Transcript: Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

And that’s what this is. This is sort of like, hey, we took on when school districts were forcing five year olds to wear masks all day long. We sued 65 school districts in the state of Missouri and we won. When the biggest cities in Missouri were forcing people to wear masks all day long and close businesses, we sued and we won.

When we took on ESG, we launched an investigation against some of the biggest banks in the world who controlled nearly half of the assets in this country. We opened up an investigation because we were saying that their actions violated antitrust laws. They backed away.

The Need for Authentic Leadership

So really the story I think is there requires a lot of courage, right, to go do this stuff. But if you do it, you find out that when you’re in the arena, what people are really looking for is authentic leadership. Right. They can spot a phony. And if you really believe this stuff and you’re fighting for the people, the kid who has to wear the mask or the deaf student who couldn’t learn, we would get reports of these things were happening in school districts that you can fight for those people. And as attorney general, I was able to go do that. And we were able to score some big wins.

And also it lays out, I think, a playbook for the future because this isn’t the last of it. You already see the left wing lawfare machine coming out to try to stop President Trump’s agenda, which is inherently disruptive of the status quo, which is a good thing. So they want the status quo to come back. We want things to change. And you’re going to need people who are aggressive to defend those things too.

The Abdication of Congressional Responsibility

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s also a really sad story. I want to – because none of this should have to happen. I want to ask you about the details, particularly of the censorship regime, in a moment. But first, it just seems like an attorney general in an ideal society would be fighting crime.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not trying to push back on social policy changes made in the courts. That’s the legislative branch’s job because it’s the most democratic arm of government, obviously. So it reflects most precisely what the people want. How do we get to a place where every big social change, from abortion to gay marriage to censorship to Covid, all of this stuff is determined in the courts. And where the hell is Congress?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right. Well, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to a lot of these administrative agencies over the decades. Right. And so honestly, some of the court actions that you take on – this is a little bit in the weeds, but the Chevron deference that existed where essentially the court said, “Yeah, we’re going to defer to these agencies because they’re the so called experts,” well, that got blown up. And that’s a good thing now.

In Congress, Congress actually now has to write laws that are more prescriptive. We should do that. But Congress has abdicated its responsibility for a couple of reasons, but most notably, I think because they’re able to say, many congressmen are able to say, “I voted for this greatest bill in the world, but I can’t believe what the EPA just did.” Well, that’s not good enough anymore, I don’t think. Right. You’ve got to rein in the authority of these agencies that have gone completely rogue.

The Administrative State Problem

And it kind of starts with Woodrow Wilson in this progressive era. It’s hypercharged by FDR and then this monstrosity, by the way, which has existed and grown in Republican and Democrat administrations over the years. One of the things I think that’s most exciting about what President Trump is doing is he put together this group of disruptors to disrupt that.

And so, but look at the hue and cry that comes out in D.C. when you’re trying to pare down the size of government. People lose their minds. And why, again, the courts are going to be really important here because President Trump and whoever the executive is, certainly has Article 2 core powers to control programming and personnel. Right. And the Democrats don’t want him to go do that.

Now, the good news is he’s by and large won these cases. There might be a district court case here or there, but that ultimately makes, as it makes its way to the appellate courts, the Supreme Court. President Trump is winning on this front. So again, I think it’s a testament to the idea we have to be willing to fight, whether it’s in the legislative branch, in the executive branch, or in the Article 3 branch for the things that we hold dear in this country because they are constantly under assault by the left, that’s for sure.

The Politicization of the Courts

TUCKER CARLSON: But the net effect is to convince people in a way that was not true when I was a kid that the courts are political. Even the highest court is fundamentally a political body, which maybe has always been true. But it does seem a little scary when everyone thinks that because I mean it used to be if there’s a Supreme Court decision, you have to abide by it whether you like it or not. But if people think it’s all just partisan, then maybe they stop obeying.

The Living Constitution and Judicial Philosophy

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, but I think that’s again why, and I referenced this in the book, when I was sort of coming of age, when I went to law school, people were still talking about this thing called the “Living Constitution,” which is a fiction, right? It should be. And Scalia was the first one who wrote with this sort of dramatic prose about originalism.

And I think that’s our best hope moving forward is the Constitution means exactly what it says. Nothing more, nothing less. Right? It shouldn’t be the Supreme Court shouldn’t be this super legislator, which is what the left has traditionally wanted.

You take Roe versus Wade, for example. Right. They sort of invented this right out of whole cloth and took that decision away from the people. As this is supposed to be decided in the states by legislatures. And now we’re kind of back to that.

So my hope is that as you have a more conservative court, it’s not about our ideology winning because somebody’s wearing a red jersey or a blue jersey, it’s that Congress passes laws and those laws are interpreted as they are written, not making stuff up as you go along. And I think that’s what we need to get to, is return to that. That’s the only way you’re going to have credibility.

But the Democrats, when Chuck Schumer is saying “you’re going to reap a whirlwind” and you have these hearings about trying to… On the Supreme Court, we know especially they target Clarence Thomas, they really despise him for a variety of reasons, but he is now, I think, like the sixth longest serving Supreme Court justice of all time.

But they want to undermine the courts because ultimately they want to pack the court. And that’s if they ever really, I mean, if you play this out, Tucker, if they ever had what we have right now, which is a Republican or a Democrat, House, Democrats, Senate, Democrat, president, they would pack the Supreme Court, they would make D.C. a state, maybe Puerto Rico, they would federalize our elections, they would have amnesty. I mean, they are in this now for a total power grab.

And I just want to make sure there’s judges that view, again, view the laws. It’s written out how they want it to be. That’s all you can ask for.

TUCKER CARLSON: You see what has happened in Brazil. Bolsonaro lost a couple of years ago to a socialist, Lula, a convicted felon. And everyone imagined that Lula would move the country hard left, which I think he’d like to do. But it’s really been a Supreme Court justice who has made all the major decisions in Brazil ever since. I mean, basically that country is run by a single Supreme Court justice in a way that’s a dictatorship.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does that not happen here?

The Threat of Lawfare and Government Overreach

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I think we were perilously close to that happening here through lawfare. Right. You just think of what… And we can get into it on the sort of the Russia hoax stuff. But what that did, it gave all the folks on the left a sort of a reason or a cause to undermine not just the president of the United States, but to spy on a candidate like they did.

I think justice should be coming for the people that are involved. Brennan, Clapper, Comey. There should be indictments that come because what they did to this country, not just for those four years, but it extended when Trump was of course out of office and they tried to put him in jail for the rest of his life, bankrupt his entire family.

The Hunter Biden laptop. Part of the FBI was very well aware. I mean, we took the deposition in Missouri versus Biden of Elvis Chan, who admitted that they had months and months of monthly meetings pre bunking that story, telling them there was a Russian hack and leak operation. Yoel Roth, who was the integrity person at Twitter, said they specifically mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop.

The FBI had the laptop in November of 2019. They had it all along, but they were claiming it was a Russian hack and leak operation. So how do you get there? Well, you have a system that’s captured by people who were obsessed with taking President Trump down and then they never wanted to get back in office. And they can’t believe it.

I think what you’re seeing right now, this sort of weird phase the Democrats are in, they can’t believe he actually pulled it off. They can’t believe that he’s back. They literally thought he had him buried. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, we are in this weird phase where the Democrat, the Democratic Party really doesn’t seem like a factor in the national conversation in American politics. All the real fights are between intra Republican fights, Republican versus Republican. But that’s got to be just a period, right, that we’re in.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, that’s why I think…

TUCKER CARLSON: It would seem to your point, it almost…

The Importance of Vigilance and Courage

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think the tendency were to believe that all of this, and now that we’re on the other side of the fever dream, that this was all inevitable. Right. That what we’re seeing, all the things that are taking place, the dismantling of some of these things, going after USAID, having a Justice Department that’s not going after Catholics because they’re traditional Catholics or parents because they show up to school board meetings.

I think it’s an important reminder, which is a big part of the book too, is just how close we were to losing it all. To me, people say power corrupts. I think power reveals more than anything else. You see the true nature of people when they have power, how they handle it.

And I think particularly during COVID people who never should have had that kind of power, had it and they wield it in ways that people could have never imagined in this country. And then you look at the lawfare, you look at what they were willing to do to dissent, to silence dissent. This is all happening not some other place but here.

And we have to be vigilant in standing up against that, because these things, we like to think that majorities are forever. They’re not right. And so in many ways, it’s sort of a playbook of how you push back, what strategies you employ to go do that. And you have to be aggressive, and you have to…

I think that my biggest takeaway from my time as attorney general is you have to be willing to be in that arena, take the criticism and fight for the things that you believe in. And I think that is… I ask judges, now I’m on the Judiciary Committee, when judges come forward, I ask less about… I mean, I want to know what their judicial philosophy is. That’s very important.

