Up Schmitt Creek

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Critics are being too kind to Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt.

 

It’s hard to do justice to his exchange yesterday with former special counsel Jack Smith, the man who would have prosecuted Donald Trump for multiple crimes if Americans hadn’t handed control of federal law enforcement over to the suspect. If you don’t have time to watch the clip—really, treat yourself—the long and short of it is that Schmitt believed he was on the brink of a career-making moment, one that would propel him to instant right-wing superstardom.

 

It can’t be a coincidence that, a few hours before the hearing with Smith began, Axios reported that Schmitt “has grown close to Vice President [J.D.] Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate.” Obviously, Schmitt’s camp planted that rumor with the outlet in anticipation of the buzzworthy trap he was planning to spring on Smith.

 

At the hearing, Schmitt pressed Smith on whether he’d conspired to persecute our poor president with Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, who pursued Trump on state charges related to his 2020 coup plot. Smith denied it. Isn’t it true, sir, Schmitt retorted, that you were in Atlanta on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis admitted to an affair with a fellow prosecutor? The implication was that Smith had rushed down there to consult with her on damage control, to keep their “deep state” plot against Trump from falling apart amid the sex scandal. Again, Smith denied it.

 

Then the trap was sprung. Schmitt produced text messages between Smith’s aides from February 3, 2024, proving … actually, it’s not clear what they were supposed to prove. They referred to a seat having been reserved for Smith at some unnamed event that evening; for reasons unknown, Schmitt determined that the event was an Atlanta Hawks basketball game—in Atlanta.

 

And there it was: Smith had lied about his whereabouts that day. You’re a “dirtbag,” Schmitt smugly informed him.

 

I never went to a Hawks game, a baffled Smith insisted, but I did go to a University of Iowa women’s basketball game in Maryland around that time to watch Caitlin Clark play. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar chimed in to note that the Iowa team’s nickname is the Hawkeyes. At which point the likely truth of what had just happened dawned on everyone present, including wide-eyed Republicans: Schmitt and his team had probably confused “Hawkeyes” with “Hawks,” collapsing the entire gotcha.

 

But as I say, everyone is being too kind to him. His error appears to have been considerably sloppier than that.

 

I’m not sure that the similarity in nicknames mattered at all, in fact. Schmitt said later in an interview that he assumed Smith was at the Hawks game against the Golden State Warriors on February 3 because it was the only NBA game that day. But it wasn’t, as a cursory Google search would have shown him. It was one of six games that evening.

 

And the NBA wasn’t the only league playing basketball on that date. Many college games, men’s and women’s, took place. One of them was Clark’s Iowa team at the University of Maryland—and video footage confirms that Smith was in fact in the stands that night, not at an NBA game in Atlanta.

 

But even if Schmitt had been right about everything, what would it have proved? At no point did he produce evidence that Smith had been in contact with Willis—the blockbuster claim that had inspired this entire moronic line of inquiry. At most, the text messages would have established that Smith had forgotten a trip he’d made to Atlanta to watch basketball. And, logically, why would Smith have done such a thing if the purpose of his trip had been to huddle with Willis about their sinister “deep state” conspiracy? Why would he have wanted to alert the world that he was in town by showing his face at an NBA game?

 

How Schmitt and his team screwed up so horribly, I don’t know. My hunch is that they outsourced their research to artificial intelligence, were sabotaged by one of those “hallucinations” AI sometimes suffers (“Yes, the Hawks game was the only basketball game that evening!”), and, amazingly, didn’t double-check.

 

And so Schmitt really did end up with a career-defining moment. Just not the one he expected.

 

Still, this isn’t the worst unforced Republican error in the news today.

 

Unconventional.

 

Will Saletan had the right take on yesterday’s hearing. The most remarkable thing about it wasn’t Schmitt’s remarkable screwup. It was the fact that, with the president’s job approval now below 38 percent and a massive Democratic wave impending, Senate Republicans nonetheless remained bitterly, theatrically hostile to Smith in Trump’s defense.

 

They did so even though Smith himself praised GOP witnesses to the 2020 coup plot who helped him build a case against the president. That was an opportunity for congressional Republicans to distinguish their party from its leader, something they’d reeeeeally like to do before voting begins. But they declined, and honestly, I understand why: Some beliefs, like the alleged illegitimacy of Smith’s prosecution, are so central in the modern right-wing catechism that to deny them is to deny the faith itself.

