The Most Dangerous Man in the US Senate?

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing at the Capitol on June 25, 2025. Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP

It’s hard to define Trumpism without Donald Trump. So much of what Trump does arises from demagogic political self-interest, not ideology or well-formed policy.

He assaults elites and decries politicians for having screwed over middle America, while gold-plating the White House, grifting his way to billions, and pushing legislation that tosses big tax cuts to the well-heeled and raises the cost of health insurance for millions. He proclaims that politicians have betrayed the citizenry, but he guts safeguards that protect consumers, workers, investors, and retirees, allowing powerful corporations to run wild. He boasts he’s pursuing an America First policy, yet he’s spending up to $40 billion to bail out his pal in Argentina. Trumpism, as practiced and presented by Trump, is a hodgepodge—a mélange of impulses, insults, contradictions, and half-baked ideas, far from a coherent set of principles.

But there are others who do a better job than Trump of shaping Trumpism into a coherent ideology that melds nativism and oligarchism. And they present as much danger—possibly more?—to American society as the undisciplined, erratic wannabe-autocrat who leads the MAGA cult. One of these Trumpers is Eric Schmitt.

Never heard of him? He’s the junior US senator from Missouri, a Republican, naturally. He was elected in the 2022 election. Prior to that he was the Show Me State’s attorney general. In that position, he championed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and supported failed lawsuits that tried to overturn the election results. He signed an amicus brief that contended LGBTQ people were not protected by workplace discrimination bans. He filed lawsuits to kill the Affordable Care Act. He sued the Biden administration, alleging it was censoring anti-vaccine activism. He’s full MAGA.

In the Senate, he has not yet become a national figure. But it’s clear this 50-year-old career politician has supersize ambitions. He demonstrated his ability to be a post-Trump leader of Trumpism with a speech he gave in September at the National Conservative Conference held in Washington, DC. It’s worth considering it in detail.

Proclaiming himself a champion of “national conservatism,” Schmitt defined this ideology as a “revolt,” within a “culture war,” against “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” Before explaining precisely what he meant by that, he assailed traditional (pre-Trump) conservatism for having gone along with the “Washington consensus” of foreign interventions, free trade, and pro-immigration policies that “undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies.”

This is standard fare for Trump acolytes who have tried to bend conservatism to fit into Trump’s mold. But Schmitt devoted much of his speech to the question of who is a true American. He derided those on the right and the left who have depicted America as an “idea,” noting:

For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration. In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was—and I quote—a “reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise.”

Not really, Schmitt insisted. The foundational principles are critical to the nation, he said, but America was not “a universal proposition” available to just anyone. He told his audience, “That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.” You see where he’s heading with this?

Real Americans, he asserted, have been betrayed: “Their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation, but in the halls of their own government.” These Americans were heirs to a particular history:

The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”

They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.

The key word here is “descendants.” Schmitt was suggesting America belongs more to some than others. (In Animal Farm, the fascist regime declares, “Some animals are more equal than others.”) America, the senator said, is not a “universal nation” open to anyone who wishes to join.

After referring to the United States as “the most essentially Western nation,” he hammered this point: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.” He celebrated the waves of European settlers in the 1800s, noting his own ancestors arrived in Missouri from Germany in the 1840s, and that it was the brave Christian souls who headed West “to build a home at the edge of the known world” who made America and—most important—bequeathed it to future Americans.

Schmitt denounced those who would dare take notice of the genocide of Indigenous people or other ills of America’s past:

For some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us—to treat our curiosity, adventurousness, and ambition as a stain on our moral conscience. We’ve been taught that, by settling this continent and building our home here, we committed a world-historical sin, and that we should rue the day that our forefathers arrived in North America, and condemn their vision, their strength, and their will as an expression of something perverse and evil.

He added: “The American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit—a spirit that drives us to expand beyond limits, to assert ourselves upon the world…We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry? America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.”

As for those who would raise questions about America’s glorious past—including those Americans who joined protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020—Schmitt said, “America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.” Who is the “we” in that declaration? The descendants of the European Christians who claimed the West.

The fight at hand, Schmitt contended, “is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: the apex and the vanguard of Western civilization.”

Schmitt’s speech was an articulate and sophisticated embrace of blood and soil. His message was that America is a land not for those who have come here drawn by its ideals and promises but for those whose ancestors were on the wagon trains and who conquered the frontier. American greatness is derived from the legacy of those people, not whatever values and principles a diverse and pluralistic society shares and honors. (“If you imposed a carbon copy of the US Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow,” he said, “Kazakhstan wouldn’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans. It’s filled with Kazakhstanis!”)

In his celebration of American history, Schmitt fixates on a particular set of ancestors who helped form this nation. His story does not include the contributions of enslaved people whose free labor generated much of its wealth, or the Chinese workers who laid the tracks for railroads that transformed the country, or the Mexican workers whose toil and sweat turned California into an agricultural powerhouse. Nor does his narrative include immigrants who arrived later from non-European countries. He is focused on—shall we say it?—white people.