But to me, I think the next phase, the next line of questioning that’s most important moving forward is do you have the courage when people are outside your home, when you’re being threatened, when people at the cocktail parties in Washington may not want you to do something, will you rule the appropriate way? That’s what we need more of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would that be a concern?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I think we’ve seen it. Seen that happen. Yeah. We go the other way. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: We have. And I don’t think it’s from a lack of decency. I don’t think Amy Coney Barrett is an indecent person or like some closet lefty or sandwich on Roberts. They’re just afraid, like everybody, and they want… they don’t want to be snarled at when they go to the Chevy Chase Club for cocktails or whatever. I mean, they’re just people. So how do you identify the brave ones? Clarence Thomas is brave. Yeah, well, he is brave.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. I think, obviously, some… Maybe some positions that they took. I mean, I’ll just… some of the judges that… In some of these cases that are cited in the book, basically in the Missouri vs Biden case, when we got favorable rulings, not only the district court, the appellate court, I mean, really went on a limb and said, “This is the most egregious violation of the First Amendment we’ve seen in American history.” When you look at the sprawling expanse of the agencies that were captured by this.

The Missouri vs Biden Case: Government Censorship Exposed

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so would you mind telling that story just from beginning to end? Because I think even people who are interested in the topic may not fully appreciate what happened.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So the Biden administration comes in and on the third day, the third day in office, start to begin to hammer this home. Now, there had been semblances of this that predate the Biden administration in that the FBI, for example, when we took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who, he was the FBI guy in Northern California that’s working with the big tech companies.

Okay. Even in the Trump administration, they were… The FBI was working with Democrat staffers to connect with big tech companies to look for things to censor under the guise of Russian disinformation. Right. This was the thing again. It’s kind of a legacy of what that hoax really meant for the country.

That foundation was laid down for a lot of folks in the administrative state, or the deep state, whatever you want to call it, as a way to undermine an agenda under the guise of “this is misinformation or disinformation.”

So when Biden comes into office, all these agencies that are galvanized, you’re mentioned, actually, very ironically, Tucker Carlson was mentioned, Alex Berenson was mentioned. RFK Jr were mentioned in these emails about people promoting vaccine hesitancy or these sort of things that they wanted to stamp out. So you couldn’t have a debate, right? You couldn’t have a debate about things. They just wanted those voices silenced, de platformed. And so how do you…

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you do that since it is so obviously unconstitutional? Every child knows that.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, that’s correct. The government can’t do it and they shouldn’t be able to outsource it either, which is what was happening. So they’re outsourcing their censorship to some of the biggest companies in the history of the world. And so we had some sense of this.

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Wait, can I just ask is, I mean, there are lawyers involved in every decision that the executive branch makes. So White House counsel signs off on that. Sure.

The Revolving Door Between Government and Big Tech

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, in a weird quirk of history, James Baker, who was the general counsel for the FBI, goes… And after he does his stint at Brookings, goes in, is the general counsel for Twitter. So one hand washes the other. They were more than willing to work with the Biden administration to censor points of view on that platform.

So you have people who are in this kind of ecosystem all along that were, it didn’t take much convincing. But the Biden administration knew that they needed to silence this sort of level of dissent. It was Hunter Biden laptop. It was certainly during COVID any kind of questioning of election results or whatever. I mean, all this stuff was on the table.

And what they did was, is they worked as we took the deposit… this sort of plays out. But Jen Psaki’s at the podium, if you recall saying “we’re flagging things that we find offensive for Facebook.” Joe Biden is threatening to take away Section 230 protections.

What’s Section 230 protections? Those are basically in the 1990s when the Internet becomes a thing. In the Telecommunications act, they say that these are platforms that can’t be sued, unlike publishers who can be sued. Publishers are supposed to be more arbiters of what you can say. It’s why CNN gets sued by President Trump for false things. But like Twitter, Facebook, those are considered platforms. They’re immune from lawsuits.

So Joe Biden starts threatening Section 230 protections. They start threatening investigations.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if someone libels you on social media, you can sue the person, but you cannot sue the company corrected it. Whereas if someone libels you in a newspaper or television channel, you can sue the newspaper. Television.

The Section 230 Subsidy and Government Pressure

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: That’s right. And so Section 230 protection is a multibillion dollar subsidy in some ways. Now I happen to think, look, if you’re actually having this platform where people can express their point of view, that’s a great thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amen.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: But that’s not what was happening. Through immense pressure from the government, they were censoring all sorts of things.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did they do that? How does the president or his staff exert pressure on, say, Facebook or Google or Twitter?

Direct Government Communication with Social Media

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So they had direct lines of communication. They had a secret portal where executives from these social media companies could communicate directly with high ranking White House officials. Rob Ferrity, who was the deputy communications guy in the Biden White House, was in constant communication berating these people, telling them, “That’s not good enough. You need to do more. Let me assure you, this is coming from the highest levels of the administration.”

Those sorts of things were constantly streaming at the social media companies. And then you also had, as we took the deposition in that case of people from the CDC, they literally were just giving them lines that they should censor. So the government is saying censor these exact phrases. They’re giving this off to the social media companies. “If this is uttered, we want you to silence these people. We want you to deplatform these people. We want you to downgrade, throttle these sort of posts.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that illegal?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It’s not legal.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if it’s illegal, then that by definition means it’s a crime. And aren’t crimes supposed to be punished?

The Missouri vs. Biden Case

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yes, they should be, absolutely. But we sued the government to stop censorship. A lot of social media companies have been sued before in other cases, but those ended up in the Northern District of California, never to be seen again. What was unique about our case, the Missouri vs. Biden case, we sued White House officials, we named them personally, we named all these agencies and we got to take their depositions.

CISA, which is an agency I know you’re familiar with, but maybe your audience probably of all audiences would know, is the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Administration. Their job purportedly was to make sure that our infrastructure is resilient against cyber attacks. They were very much involved in something called the Election Integrity Project, where they outsourced their censorship to Stanford and the University of Washington to flag certain posts that would then be given to social media companies to censor.

The CDC was involved with it. CISA was involved with it. The FBI, of course, played a role with the pre-bunking of the Hunter Biden laptop, which they knew was actually real. They knew it was real. They had it in their possession. And then they pre-bunked it. And then when it came out, they never actually said when people were asking, “Is this legitimate?” They never actually said, “No, we have it.” So they were very much a part of this operation to silence millions of American voices.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many people have been fired at the FBI for that?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I don’t know the answer to that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right around zero.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, and this is the kind of accountability.

TUCKER CARLSON: What the hell is that?

The Need for Accountability

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. And that’s something that, as we talk to Kash Patel and his confirmation hearings is certainly something that we talked about. He’s very well aware. I think having somebody like that who was on the other side of it is a good thing, but we certainly need to have more accountability.

But these people, the scale of it was immense and it really wasn’t exposed until we filed the lawsuit. And then when Elon Musk buys Twitter, now X, they did the Twitter files and you saw even more of it. How these people were in charge of this stuff is insane.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s interesting, from just like a corporate governance point of view, let’s say I’m Mark Zuckerberg. Seems pretty liberal, but not maybe a liberal activist, but you spend four years getting attacked for censorship. And you never say actually, well, he did ultimately say, but he didn’t say for years, “I’m only doing this because the Biden people are pushing me to do it.” Like, these companies were hurt by this, weren’t they?

The Zuckerberg Example

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. I think the Zuckerberg and the Facebook example is really interesting because if you go back in time, if you get in the DeLorean here, a lot of people blamed Facebook for President Trump’s election. Remember this?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And I think then in the next election cycle, whether that was sort of internalized or not, Zuckerbucks materializes. So Zuckerberg is funding a lot of the voter turnout, privately funding election operations, which is kind of crazy in 2020, and then gets sort of, whether completely voluntary or steamrolled by threat of investigation, is part of then Facebook very much a part of this censorship regime that existed.

And now Zuckerberg seems to be like red-pilled. I don’t know how much of this is sincere from these big tech companies or it’s just because President Trump won. Time will tell. But it does feel like my hope is that censorship is in retreat a little bit now and that this renaissance you’re seeing that you talk about a lot on your show, of the First Amendment and free speech and how important that is the fabric of this country.

The Importance of Free Speech

It really is the beating heart of our Constitution. The ability to say things that you might find incredibly offensive or even dangerous, your ability to defend someone else’s right to do that is really at the core of this American experiment. And we have to fight for that tooth and nail.

