought was a real humdinger of a "gotcha" moment on live television, accusing the former special counsel of committing perjury and openly calling him a "dirtbag" as he accused Smith of attending an NBA game in Atlanta in February 2024, citing that as proof that Smith was colluding with Fulton County DA Fani Willis.
But Smith was not in Atlanta watching the Atlanta Hawks play basketball. He was in Maryland watching the Iowa Hawkeyes play basketball—and suddenly Schmitt's "gotcha" moment turned into what I can only imagine is the most brutal humiliation of his entire career.
The GOP lawmaker has desperately tried to save face, cranking out shoddy attempts at witty social media posts and telling reporters that he's not embarrassed because he didn't even make a mistake. Apparently he meant to make an ass out of himself, I suppose.
But in the end, absolutely no one is buying it.
The entire editorial board of Missouri's largest newspaper got their own licks in with a scathing takedown of Schmitt's "cringey" screw-up.
"Wrong teams, wrong league, wrong state," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editors wrote. "It was based entirely on that sloppy staffing that Schmitt furiously accused Smith of perjury."
"Eric Schmitt couldn't possibly embarrass himself and his constituents any more than he already has," the editors blistered before laying out the lawmaker's actions as "a loony right-wing conspiracy based on some misunderstood text messages; falsely accuse a prosecutor of perjury; call him a 'villain' and a 'total dirtbag' — and then stand by that playground-level pejorative even after the whole thing turned out to be a lazy mistake on the part of Schmitt and his staff regarding, of all things, a basketball game."
"This is the man representing 6 million Missourians in the 'world's greatest deliberative body.' Sheesh," they wrote, before going on to compare Schmitt's blunder to "an especially cringey episode" of HBO's "Veep."
"In the upside-down moral universe that Schmitt and his fellow MAGA apostles occupy, the worst offense against constitutional democracy in our lifetimes wasn't President Donald Trump's damnable attempt to overturn the 2020 election; it was Smith's admirable attempt to hold him accountable for it with criminal charges."
Maybe it's time to hang up your hat, Eric.
You tried. You failed. SPECTACULARLY. I just don't think you're meant for this gig, bud.