Schmitt deftly ties his skewed history lesson to the grievances held by white voters of today, arguing that those who don’t accept this particular view of American greatness are the same folks responsible for the economic policies and decisions that have hollowed out middle America and left many Main Streets in tatters. He is integrating racial and economic resentments, with a dash of Christian nationalism, into a coherent and divisive strategy for prosecuting the culture war against them: unidentified elites, critics of American society, and...well, fill in the blanks.

All of this is present in the Trumpism espoused by Dear Leader. But Schmitt more aptly combines explicit nativism, implied white supremacy, purported economic populism, and anti-elitism into a neat package, and he’s a damn good salesman for this noxious brew.

He’s a crafty and disingenuous fellow who’s skilled at performative politics. Two weeks after this speech and six days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where FBI Director Kash Patel was the witness, Schmitt used the occasion to describe America as in the grips of a titanic battle between good and evil, with the latter being a left that encourages political violence. He cited instances of violence committed by people with left-leaning agendas, but absent from his list were shootings and massacres perpetrated by those motivated by conservative beliefs, such as the killing of Democrats in Minnesota by a Trump supporter. He also ignored January 6, the largest act of insurrectionist violence since the Civil War.

“Don’t give me this both-sides bullshit,” Schmitt angrily exclaimed. He claimed that political violence in the United States is happening on a “mass scale” and is “not organic.” It is part of a nefarious and orchestrated plot, he insisted,

the offspring of a dark clandestine system funded in part with our own tax dollars with a large network of foundations, NGOs, activist organizations, and front groups. This system lurks behind every radical leftist movement in our nation today. The George Soros empire has financed a vast ecosystem of radicals, all working together, dropping off bricks at riots, to unleash a tidal wave of violent anarchists on our streets and to prop it up in an army of researchers, experts, and journalists, and propagandists who downplay the political violence.

Schmitt’s fact-twisting—the claim that Soros’ organization supplies bricks to violent protesters has been debunked repeatedly but remains a right-wing article of faith—and his amnesia about January 6 and other horrific violence from the right show that he is yet just another MAGA fabulist willing to lie and misrepresent to exploit hate, paranoia, and distrust to score political points. Like you-know-who. But he is much better able than Trump to convey the ideology that animates Trump’s own political movement and that is the foundation for Trump’s march toward authoritarianism. That’s quite a talent, and Schmitt intends to put it to good use—that is, good for himself.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Trump is peeved that he did not earn the recently announced Nobel Peace Prize, even though he has ended 37 wars and totally resolved the Israel-Palestinian conflict forever. Yes, he did broker a ceasefire and hostage release on terms that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected two years—and 20,000 lives—ago. But you have to forgive the Nobel committee for not being eager to hand an award to a fellow who is illegally killing people in the Caribbean, mounting a brutal mass deportation effort that stinks of racism and violates due process, and undermining democracy in his own country. How did Trump strike back at this self-perceived slight? He embraced a sympathetic message from Vladimir Putin.

Trump welcomed an endorsement from a murderous war criminal and cited it to attack the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision—as if anything Putin says about peace ought to be considered valuable. But yet again Trump was falling for an autocrat who was praising him. And he was once again hailing a man who launched information warfare against the United States to subvert American democracy. What an absurd and disturbing moment, but not surprising coming from a narcissist of a pathological degree who has long yearned to be BFF with this tyrant.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has become a DCotW regular, and the judges often have a tough time choosing between multiple entries. Speaking about the No Kings protests scheduled for today, he said: “The Hate America rally that'll happen Saturday...I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists in full display, the people who don't want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”

Just good ol’ fashioned smearing and redbaiting. Johnson doesn’t have to agree with the demonstrators, but it is despicable for the House speaker to denigrate millions in this manner.

Yet Johnson outdid himself when he was asked if Capitol police should be paid during the shutdown, and he replied, “We've always stood with Capitol police and law enforcement. We've shown that in word and deed."

How is it standing with the Capitol police to support the man who incited thousands to storm the Capitol and beat the crap out of police and to accept Trump’s pardon of these violent thugs who brutalized law enforcement officers? Johnson should have more respect for the men and women who protect him and spare them such bullshit.

Not letting Johnson surpass her in vile demagoguery, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt brayed, "The Democrat Party's main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals."

We ought to remind people that there was once a time when if a White House official said something this hateful and outrageous, it would have been a retirement-causing scandal. Thanks to Trump, those quaint days are long gone.

Vice President JD Vance, another regular, was back in the running this week. On Tuesday, Politico broke an eye-popping story. It had obtained a cache of messages from a Telegram group chat of leaders of Young Republicans that included a load of racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and hate-fueled messages, with participants calling Black people monkeys and urging the raping and execution of political opponents. One declared, “I love Hitler.” This exposé revealed the foul views of the GOP’s future leaders. An excerpt:

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” 

Very fine people, eh? Yet Vance proclaimed the story was insignificant. Appearing on The Charlie Kirk Show, he huffed, “Grow up! I’m sorry. Focus on the real issues. Don't focus on what kids say in group chats... The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That's what kids do."