And so that lawsuit, I mean, just think of the time I was blessed to have a good team. John Sauer was my Solicitor General in Missouri. He’s now the Solicitor General of the United States. The first four district judges that have been nominated in Missouri all worked in my office. There’s another guy who worked in my office who’s now on the Fourth Circuit.

TUCKER CARLSON: The first four all worked in your office.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. So the point, I think, again, why that time period was instructive. I think there’s a forging that happens in that time of crisis. And when you come together and you fight the good fight and you come out on the other side, there’s a lot of important work to do.

The Rebels on the Inside

Interestingly, also, I think RFK Jr. is a part of that. I mean, he was one of the guys originally censored. Now he’s on the inside. And then another guy who was actually a plaintiff in Missouri versus Biden, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s now the head of NIH. He’s on the inside now. So again, I think the Democrats just can’t believe this is actually what happened. But the rebels are now kind of doing some good things, I think, on the inside.

Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Which essentially said something so controversial like there is a thing like natural immunity that can exist for Covid. They tried to wreck their careers. Anthony Fauci himself tried to wreck their careers. He was a well accomplished Stanford professor, and now he’s running NIH. I think there’s a lot of great symmetry to all that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I believe in forgiveness and mercy. I think they’re essential to our humanity and we should pursue them. But also justice is important too. And why not treat all of these guys like Biden treated the January 6th defendants? I don’t understand. Like, how is Fauci wandering around Washington still and working at Georgetown and taking the biggest federal pension? And I don’t understand that.

The Fauci Deposition

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. The Fauci candles, the light has dimmed.

TUCKER CARLSON: The light has dimmed.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: But he’s still around. And I will tell you that day, it’s one of the last things I did as Attorney General because I was just elected to the Senate. And we had this deposition of Anthony Fauci scheduled at the NIH headquarters and took the deposition of Anthony Fauci. The security in there was, I mean, only in the White House have I seen security like that.

So Fauci walks in, shake hands. Jeff Landry, who was the attorney general from Louisiana, now governor, had a copy of RFK Junior’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” out on the table, which I’m sure he did not appreciate.

TUCKER CARLSON: And probably hadn’t read.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Probably had not read.

That deposition took all day long. And you get in that kind of setting, you get a real sense of the person. And he said, “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall” like 174 times. Which says a lot for a guy who proclaimed to be “the science” and knew everything, suddenly he couldn’t remember much at all.

The Lab Leak Cover-Up

But when he was confronted with some of the actions early on in Covid, again, I think people, there’s a, the Czech writer Milan Kundera writes that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory versus forgetting.” And so I think it’s important to remember these things.

Very early on when it was pretty obvious that this came from a Chinese lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What was the Jon Stewart thing when he confronted Colbert? I mean, it’s one of the maybe few smart things he’s ever said. It’s like, “Maybe it wasn’t a bat who mated with a penguin. Maybe it was this virology lab with the name on it in Wuhan.”

But anyway, it was very obvious early on because of the sort of secretive funding and basically to take a step back, in 2014, the United States basically said, “We’re not going to participate in gain of function research anymore.” It’s very dangerous, basically hypercharging viruses that can sweep through the world just to find a vaccine that might stop it. Seems like a bad idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: It sure does.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So we don’t do that anymore in this country, but through the EcoHealth Alliance, it’s funded and it’s being done in Wuhan, which did not have, by the way, the safety protocols necessary to do this kind of work.

TUCKER CARLSON: Apparently not.

Fauci’s Knowledge and the Global Response

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Apparently not. So unleashed on the world, China lies about it. The World Health Organization, which is bought and paid for by the communists in China, they lie about it. And then, then all of a sudden you have this global pandemic.

Fauci knows immediately the problem here, and it could come back to him. And so in the deposition he sent, we find out, he sends his deputy, his chief deputy over to China to see what they’re doing with the Chinese government. And there he’s a big fan of these lockdowns, big fan. Comes back and reports back to Fauci, “all these lockdowns are really working.” And so Fauci then has this idea that that’s what he’s going to create in the United States.

It’s also interesting when he asked about the efficacy of masks, you know, he was such a proponent that everybody should wear a mask all day long, even when you’re outside. A friend of his emails him and says, this is like in April of 2020. “Hey, I’m getting on a flight. This Covid thing is a thing. Do I need to wear a mask?” He’s like, “of course not. Masks are totally ineffective. You don’t need to wear a mask.” So, like, masks off. Right. But it’s very telling.

And so he meant to undermine anybody who disagreed with him, participated in studies. He pretended, or he authorized studies. He pretended to have nothing to do with that. This was from a wet market and not from a lab that he knew was a lie. And you just think of the damage that was done.

The Milgram Experiment and Authority

There’s actually the first time that I ever met RFK Jr. I was at a conference in Utah. This is in probably the summer of 2021. And he was familiar with some of the work that I’ve been doing to push back on Covid tyranny and these excessive regulations. So we had a conversation. He was talking to a few of us, and he reminded me, this has been years since I even thought about something called the Milgram Experiment, which was done at Yale in the 1950s or the 1960s, where essentially people are brought into this room and there’s a guy in a lab coat and a clipboard and tells them that there’s somebody on the other side of the wall. “When they get an answer wrong, we need you to flip the switch to give a little pain.”

And the number of people that would do that, even when there were cries in the other room and maybe even someone dying on the other side, the willingness of some people to continue to do that because of this authority figure in the white coat.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It haunted me when he told me that story. I thought about it, haunted me throughout all of this, and kind of strengthened my resolve to really push back. Because in those moments, you need people who are willing to stand up and fight back. Right.

But, yeah, Fauci was sort of heralded as literally some sort of saint like figure. He had candles. And I think some of it was they wanted to make Trump. People were really obsessed with making Trump look bad. The Democrats want to capitalize on this crisis, make them pay. Because you also forget Trump was cruising going into that Covid. I mean, he was on his way to winning, I think decisively in the fall of that year.

And they used Covid for everything. It was Fauci was sort of this who undermined President Trump. Use this as alternative figure, this whole weird “trust the science” thing happened. Then, of course, you have the summer of 2020, the summer of love, and you see all these sort of Marxist organizations rally to create ultimate disruption. And then you have the election. You have Mark Elias out there trying to undermine all these election integrity measures that have been put in place even in blue states forever. I mean, just think of the level. All this stuff happening at one time. It was a crazy time. Like, that whole period of time was a crazy time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Unbelievable.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And so that’s what you sort of document some of these things that in Missouri, for example, we beat back all three of Mark Elias’s lawsuits to weaken our election integrity laws, but he was successful other places. And so you just had the whole of kind of the left coming for all the things that we care about. Borders, free speech, freedom of movement, all these sorts of things that you kind of take for granted. Rough for grabs.

Deposing Fauci

TUCKER CARLSON: When you talked to Fauci, when you deposed him for eight hours, you said, yeah. Did you get the feeling he was lying? Is he a good liar?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: He’s pretty. Yeah, I know he’s a good witness, I’ll give him that. He was a good. I mean, this isn’t his first rodeo. He’s been in front of Congress. Oh, yeah, he’s very smooth, but there’s just too many inconsistencies.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did he seem, I mean, short of like a sociopath? Most people, when confronted with inconsistencies in their story, get uncomfortable in a deposition is a place where you definitely confront.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: The only time. Yeah, the only time he got really uncomfortable, I would say, is when we continued to question him, his authority. He didn’t like that. Yeah, “well, you said this. Now, wait a minute. Did you change your mind on this, Doc?” You know, you get to that kind of line of questioning. He didn’t like people he’s not used to that. He wasn’t used to at all.

And by the way, I also think another telling moment of that deposition was after the lunch break. We came back and the court reporter sneezed, and he looked at her and asked her to put a mask on. Asked her if she had an upper respiratory virus. “She had Covid, will you put a mask on?” She put a mask on. I mean, this is, by the way, November of 2022. This isn’t like March of 2020. And this is the guy that was in charge of our nation’s health, like so.

But I think it Covid became a time where these weird, like, mask became like a. It was the ultimate virtue signal. Almost like having the stupid sign “in this house, we believe” out in your front lawn thing. Right? It became like a way of distinguishing people who were. Who were a problem. The othering that happened in our society is really dangerous. And I think families and friendships were destroyed over all this. That’s the kind of power this little guy wielded, and he’s not been held to account yet.

The Origins of Covid

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the real story was? Like, where did Covid come from? We assume it came from the lab. Do we think it was intentional or unintentional in its release? When do we think the Chinese knew it was circulating among the population? And to what extent was it a joint creation of the US And China?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, it’s in the book, actually. “The Last Line of Defense.” I feel a little awkward doing that. I’ve never actually done it, but it’s. But it’s actually. So the first chapters really kind of go back in time because I think to give context for all the other crazy things we had to push back against, it was really important to go back to that moment of when this thing first happened and remember that there was like police tape around kids playgrounds. They were bulldozing skate parks with, on beaches. Like, the level of insanity that took hold.