 

You can’t be a Christian without accepting Christ’s divinity, and you can’t be a Trumpist without believing that Trump’s obvious, overt criminality is some sort of Democratic “hoax.”

 

I suspect that explains why Schmitt remained unapologetic after his error about Smith was exposed, coming no closer to a proper mea culpa than tweeting “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” And it certainly explains why lackwit right-wing influencers continued to pretend in the aftermath that Schmitt really had scored a momentous gotcha at Smith’s expense. In modern Republican politics, stupidity and mendacity caused by an excess of zeal in trying to own the libs are not vices.

 

In fact, by refusing to concede that he’d done Smith dirty, I suspect Schmitt improved his chances at becoming J.D. Vance’s future running mate after all. Republican voters will tolerate all manner of incompetence in a politician if he’s ruthless enough toward their enemies. That’s the story of the Trump era in one sentence.

 

By going for the throat, missing, and not regretting the attempt, Schmitt demonstrated the requisite ruthlessness. Congratulations to Missouri on having the worst tandem in the U.S. Senate, at least until Ken Paxton joins Ted Cruz in the Texas delegation.

 

And speaking of which: That brings us to that other, more significant unforced error I mentioned.

 

This morning the New York Times scooped that Paxton met last week with nervous donors, who naturally enough wanted to know why he’s trailed Democrat James Talarico in every public poll taken since late August. Could it be because he’s the second-most corrupt politician in America? That he’s a lousy campaigner and poor fundraiser? That he’s unattractive, badly dressed, and charmless, as the president now frequently reminds audiences?

 

Paxton had a theory. “To be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” he told his audience. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

 

It was the convention. Two days of “Trumpalooza” in Dallas earlier this month, with Paxton in attendance, had tanked his and other candidates’ polling. Critics had warned the president beforehand that parading himself before voters so close to Election Day would backfire, reminding them of why they dislike him and undermining GOP candidates’ efforts to separate themselves from an unpopular president. Paxton seems to think those critics were right.

 

Which is shocking. It would be shocking to hear any Republican on the ballot this fall admit that Trump is a liability for the party, of course, but Ken Paxton? A man who would have been removed from his office as state attorney general by his own party if not for the president’s intervention? Who may very well have lost his Senate primary this year to John Cornyn if not for the president’s endorsement? Who’s being bankrolled right now to the tune of millions of dollars from the president’s super PAC to keep him in the game against Talarico?

 

For him to declare “Trumpalooza” a major unforced error feels like an act of “disloyalty” on par with Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russiagate investigation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the president pulled the plug on further financial support for Paxton in response, especially if Paxton slips further behind Talarico and Texas begins to look—if you can imagine such a thing—like a lost cause for Republicans.

 

There’s just one catch to the “it was the convention” theory of the GOP’s crumbling polls. Is it even true?

 

Dead weight.

 

I’m skeptical.

 

Start with the polling in Paxton’s own race. On September 8, the day before the convention, he trailed Talarico by 2.8 points in the RealClearPolitics average. Today he trails by … 2.9 points. That’s the “drop” in the numbers for which “Trumpalooza” is supposedly responsible?

 

For what it’s worth, Paxton’s campaign put out an internal poll yesterday that has him leading Talarico by 3. That represents a 1-point gain since May. Where’s the drop?

 

“Maybe Paxton is thinking of the generic congressional ballot,” you might say—and in that case, he’s on firmer ground. Check the numbers, and you’ll find the Democrats’ lead lifted off from 6 points on September 9, the convention’s first day, to a garish 8.7 points just a week later. That does look like a sudden, significant backlash in public opinion to some intervening event. What else could that event be except the convention?

 

Well, how about … gas prices? As it happens, the week of the convention was also the week that the cost of diesel crossed a psychological threshold, inching up over $6 per gallon for the first time in U.S. history. That generated the worst conceivable headlines for a Republican majority being crushed under the electoral weight of an affordability crisis. “Trumpalooza” happened to correlate with the news about diesel and the Democratic polling surge, but you know what they say about correlation and causation.