If this were a contest for disingenuous remarks, Vance would win in a walk. These were not “kids.” The members of this band of bigots were in their 20s and 30s. Many had relatively important jobs. One was a Vermont state senator; another worked for the attorney general of Kansas. Julianne McShane at Mother Jones assembled a good round-up of these miscreants, showing they were not “young boys.”

Playing up the false line they were “kids,” Vance also said, “I’m going to tell my kids, especially my boys...be careful what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm.” He was suggesting that the wrongdoers in this caper were not the Young Republicans who spewed these ugly remarks but the people who made the comments public—as if these statements should have been covered up. Great parenting, JD.

Vance did not place first this week, but the fellow who did won because of a response to the “I Love Hitler” story. After House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries put up a social media post slamming House Republicans who had hobnobbed with the “racist, antisemitic, and bigoted” Young Republicans, Mike Davis, the president and founder of the Article III Project, a right-wing group that claims it fights “leftist lawfare,” called Jeffries “George Soros’ house slave.”

This guy hurled a racist attack at Jeffries because Jeffries criticized Republicans for hanging with proven racists. Davis, who was once a law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch and a chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee and who heads a group that brands Democrats as “Marxists who hate America,” is a member of the MAGA establishment. For outdoing the racist Young Republicans in racism, he is this week’s victor.

Mipso, a North Carolina quartet formed in Chapel Hill that blends a traditional string band format with modern influences, played Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington earlier this month. It’s timely and timeless:

NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani keeps showing other politicians how to perform in the theater of politics with joy, sass, and punch. When he appeared on Fox News, he delivered a message to the right-wing network’s No. 1 Viewer:

Three cheers to airports across the country that refused to play a video in which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blames Democrats for the federal government shutdown that has impacted Transportation Security Administration operations and caused delays. According to the Associated Press, airports in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, Seattle, and elsewhere have decided not to play along with Noem’s stunt. Resistance can happen in many ways.

Charlotte Dunham responded to the recent issue in which I recalled the time that Stephen Miller invited me for a coffee and tried to recruit me for a left-right crusade against immigration.

I've been reading Hate Monger, one of the latest books on Stephen Miller. The biggest irony is that his grandmother entered the United States as a refugee from the pogroms in Russia. Many of the family who stayed behind were killed. His family settled in Ohio and then California and prospered. There is a good chance he never would have existed without America's allowing his family to settle here. Yet he is not capable of any level of empathy for people who come after. I read the book to try to get some sense of what in a boy's life would turn him into such a monster. Right now, I think we have a whole cult of Stephen Millers.

Harry McConnell thought I was too soft on Republicans when I wrote that it “looks like” they were running a disinformation campaign to smear the No Kings protest:

Looks like? Atwater, Stone and Gingrich learned from Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Sen. Joe McCarthy attacking Secretary of State George Marshall, that scaring the unquestioning faithful, Southern racists, and Northern dummies could build a winning coalition. They saw that if they could pump enough fear into the mix (pinkos, Willie Horton, the menace of Hillary backed with Soros money, the threat of desperate people coming to rape and pillage), they might win elections.

Disinformation is their stock in trade. We are not peering through the mist trying to discern what is happening; we know that a disinformation campaign is underway to create an alibi for the aspiring tyrant. You do not sugar-coat issues so please consider omitting the qualifiers (“It looks like”). The MAGA-controlled Republicans are conducting a campaign of lies and smears designed to cement their hold on power. If they prevail, we are heading back to the early 19th Century (or maybe the 9th Century). Smart, courageous journalists telling the truth may save us, if enough people believe in liberty and justice for all. 

Max Folkenflik took issue with my recent reference to Trump’s “alleged” crimes.

“Trump’s (alleged) crimes”—seriously? Jack Smith was looking into Trump’s theft of top-secret documents and the role in the January 6 uprising. Those were indisputable crimes, not “alleged” crimes. One thing everyone seems to have forgotten is that when there was an assault on the Capitol on January 6 Trump insisted on leading the rioters toward the Capitol but was stopped by his Secret Service team. Trump wanted to lead the insurrection.

NC Awuzing emailed:

I'd really like to hear what Mike Pence has to say now about Trump and about Pence's role in creating and perpetuating the monster now inhabiting (and destroying) the White House.

Me, as well.

Here was a depressing note from a reader named ARC:

Does it ever feel like you're chronicling the inevitable slide of a nation into the abyss of just another failed experiment in governance that proves the incapacity of people to govern themselves successfully for more than a couple centuries? There seems to be an inevitability to it all. It's as if collective brazen stupidity cannot be stopped from infecting more and more, to the point that not necessarily a majority but a critical plurality that is inspired by criminality motivated by plastic patriotism causes these fools to bring it all crashing down. Your efforts and those of a few others to thwart this will be what history remembers—if there is even such a thing as "history" and "future."

Whoa. I think I’m going to take Moxie for a walk. Speaking of which...

“What’s this thing you put on me?”
“Moxie, nothing to worry about. It’s just a monitor to track your heart.”
“I’m not worried. I just don’t think it complements my figure.”
“You only have to wear it for 24 hours.”
“If we go out, I’m not leaving the yard.”