TUCKER CARLSON: True craziness.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It really is wild and hopefully we never experience that again. But I think it’s important to document those excesses and what people were willing to do to hold on and aggregate and exercise power. I mean, people who literally would. County executives and mayors were telling people that you could live your life today or not. Like, it’s insane what was going on.

But really my first. And actually on your show announced the lawsuit. We sued China. We sued China in April of 2020 for unleashing this pandemic on the world. And I think. And ultimately there’s a judgment out there for $24 billion that Missouri has that can go, by the way, seize farmland now. So my successor, Andrew Bailey’s going to have that opportunity, and I think he’ll do it.

But anyway, I think through our research through public, and then of course we wanted to get to discovery, which is why we filed the lawsuit, was that in November and December of 2019, patient zero enters the hospital. This is how I see it. And patient Zero likely came from that lab. So that. And of course, you know, you get to different strains down the line. It’s left less lethal, as any virus is. But initially that’s where it happened. It happened in Wuhan and it came from the lab.

China, a very closed society with communist dictators who have concentration camps, wanted to deny its existence for a while. But within, by December, Dr. Lee, I think is his name, Dr. Lee was on WeChat and said “this is what’s happening. Like this is a virus that came out of a lab and people are dying.” He had to recant that, of course, and then mysteriously died a couple months later. But it was kind of this whistleblower and the Chinese people actually celebrated this guy for blowing the whistle.

So anyway, so China discovers that this is a thing. It’s a very lethal and widespreading virus.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you believe the release was accidental?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I don’t, I don’t believe it was on purpose. I mean it could be, but I don’t think so. I think it got out accidentally. But the cover up then is almost worse than the crime. Of course. Right. Because then, and one of the problems with China is they want to be considered one of these countries on the world stage, but then doesn’t do the things that like a country would do to kind of notify everybody.

So what they do then is they close all the flights, internal flights in China, in and out of Wuhan, but they don’t stop the international flights, interestingly. So you can still fly internationally in and out of Wuhan, but you can’t fly within China out of Wuhan. They immediately become, not, they were the largest debt exporter of PPE. Personal protective equipment. They immediately become the biggest net importer of PPE. So they know something’s going down. And this is in like January.

And then finally they kind of have to, with the World Health Organization sort of holding their hand, let the world know that this is out there. And then the story of courses. “Well, this wasn’t something we created. This came from a bat mating with a penguin” or whatever the example was, or some wet market theory. And then what’s really interesting is President Trump takes the action you would want him to take. He closes flights coming in and out of China. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember that. Remember that outbreak of racism?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Like all of a sudden that was a xenophobic act, you know what I mean? Like, and then Nancy Pelosi is on the streets of San Francisco with, in Chinatown saying “everything’s fine here, come here. This is fine.” Like it was this, this Trump derangement syndrome, where even if it was the right thing to do, people would take the opposite point of view. Right. So he shuts down the flights and because he understands that that there’s a problem.

Fauci’s Role in Gain of Function Research

TUCKER CARLSON: But by this point, you said Fauci knows that the virus came from that lab.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: To what extent was Fauci implicated in the creation of the virus? Do we know?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, by all accounts, he wanted the gain of function research to continue, and it was funded through a NGO. Imagine that, the Eco Health Alliance.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So the money still flowed, but no one would ever be able to really track it. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can we say definitively that U.S. tax dollars helped create Covid?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I believe that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, whatever you think of COVID a lot of people did die of it.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Millions of people died of it, I think.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. One of the great sense, Tucker, is that there was never any distinguishing between a super vulnerable elderly person with comorbidities. There’s a different way of dealing with that scenario than a five year old.

TUCKER CARLSON: Healthy kid or snow. Of course. And it also would be good during a pandemic to have treatment for your population.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not discourage treatment. Of course. All true. I guess I just want to linger on the fact you just endorsed it, that US tax dollars were used to help create this virus that killed millions of people. And I feel like the fact that no one’s been held accountable. There is a. I mean, I don’t. Why.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: That’s a good question. I think that there’s. There ought to be. I think that there ought to be hearings. I think Fauci should be at least, at least brought before Congress at this point. Right. At least.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why hasn’t he been.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t. Not on the committee. I certainly would love to see that happen. And I think that there ought to be accountability and this shouldn’t go away.

The Outsourcing of Government Operations

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that too many people are implicated in it?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Maybe. Feels to me like this was very much a sort of an inside operation because the government. Well, in fairness, the United States government said we don’t want to do gain of function research anymore. But we did through the funding that flowed through the Eco Health Alliance.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s how everything works.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: They can’t do censorship, so they outsource.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: They can’t assassinate people, so they outsource it. I mean, everything is well.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And think about what we just went through. And I don’t want to go back to this, but look at this USAID stuff.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The USAID Problem and Administrative State Overreach

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Like I just led the rescissions package to claw back 8 billion plus of that, which is like the ridiculous stuff like trans gender sex surgeries in Guatemala and DEI trainings in Burma and Sesame Street in Iraq. All this ridiculous stuff that the American people are rightly pissed off about. There’s no line item in the budget for that. Like, there’s no line item for that. It’s just the money goes to this Institute for Peace or all these BS names that exist out there, and they do a bunch of crazy stuff, and then you have to kind of go on the back end and pull it back.

And there’s my hope is that when you have an administration like the one we have now, and I do think they’re kind of getting a handle on this, they paused a lot of the funding. They’ve eliminated USAID altogether. They’re bringing it into the State Department. That’s progress. Like, that’s a good thing to do. But you got to stay vigilant on this because there’s a lot of people in the administrative state that think they know better. They’re the expert, and they don’t care what a senator or congressman or even what the people believe or think. They know better.

And that’s the kind of thing that has to be ultimately disrupted and dismantled completely. And that’s one of the reasons why I think my experience as AG now in the Senate, that’s my focus. I don’t, you know, that’s what I want to do. I want to get rid of all that stuff that people hate back home.

But anyway, yeah, I think that so he sends his deputy over there, he’s a big fan of lockdowns, comes back and begins to undermine President Trump. You know, when President Trump talks about this having come from a lab, you know, he’s already a xenophobe because he’s restricted travel now he says it’s from a lab. That’s ridiculous. Everybody piles on about that. And by the way, it’s true.

So I think that this combination of Trump derangement syndrome and this obsession with power and the left, I mean, they couldn’t have believed their luck to have a pandemic, that they could move all the things that they wanted to move on.

The Need for Accountability and Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure. And I mean, it certainly reduced the United States relative to China on many levels, but economically, most obviously, it really gravely damaged the US Economy. And, you know, we’re still dealing with it. But I guess I just can’t get past this question of how did the virus come to be and who paid for it? And the downstream effects are history changing and terrible for the United States and terrible for the families of those who were killed, et cetera, et cetera. But like somebody did that.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t understand how Republicans can control all three branches and we don’t have an answer.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. I think ultimately the Department of Justice should take a look at this stuff as they should on the Russia hoax. I think there’s a lot of. There’s a lot. It’s a target rich environment, let’s just put it that way. I think of the places that they could go.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah. Sorry. It’s just, it feels like since it’s been five years that we’re going to get to a point where it’s like we’re never going to.

China’s Control Over Critical Supply Chains

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No, I know, right. Which is, by the way, one of the reasons we filed that lawsuit was it felt like if you could get into discovery phase, which again is that you’re suing a foreign country, we were able to slide into one of the exceptions. You know, there’s the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally means you can’t sue foreign countries. But we, I think one of the clever things we did here is we said, no, this falls into the commercial activity exception to that. Meaning if you’re going to be controlling hospital systems over there and you’re going to be controlling PPE, the flow of it, you fall into one of these exceptions. And the judge agreed.

But I think the other thing for me that became clear is the epicenter of the global supply chain network runs through China. That became very obvious. And so like for me, my son has epilepsy. He relies on multiple seizure medications every day to stay alive. And it occurred to me, well, you know, 90% of our pharmaceuticals, 80% of our pharmaceuticals come from somewhere else. Mostly China. The raw materials for it, including the seizure meds.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, wow.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So think about it. What if China just decides to stop producing that stuff or poison that stuff? One of the reasons why I’m a big proponent and believe, I think it’s good for our economy too, is we got to onshore a lot of the stuff that was 30 years ago said to be done somewhere else.