 

Forget the polling, though. Explain to me like I’m 5 years old why seeing the president on primetime television for two days would logically inspire a tectonic shift in voter preferences in 2026. After 10 years of daily exposure to Trump and hourly exposure to him during his presidencies, with bad news at the grocery store and at the pump staring Americans in the face every day, what’s the thought process by which watching him for a few hours on TV might have magically transformed people from ambivalent about their midterm choices to pro-Democrat?

 

Did he do something especially repellent at the convention that I’ve forgotten? There was the sort of funny, sort of creepy “pledge” he asked attendees to take on the second night, but surely the cultishness of Republicans is fully priced into the party’s political stock by now. The closest thing to news made over the two days was Trump dangling a $5,000 bribe at voters if his party retained control of the House and Senate in November. But, while Americans didn’t like that idea, the prospect of “free” money isn’t the sort of thing that usually ignites a voter rebellion.

 

Occam’s razor, then: The reason Paxton believes, or wants others to believe, that the convention was a significant unforced error is simply thate it moves the onus for losing Texas away from himself and onto the president. Trump’s digs at Paxton’s looks and personality are obviously designed to do the opposite, supplying an excuse in advance for why he couldn’t get Paxton over the finish line in a famously red state. He was dead weight, the president intends to say.

 

Grumbling about the convention is Paxton’s version of “back atcha.” The president was dead weight. It was the stupid convention that turned Texas blue, not the candidate.

 

But if you’re invested in the idea that the convention really was an unforced error, I’ll give you two theories for why you might be right. One has to do with the scheduling. By holding it right after Labor Day, Trump and his cronies timed it to coincide with the very moment that Americans traditionally begin making up their minds about a coming election.

 

It’s not that he said or did anything during “Trumpalooza” to alienate them. It’s more the case, I suspect, that he reminded casual voters that, oh right, they’re going to need to cast a ballot soon, which may in turn have “firmed up” their already existing preference for Democrats. Look again at the generic ballot polling, and you’ll see that Republicans haven’t lost any support since the convention; the Democratic surge seems to consist entirely of people who are coming off the proverbial sidelines after previously not stating a preference.

 

The convention made checked-out voters pay attention to the midterms. Those voters were always likely to vote Democratic due to anger about the war and the cost of living, and two nights of Trump and J.D. Vance served as their cue that it was time to pick a side. I wouldn’t call that a significant unforced error, though: At worst, it accelerated the cresting of an inevitable blue wave.

 

The second theory is less flattering to Americans. Maybe some swing voters are so childlike about politics that even now, after a decade of Trump, they can’t muster a strong opinion about him unless he’s (virtually) right in front of them. Like a parent hiding their face behind their hands while playing peekaboo with an infant, the president’s many failures somehow disappear in the minds of these voters—until he appears before them, and then, suddenly, there they are again!

 

As low as my regard is for the American people, it’s hard even for me to believe that two nights of primetime exposure to the most famous person in the world, who’s sought out and achieved ubiquity in media, might meaningfully influence anyone’s opinion about him at this point. But then I remember that there are voters—important voters!—who seem earnestly shocked that a guy who campaigned on mass deportation and complained about foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country” has turned out to be a little aggressive on immigration.

 

There are a lot of suckers in our electorate. That may explain why the president, despite urging fans to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” has steered toward campaigning in solidly red states lately and avoided battlegrounds. That makes no sense, as Ed Kilgore notes: If the key to holding down Democratic gains in November is motivating demoralized Republicans to turn out, Trump should skip Republican strongholds and show up where races are competitive. The fact that he isn’t doing that suggests that he thinks the “peekaboo” effect is real, that seeing him show up in their home states will antagonize local suckers more than it’ll galvanize loyal Republicans by reminding them how badly they were suckered in 2024.

 

Well, either that or he believes November’s blue wave will be so enormous that red states are the battlegrounds now.

 

Let’s hope so. This entire miserable era has been an unforced error by the American right, and a humiliating electoral drubbing would be a small first step toward encouraging people to admit it. It will be a while before we’re free of figures like Trump and Schmitt—whose dopey gaffe yesterday is not the thing for which he should be loathed—but we’ve got to start somewhere.