After his snafu Eric Schmitt’s been talking into microphones about the confusion. His performance is a beauty. The dumb, slab-faced senator from Missouri sounds impatient but amused; he shows the bemused tolerance of a strong man encountering somebody else’s mistake. In effect he’s commenting on that screw-up Jack Smith and the guy’s failure to be in the right city. He manages it without a quaver and does so after the facts just slammed his incompetence straight into his face. So I think the blustering Republican screw-up has a future, and boy, is that a sign of the times.
Schmitt tried to hang Jack Smith on a perjury charge but then watched the claim blow apart. The event’s been celebrated and explained: Hawkeyes, not Hawks; no Atlanta visit; no lie when Smith testified to Schmitt and the Senate Judiciary Committee that he hadn’t been to Atlanta. I’ll highlight a particular aspect, namely the noise Schmitt made on his way out of the committee room. He laid down a barrage, barracking about misuse of time just before he bolted. If you were following the commotion and not the words, it might feel like he hadn’t lost at all. Now there’s his handling of the post-flop interviews. Not bad; shameless but not bad.
Others write him off. Tim Miller at The Bulwark gloats that Schmitt has burnt down his vice presidential hopes, which had been doing fine early on the day that Jack Smith testified to the committee about his attempts at prosecuting Donald Trump. In Axios we read that future presidential candidate J.D. Vance found Schmitt “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator.” Then the three-fingered, four-toed, snakebit, stumbling doofus of a disaster artist launched into action. By the standards of the Reagan-Bush crew, who were a brass-tacks kind of gang and focused on results, Schmitt would be a numbnuts, a nonperformer. But I think by MAGA standards he’s quite viable. MAGA’s about noise, about owning the room no matter what. Facts be damned, right be damned. You keep that mouth going and let everybody duck.
Schmitt’s got it, God help us. These are the end times and seeming’s now more important than doing. So I think we’ll hear more from him before the lights go out.
Rhodes scholar? John Kennedy of Louisiana is supposed to be a smart guy who plays a dumb guy, a product of Oxford, Vanderbilt, and the University of Virginia who lays on the “Waaal, I dunno” for the morons who are watching Fox back home. The failed ambush of Jack Smith found Kennedy just being dumb. What was supposed to be the trapped prosecutor’s box-canyon moment featured a big placard; on it you could see the black faces of Fanni Willis and her ex-, plus some blown-up texts that were supposed to demonstrate that Smith had indeed been to Atlanta. Kennedy, though a senator, pitched in and held up one side of the placard. Below it Schmitt lounged in his seat, his mouth lolling open in a pink, lopsided display that signified “Well, well, well.” Kennedy’s mouth was working too. Tucked in tight, it curved hard and down at one end; an eye squinted, and together eye and mouth signaled a wan, acerbic acceptance of yet more chicanery by the opposite team.
The mugs were letting the home audience know what a fix Smith was in. Yet there was no fix. The people working for Schmitt never looked at a ticket site to see if the rows at State Farm Arena are numbered. They aren’t, so the blown-up texts’ “109 Row 1” actually proved Smith wasn’t at the Atlanta game. Schmitt didn’t think of this, and Kennedy was dumb enough to trust Schmitt and his team. Until Smith testified he hadn’t been to Atlanta, his supposed visit there wasn’t supposed to be proof of anything, just a springboard for some bluff. (Hadn’t Smith and Willis conferred? Didn’t that mean they were allies out to get Trump, not two prosecutors each following the facts on their own?) Kennedy was fine with the charade and then found no one on his side is serious, including about research.