TUCKER CARLSON: To take that specific example. So the seizure medications for epilepsy, including the ones your son takes, they’re not made in the United States?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No, they’re sourced. I mean, all the source materials for the most part of. Not just anti epileptic seizure meds, but most things that people take on a daily basis are derived from China.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but not just vitamin C or even, you know, but drugs that we will literally die if you don’t have them. Those would seem like priorities. How hard would it be to have those drugs specifically made in the U.S.?

The National Security Imperative of Domestic Production

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I think President Trump has identified this as a priority, certainly something we’ve talked about. I think for whatever reason, that stuff went somewhere else, like so many other things, but that has to be brought back home at a minimum. Like countries that aren’t communist regimes that want to, you know, throw people in concentration camps and have global dominance.

So we should do that stuff here. It’s a national security issue. Like, by the way, the critical minerals that we rely on to make fighter jets and iPhones like this stuff. We got to bring that stuff back home. And I think you’re seeing that play out in some of the trade deals and the investment that’s happening now.

But that occurred to me. And I also think one of the wake up calls here, which everybody kind of had a breaking point with all this. Mine was probably the realization of how reliant we were on China for things, and one of the reasons why we moved forward on the lawsuit. But also, if you recall, Tucker, this letter that over a thousand public health officials signed during the George Floyd protests. Remember this? They’re saying everybody had to stay home. Remember, this was you. You couldn’t. People were protesting anything else. They had to stay home. But if you were going to attend a Black Lives Matter protest, the rules didn’t apply to you anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think for members of the Democratic Party’s militia. Yeah, the youth wing. Yeah.

The Selective Application of COVID Rules

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Like, that was like. I think for a lot of people that I’ve talked to who weren’t, like, in the thick of it, they actually have lives and families that are outside of this stuff. When they saw that, that you got a license to go out and protest, quote, unquote, “systemic racism,” you could go do that, but you couldn’t protest something else. That, like, at that point, it was very obvious what this whole thing was about.

And you saw, I think, the entire apparatus of the Democrat party, these NGOs, bricks, are being delivered by, mysteriously, by, you know, organizations when the sunset. I mean, all this stuff was meant to sort of create the kind of untethering that’s necessary for something much bigger. And they were all in on that.

The Crisis of Institutional Trust

TUCKER CARLSON: I just worry that people are losing all confidence in the system. And when people I know who are moderate and sensible, well educated, smart, will believe anything at this point, just absolutely anything. And the reason they’ll believe anything is because so many things they believed in turned out not to be true. And there was zero accountability and has been zero accountability for really anything other than January 6th that I’m aware of. And I just wonder if the people in, you know, making the laws and crafting the regulation in Washington understand that the whole system at some point becomes at risk because the population’s like, “I don’t believe anything.”

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right. Well, I agree with you. And one of the reasons why when President Trump was creating his cabinet and going through the confirmation process, he put together a team. And by the way, this isn’t going to happen overnight. I don’t think this confidence that you’re talking about, this lack of lost confidence, lack of confidence in institutions is a real thing. And by the way, in many ways rightfully so. When you have law enforcement agencies that are weaponized not just against their chief political rival, but against the American people, we ought to, there should be a loss of confidence. But what comes next is how gain the confidence.

TUCKER CARLSON: It has to be. That’s right.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It has to be accountability. And so that’s what needs to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not vengeance or revenge. I don’t think that’s a good.

Accountability Without Political Weaponization

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And by the way, not to do the same thing that they did to target a political opponent, because a political opponent, but rather to say you did something was terrible for our country, which basically relies on self governance and accountability. I mean that at the end of the day. That’s the ultimate thing. People of Missouri can send me there, they can send me home, they can send me back. There’s some level of accountability that comes with our, with the way our constitutional republic.

But when you get to all this other stuff that’s below that, which is why the administrative state is so dangerous because they’re not accountable to anybody. They know it. And you have to rein that in and disrupt it and dismantle it in many ways. And again, I think part of what drove me to uncover a lot of the things as AG was that and now in this new role, it’s to help finish that job. But you really do need an administration that believes that too. And I don’t think we’ve had, I can’t think of any administration in the last hundred years that has invested in rooting that out as this one.

The Perception of Two-Tiered Justice

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree. I just, you know, there’s a lot of emphasis on, you know, people who were criticizing BB on college campuses and everything, which is fine. But I’m getting to the point and I know, a lot of the people, you know, run DOJ, and I really like them and think they’re decent people. And I agree with them on most things. However, like the BLM riots, COVID censorship, like, you got to get to the bottom of this stuff, Epstein. Sorry to say it. Yeah, I know no one wants to hear it, but it’s just not because I care that much about Epstein. It’s like the perception, however, that some people are above the law is the most corrosive possible perception in any society.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, I think you just take this Russia gate stuff.

TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s another great example.

The Corrosive Effect of FBI Politicization

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think it’s so corrosive is the right word of how it infected so many aspects of law enforcement. I mean, think about it. All the time that the FBI is spending trying to protect Hunter Biden and get Trump out of office or going after parents or Catholics.

The FBI is supposed to go after the bad guys, right? Help clean up the streets in Washington D.C. or in St. Louis or in New York or wherever. Think of all the resources pulled away to go do all this other stuff that the Biden administration wanted to do. It really is a tragedy.

And so I do think that there’s some opportunities coming up for the Justice Department to go do that. And the Russia thing is front and center. Just think of the idea that Hillary Clinton, who by the way, was working with the George Soros organization to come up with this ridiculous theory to deflect from her emails, right. Her email scandal.

They needed something on Trump and they concocted this thing out of thin air that he was some Russian asset or had some, was in bed with Putin on stuff. And then they sold that to the intelligence agencies that bought it and then convinced the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to spy on the guy who’s running for president who happened to be a Republican.

And then they continue to lie about, and still, by the way, continue to lie about it to this day, about their role in undermining. Not just our system of two people running against each other where the American people get to decide. They did everything for a five year period to undermine not just his agenda, but his presidency.

And then the same group of people then are weaponized and they go get Jack Smith who’s like, everybody knows in prosecutor world is just like a hired gun. You make him special counsel when it’s like, “show me the man I’ll show you the crime.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Soviet style. That’s exactly what that was. And it was happening in this country. And they’re down in Mar-a-Lago going through the first Lady’s underwear drawer, trying to find probably stuff related to Crossfire Hurricane, probably, and maybe some other stuff. But it was just about settling political scores with guns.

And then you have Fani Willis’s deputy meeting with the White House counsel. Why is a state prosecutor in Georgia meeting with the White House counsel’s office? Why would they be doing that? Why would the number three person from DOJ go to the New York District Attorney’s office to help out with the prosecution of President Trump? Why is all this happening?

The minute President Trump’s original sin to them was that he ran at all, that he came down the escalator.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And he was such a disruptive force that they were willing to throw – to save democracy, they were willing to destroy democracy. And so now, the reason why I feel committed with the job I have getting back to what job would you rather have – I think it’s important to have people in the United States Senate and Congress who want to see this project through, that they want accountability restored. They want people to actually not believe their government is weaponized against them.

It’s a tall task given the sins of the last eight years. But it’s important for this republic to last and to stand and for our kids and grandparents.

The Need for Justice and Accountability

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, you’ve got more relevant law enforcement experience than a lot of people running DOJ. Sorry to say that, but it’s true. I hope that you’re in contact – I won’t even ask you, put you in an uncomfortable position – but I hope that you’re in contact with them, and I hope that you will convey the message.

To the extent that you don’t bring to light the truth and affect justice, people start to think, “well, maybe you’re in league with the bad guys, too.” I mean, which I think is unfair. And I like the attorney general and I like the FBI director and Dan Bongino and all that, but I think it’s fair to ask at a certain point, “why aren’t you prosecuting anybody for any of this stuff?” And what’s the answer? “Well, we’re really busy.” Really? Are you really that busy?

And maybe you’re in on it, too. And I don’t think they are in on it. I don’t think they’re bad people. I’m not alleging that, but a lot of people will start to think that very soon unless they act. And I hope you will pass on that message.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I will. And I think what people are looking for is action. There’s no doubt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it hard to – I mean, you would know since you’ve been involved in it all, but just as a process matter, is it hard to say, “we know that Clapper and Brennan were involved in illegal activities. Let’s get an indictment.” How hard is that?

Statute of Limitations and Presidential Immunity

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I mean, I think the issue is that it’s possible some of the statute of limitations may have run on a lot of the crimes, however, not necessarily on a conspiracy, on an ongoing conspiracy. And there’s also no presidential candidate immunity. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have immunity.

Now, Barack Obama likely does, ironically, because of the US vs Trump case, where John Sauer, who’s now the Solicitor General, who’s my Solicitor General, argued successfully before the Supreme Court that official acts, you can’t have ongoing – so there is such a thing as presidential immunity that was established. So Barack Obama may have presidential immunity while he was in office. I don’t know if he engaged in activities after he was out of office. Who knows?

Certainly James Comey doesn’t have immunity. Clapper doesn’t have immunity, Brennan doesn’t have immunity. So I think this is going to go where the facts lead. And I think that the most likely, if there was something to pursue, it’s likely an ongoing conspiracy to defraud the American people. And that is a crime. So we’ll see. But there can and probably should be – let me say definitely should be indictments.

FBI Corruption and Reform Challenges

TUCKER CARLSON: Dan Bongino, who’s taking a lot of crap for the Epstein thing, but I can verify, since I know him well, is a good man, decent man. But he said in public and also in private that the FBI is way more corrupt than he had any sense of. He didn’t know he said that. And how hard is it? Why is it so hard to clean up the FBI?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I guess you could say you kind of need to know what is the known knowns, known unknowns and unknown. I think you got to figure out who the people are, but nobody’s got a right to be insubordinate FBI agent. They have no authority apart from the president’s authority.

TUCKER CARLSON: And the president’s authority derives from elections.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it’s authority conferred by the people as expressed by voting.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It’s also interesting.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they have no authority at all.

Civil Rights Division Reform

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right. Well, you take the Civil Rights Division. I mean, I think she’s doing a great job. And that perhaps was maybe the most corrupt division out there, the Civil Rights Division.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s my former lawyer and I can say she’s tough.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, she’s tough. And I think there’s a lot that we’re going to see from – I just had a hearing. I chair the subcommittee on the Constitution of the Judiciary Committee. We just had her come in and say, “hey, what are you thinking about doing? What are the things that are on your list of things to do?”

I think she’s – obviously, universities have been a topic of conversation, but I also think in corporate America they ought to be ready because this discriminatory DEI stuff flies in the face of federal law. The Civil Rights acts of the 1960s were meant to protect people from racial discrimination.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everyone.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Everyone. And there are people being racially discriminated against right now. And by the way, these struggle sessions that exist, like Coca Cola would have a seminar saying basically from the moderator, “how can you be less white?” I mean, this is insanity.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can you be less black?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: How can you be less white?

TUCKER CARLSON: How can you be less Hispanic?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Like, what?

TUCKER CARLSON: What the hell is going on?

Military and DEI Programs

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: By the way, our military – I’m on the Armed Services Committee. We would ask – I would ask questions all the time. We would try and that went a little underground once it was exposed. But this idea of dividing the room, our military, is this great – supposed to be this great meritocracy. Anybody from any background can go serve. You can have a ticker tape parade in New York City as being a war hero. Doesn’t matter where you came from, what your race is. We celebrate that.

This idea of dividing the room by race and who’s the oppressor and who’s the oppressed is insane. But I think that Civil Rights division is a good example. I think they’re going to pursue some things that the prior regimes didn’t pursue. And I think that will have an important effect on behavior as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: You do think that?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I do.

Confidence in Leadership

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have confidence in the Attorney General?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, listen, I think President Trump’s put a good team around him and I have a ton of respect for Pam Bondi. I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you make of the Epstein thing?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think that more needs to be done on transparency, there’s no doubt about it. I think any of the credible information that can come out should come out. I will also say the Southern District of New York had those files. James Comey’s daughter was the lawyer handling this in the Southern District of New York.

TUCKER CARLSON: Weird how that works.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, so I don’t know what that means, but I do think that more transparency would be a good thing.

Over-Classification and Transparency Issues

TUCKER CARLSON: You often hear, I mean, now you’re in a position to receive classified information. You have meetings in the fabled SCIF from time to time. We often hear, “we can’t tell you that for reasons of national security, reasons of privacy,” whatever, all these different reasons. We have more than a billion classified federal documents. Why?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, there should be – I agree with you and I’ve heard you talk about this before. There’s just way too much stuff that’s hidden behind what’s so called classified. A lot of that stuff should never be classified in the first place. It’s sort of a great way to never have to have transparency with the American people. And by the way, contributes to this lack of trust that you’re talking about. I think the more information you can get out there, the better.

And by the way, I do find it hilarious. We have these, sometimes we have these all senator briefings.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And nothing comes of it. There’s nothing new that wasn’t already leaked by somebody in the Pentagon to the New York Times the day before. Now some of these you can get in there and ask – not necessarily the top level person, but somebody that’s actually doing the work. You can ask some questions in a much more private setting, but some of this stuff is just a way to hide behind.

Interestingly, Chris Wray once mentioned that “we can’t gather information the same way we did prior to the lawsuit.” He was referencing Missouri versus Biden because the FBI was very much a part of this censorship regime where they were flagging stuff and calling it Russian disinformation and working with the big tech companies. And he was sort of annoyed that his practices were being curtailed because the court said you can’t do that anymore.

For me, having been the guy that filed it and then now sitting when he said that was really an interesting turn of events.

Senate Composition and Campaign Costs

TUCKER CARLSON: How many senators are former AGs?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: There are probably five on the Republican side, there’s maybe four. There’s probably about the same on the Democrats.

TUCKER CARLSON: How much is spent on your average Senate race?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Oh, I mean, I would imagine it ranges from 20 million to – then you get into hundreds with 200 million in Montana, where there’s literally – you could be one of the least populated states, a very important state, but was important for them to take the majority.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just pay off everyone’s mortgage and call it a day.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Kind of cheaper.

The Importance of Attorney General Races

TUCKER CARLSON: The AG races, I mean, this long way of making a short point, which is an AG, seems like every bit as important a job as being.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It’s a very important job for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think the rest of us are just waking up to that. How much you spent on those races?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Oh, a fraction of that. Fraction of that. And then you get into races where, you know, you’ve got red states or blue states, but red states, and it’s really about the primary and that’s even less expensive.

TUCKER CARLSON: Someone like Dana Nessel in Michigan, I think had, did more damage to the state than that kind of the Botox governor ever thought about doing. Like Dana Nessel’s like a truly poisonous anti-Christian, dangerous person. That’s my read on her anyway. I don’t know her. And she kind of gets ignored and everyone beats up on the governor, the hapless governor.

Fighting COVID Overreach Through Legal Action

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, what’s interesting about that is we kind of took a page. So during COVID you know, Cuomo had instituted like a tip line essentially to tell on your neighbors. And I think Tim Walz did this actually too.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: They had this tip line where you’d snitch.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re all tattletales.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Like you’re outside barbecuing without a mask on and all of a sudden the police shows up. I mean, I think this happened in Minnesota. So we kind of turned it on its face when we sued the 65 school districts in Missouri. We said we’re going to have a tip line not for the suppression of rights, but to vindicate people’s rights. We had a tip line of parents reach out to us of what schools were still forcing their kids to wear masks all day long.

And I’ll tell you, Tucker, in some of the dark, lonely moments of this fight when, you know, now it seems very settled, like that was a terrible thing to be doing to kids. But back then, not everybody. I would get interviewed by reporters locally in Missouri who were still in their cars because they couldn’t go in the studio with masks on, asking me questions about, you’re trying to sue a school district for not.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Why do you want to kill the kids?”

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right, exactly. Those are the questions that they would be asking.

TUCKER CARLSON: So many kids died of COVID.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right. So the stories we got coming in were just devastating. There was a kid in one school district who, because she refused to take her mask off, was made to sit on a stage by herself in the cafeteria to eat lunch by herself away from the other kids. We got emails from a parent of a deaf child. So this is just killing my kid. My kid can’t see any, can’t pick up language the way that normally picks up language.

The extent to which these adults who should have known better were just willing to do all this, it’s just terrible. Like, it’s terrible. And so I think you just never let that happen again. And by the way, these are the same people that say, “Well, once we have a vaccine that things will change.” That didn’t change anything. And by the way, it didn’t affect transmissibility, of course, but then you were censored for saying that, even though it was true. So again, the sins of that era should not be forgotten because we can’t let it happen again.

The Lasting Impact of COVID Policies

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they also are the basis of the society we’re living in now. It changed everything. It changed people’s attitudes toward each other, toward the state, changed the economy, changed the culture up and down, spiked the suicide rate.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shortened the life expectancy, increased drug and alcohol addiction exponentially. I mean, like, things fell apart.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Now I think the one thing, particularly from there, I think you’re seeing this with a lot of younger, especially males who came up during that era. And by the way, writ large, kids of that generation now that grew up with that are much more conservative than any generation that preceded them. Because I think they saw some of the, they saw what was happening to their social networks, their schooling. And I think it’s part of the reason why you’re seeing especially young men who are also being told that you’re the reason why everything is terrible.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would disagree. I don’t think they’re conservative as much as they’re radical. I think they’re way more radical than Republicans understand. I think they’re really radical. I don’t think they’re going to vote for Democrats anytime soon. But I mean, I think that their views are so different from your average 75-year-old Republican senator.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Oh, I would agree with that 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there an appreciation of that?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I don’t know that everybody sees that, Tucker. I feel like I try to be a voice for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Because, you know, and I ran.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I ran statewide three times in six years. In that era in Missouri, you get a real sense of what’s really going on if you spend the time getting around talking to people. And that’s my sense of it too.

A Political Career Born from Personal Tragedy

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve been, you filled three elected offices.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Treasurer, AG, senator.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I was in the state senate before that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually said. Oh gosh.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. When I was 31 years old or whatever that was.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, I got into. It’s interesting. Everybody has their own path. For me, it wasn’t anything I was thinking about. And then my son Stephen was born in 2004 and was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called tuberous sclerosis, which there’s tubers that form in different organs, including his brain, which has affected his development. And he has epilepsy, seizures nearly every day. He’s non-verbal. Stephen will be 21 here in a few days.

But seeing him go through that, including a four-hour seizure and being in the ICU for over a week, I kind of went through this process as a child. Oh yeah, he’s like 2, 3 years old and he would have them every few months that we would be in the hospital. And in the four-hour seizure, they were on the last medication they could give him. You had to wait 20 minutes. And I remember there was like a red digital clock on the wall. It had the seconds ticking by and had to wait 20 minutes before they could try a new med. And he’s seizing the whole time and all I could do was be there with him, pray. Jamie, my wife, had to leave the room and I would just pray the whole time. And the last one worked. They were about ready to induce a coma. So we almost lost Stephen that day.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you keep your family together? Like how do you with other children?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Two. Yeah. We later had two daughters. Sophie and Olivia were great. But we did, you know, we wanted to have more kids. I think those things, Tucker, you go one of two ways with your faith and your family. And for us, it strengthened our family, my wife and I, and even my faith. I went through a process of discernment. I’m Catholic, was educated by the Jesuits. And there’s this process of sort of trying to figure out what you want to do with your life. And that was an inflection point for me, and I wanted to do more than what I was doing. I made partner at a law firm. That was great. I was building a career and a family, but I felt like there was something more to do. So I was called to that.

Faith Through Adversity

TUCKER CARLSON: Strength in your faith. It doesn’t seem like an obvious response if you grew up Catholic, you go to Catholic schools, and then the toughest, really the toughest thing that can ever happen to a man happens to you. And so why wouldn’t you say, “Well, you know, God has abandoned me. There is no God. This is too horrible.” Like, why would that strengthen your faith?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think it certainly gives you a perspective on what the things you can control and what you can’t control.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And so much of, I mean, think of the original sin, really. It’s just trying to become God in the Garden of Eden. And I think that it does. Look, there’s a mourning that never totally goes away when I go to a baseball game or something like that and see a dad with a son that’s about Stephen’s age or kids go off to college and do those sorts of things that Stephen will never get to do. Stephen will never be married and have kids. And that’s tough as a dad. That’s really tough.

But I would say that from that, I’ve gained a much greater perspective on the things that are important, the things that are real. And he’s a happy kid. And there’s, when you see him, when he sees you or sees me, if you were here right now, he’d be walking around, he would give you a big hug and that kind of thing. But the minute that I see him or wake him up in the morning, he’s just got this look of joy on his face, really.

And people have asked me, you know, “What do you think heaven is like?” Heaven is that to me, that second or two where I feel that just intense, unadulterated, unconditional love for my boy times eternity. That’s what it must be like where all this other stuff is not important. And that’s the closeness you have with God, your creator forever. And so Stephen has taught me a lot of things, and it was my inspiration to enter all of this and still is.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve heard, I have known parents with a child with Down syndrome say something similar that for all of the, you know, obviously the tragedy and the sadness and the difficulty, that there’s something about the child that just emanates, radiates joy.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: What I think he’s our, I’ve talked about, I think he’s our little angel that teaches us all the time. And I think there’s an innocence there with Stephen, and our job is to love him and protect him. And there’s something unique about that. So I think for me, it’s. This is going to be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: This is like the, what is it, the Jerry Maguire movie, the Rod Tidwell Roy Firestone moment where I cry or something?

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No, but it’s hard to explain, Tucker. It’s such a touchstone for me that it’s what’s really important. And so there’s something that also that I try to think about is this indifference. And what I mean by indifference is it’s not you don’t care about something, it’s that whatever, Ignatius Loyola talks about this, whatever comes your way, you make the most of it. And there’s a certain freedom that can come from that. Again, that I think Stephen has taught me. But for this experience with Stephen, I don’t know that that’s how I would view things. And so in that way, it’s a blessing. Even though it’s hard, you know.

Sometimes, like when we went to the inauguration, when I got sworn in as the 2,000th US senator, my whole family went. My parents had never been to the Capitol. I had only been there a couple times. I mean, I was in Missouri. And Stephen, we don’t fly. So we drove, we drove from St. Louis to Washington. And looking back on that, I keep thinking, oh man, that’s a lot. The ride there with my kids in the back seat and my wife and I listening to music that we listened to in college for the 12-hour drive. That was an experience I wouldn’t have had without Stephen having the condition that he has. So there’s a lot of blessings that I take from it, I think.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you drove 12 hours across the country with three kids and you found that a blessing?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. Thank God for Stephen. No, it does sound ridiculous, doesn’t it?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it sounds wonderful. It sounds wonderful.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No.

The Senate Experience and Republican Transformation

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you count it as a blessing, then that says something about you.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So it’s perspective, I guess. But anyway, that’s a long way of me getting to the answer question, which is, then I ran for office, and then I felt like there was more to do, and so here I am.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’d you think? So you said you’d only been when you were sworn into the Capitol a few times. Then you’re in this famously cohesive, not to say clannish, body of a hundred senators. Like, what did you think of it?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: What’s the old line? You get there, and the first few months you say, “How did I get here?” And then after that you say, “How did these people get there?”

No, I have immense respect. I mean, I think I’ve always looked at it this way – I love America, and I think our founders were genius and inspired, divinely inspired by the system that was created, that ultimately this checks and balances, separation of powers, all of it was meant to protect individual liberty. They saw the excesses of government. Ironically, a lot of things we’re talking about, we fight back against that. The best way to guard it was you had faction versus faction. You had all these things sort of playing off.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I think guard it, not bestow it.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Correct. And our rights don’t come from government, they come from God. And the government’s job is to protect those rights that we’re born with. The ability to speak your mind, the ability to defend yourself, the ability to petition, all these things. So I come at it from that perspective. So I treat it as such. I think it’s a very important role that you play. And I think our system is important and designed to protect this very important experiment, but ultimately human dignity and flourishing. And so that’s how I come at it.

Look, are there things about it that are frustrating? Absolutely. My first two years there when Chuck Schumer was in charge, you hear about this “world’s most deliberative body.” The worst thing that I learned is that there isn’t as much – people think Mr. Smith goes to Washington and you’re on the floor. There just wasn’t a lot of opportunity to be on the floor to offer amendments, to find unique coalitions that might exist there that people wouldn’t expect. That didn’t happen. And that was frustrating.

And I think what is important now that we have the majority is that we have more of those opportunities. When I was handling President Trump’s rescissions package, I didn’t put any limits on amendments. I didn’t tell anybody, “Don’t offer the amendment or we’re going to box you out.” Offer the amendment. Let’s vote on it. Let’s see where people land. So I think that was one observation.

The other one is that, interestingly, in my class that came in – we were elected in 2022 – it was very much a generational turnover from the people that we were following in those offices. And there’s a bit of a bonding. I mean, JD and I, Vice President Vance and I became very good friends. We shared a lot of common experiences in life and viewed the world similarly. And other people in the class – Ted Budd and Katie Britt and Pete Ricketts – there’s this experience you don’t get to share with many people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So we go to dinner once a month and talk about not legislation you’re working on, but real life stuff about our kids and the things that are important. And so I was lucky, I think, that I came in with a group that was about the same age and had same cultural references and things like that. But the average age of the Senate is sixty-seven and a half or something like that.

So I play on the congressional baseball team. I’m the senator that starts because, for whatever reason, which, by the way, I got to meet a lot of House members that I would never have met otherwise. I mean, I think people think the House and the Senate are working together on all this stuff. I mean, you have relationships, but being at a baseball practice at 5:45 in the morning, 4:45 Missouri time, there’s a bit of a bonding that can happen with that. So you get to know people.

And so I just try to meet people where they’re at. And I think if you work hard, I have deeply held beliefs that I’m going to fight for, as we’ve talked about, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole along the way to everybody. That’s not me. So I’m just trying to be as effective as I can for the cause.

Trump’s Impact on the Republican Party

TUCKER CARLSON: Is the Republican Party changing under Trump?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, I believe so. I mean, I think you look at the people who’ve been elected since, say, 2018. The Senate is meant to be – a third of the Senate is up every two years, and the House, the entire House of Representatives can turn over in two years, theoretically. The Senate is designed to be that way. But I do think it’s changing.

I think President Trump, I think one of his great contributions to the Republican Party is that it has given people the confidence to fight. I think that’s a good thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Because I think that no longer can we deny that we’re up against some benign force out there. I mean, there are people on the other side that have a very different vision of this country than we do, and you better stand up and fight for it. And I think he’s given us great cause to do it.

I mean, you just look at this comeback, and it’s historically – we’re living in a very historic moment. We’re talking about it in real time. But when people look back, I mean, he was in office, out of office, came back. That’s only happened one time. Nobody alive now has ever seen that. He came back against a backdrop of people trying to throw him in jail, bankrupt him, and assassinate him, and he’s back.

And I think the difference now, I wasn’t there in the first term, but there is a definite recognition, even of some who aren’t as aligned as I am with President Trump, that he earned it and that his policy agenda and his nominees should get a fair shake. I don’t know if that was true the first time. I don’t think it was true the first time.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

American Realism and Foreign Policy Shift

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: But the Senate is changing, and I think there’s an ascending view that I subscribe to, which is sort of American realism. It’s much more restrained diplomacy. If you have to move on something that’s a legitimate threat to your core national interest, you do it swiftly, decisively. But this kind of meandering foreign policy, where you can be everywhere all at once, all the time, that sort of predated the last decade. I think that’s not the future, but it’s still an ascending view. But I do think the Senate is changing, and I think President Trump has sort of led the way on that.

And just look at the conversation we’re having now about trade. A lot of these things that were – after the Cold War ended and Soviet communism was defeated in that way, there was never really an adjustment. In many ways, Europe, Japan, we allowed them to get back up on their feet, whether it was protection through NATO or these disastrous trade deals. But they had a purpose at the time, was for them to get up and be able to stand up on their own two feet. Well, that time is over.

We shouldn’t have ridiculous trade deals. So President Trump wielding tariffs to get a better deal – that’s working. We’re getting record investment, trillions of dollars in this country. And then also, look at NATO now. They’re actually – we’ll see if they actually do it. But one of the reasons why I went to the Munich Security Conference, I don’t have the same foreign policy view of most people that go there, but I wanted to tell them the truth, not what they wanted to hear.

I think so many like the adulation and the red carpet that gets rolled out and you’re treated as American hero or whatever over there. That wasn’t my purpose. I wanted them to understand that there’s a shift happening. We are pivoting. We’re going to protect the homeland. We understand China, the 21st century is going to be defined by this great competition with communist China. We have to win that fight. And you need to stand up on two feet much more than you ever have before. And I think it’s important that more people deliver that message.

So I do think that’s part of the transformation of the Republican Party right now and also rooted – and I’m very comfortable in this place now because I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. My dad works seven days a week in the midnight shift. This ability to connect with working people, to fight for them, not the corporate interest, but the people who are working hard, who just want their kids to have a better life than them, they’ve been vilified for so long. They’ve been looked over in so called flyover country for too long. Their time is now.

And I think President Trump has a very unique way of connecting. And as I said earlier, I think what people want right now more than anything is authentic leadership. And so it’s incredible time to be there. And I think this is where it’s headed and I’m just grateful to be a part of it.

The Democratic Party’s Direction

TUCKER CARLSON: As honestly or sort of impartially or non-emotionally as you can, can you describe where you think the Democratic Party is going?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I don’t think they’ve hit rock bottom yet.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Actually, I think that you look at the people that are filling up the arenas, it’s Bernie Sanders, it’s AOC, it’s this Mandami guy who’s literally a communist running. He’s going to be the mayor of New York, probably looks that way. So I think they’re still searching. They don’t have a message, they don’t have a messenger. They’re still obsessed with President Trump, with Trump derangement syndrome. They’ve sort of learned nothing from the last go around with all this.

And things that used to be – I mean there used to be kind of a Washington consensus, which isn’t always, it’s usually a bad thing. But there used to be kind of a belief that borders were important. I don’t think they believe that anymore. I think if you really press the rank and file Democrat in Congress, they believe in mass migration. They don’t think that lines on a map are arbitrary.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’ll never win with that.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right, I know. And I don’t think they’ll get away from it. So I think you saw some self reflection after the election, but they’re falling back into the same.

TUCKER CARLSON: Migration has made everyone’s life worse in this country.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It has. And I think that you look at the Overton window on that now versus 10 years ago when President Trump came down the escalator. It’s pretty dramatic in a good way. So I think that oftentimes we get caught up in the daily news cycle, what is the thing of the day. But if we take a step back and we look at how the Republican Party has been transformed, how the country has sort of woken up from this fever dream – I talk a lot about in the book – I think that’s all positive.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: There’s more work to do, but I’m optimistic.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s wise. You’re taking a bigger view of it and a lot has changed. A lot. And it’s good. Here’s my one.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And by the way, real quick, the other thing that’s different – when I was growing up, in college in the 90s, this political correctness thing was sort of beginning and I saw it. And sometimes I would take classes knowing that I would – I was even a contrarian back then because I loved a good debate. And I’ve always been pretty conservative. I always was a little jealous of liberals in that they kind of had the high ground on free speech.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yeah.

The Fight for Free Speech and Economic Opportunity

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: You know, they were right. And I’m glad now and particularly proud of the work, as you know, we’re talking about in the book. I think we have taken that mantle now. They’ve abandoned it. They don’t believe in it anymore. It’s all about power and control.

And I think if we maintain this path of fighting for people’s right to say things, even if you don’t agree with them, is a very important thing for us to maintain the connection with this new coalition that’s been created in the Republican Party. So the number of people who believe.

TUCKER CARLSON: That on either side is really small because speech is of course, a threat to the people in power no matter what side they’re on. That’s why liberals went from being, you know, big donors to the ACLU to controlling Facebook. So because they took power. So nobody wants to be challenged.

I think only the truly principled, I think you’re in the group, are willing to accept challenge to their power without trying to shut people up. My concern is that Mandami, who I think is a, you know, I don’t think much of him, however, I think his main appeal may be quality of life worries that people have.

Do you think, I know this has been a big issue for you, but there aren’t that many of you actually in the Senate talking about people’s lives. Somebody in power needs to address declining quality of life in this country or else there would be a lot more Mandamis.

The Economic Reality Facing Young Americans

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, I agree with that. And you know, I think especially for young people who are coming out of college with a lot of debt. They don’t, you know, they may not be able to afford a house or have a family the way things are tracking until they’re in their 30s somehow. That’s a very different America and not a better one.

And I think part of it is understanding the moment that we’re in and you think about the ability to have a one income family. Very difficult to imagine now for a lot of people and people can choose to do it or not do it, but you ought to be able to have the option.

I think a lot of opportunity hopefully will come for bringing manufacturing back. There are twice as many people that work in government than have manufacturing jobs in this country. I think the number was 90,000 factories have left the United States since NAFTA. That’s dramatic.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think Perot was right. There was a giant.

Missouri’s Independent Spirit and Historical Context

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And by the way, what’s interesting about Missouri, you know, I’m in Maine with you. Maine and Missouri have a connection because the Missouri Compromise, of course, Missouri and Maine came in at the same time, although Missouri took a little bit longer.

And on the state seal, there’s a belt buckle that holds the seal together. And it was basically telling the federal government that we retain our independence and we may leave because you’re screwing us over. So we would unbuckle the buckle and, not that I’m advocating for that. I’m just saying even back then.

TUCKER CARLSON: Forty years later, they found out no one’s allowed to leave.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: But the point is, even back then, Missourians were skeptical of a government telling them how to live their lives a thousand miles away. So I think that it’s important for us to kind of forge this path where we are providing more opportunity for people. But Missouri’s always had this kind of independent streak.

If you look at the states where Perot did particularly well, it was in places like Missouri, Pat Buchanan, somebody that I listened to growing up. When I was, my dad worked seven days a week on the midnight shift. It also meant that he was home after school, so he could go to my games and I played a lot of sports.

Or we would watch Crossfire on the one television, when you had one television in the living room. And I would watch Jack Kemp and Pat Buchanan kind of thunder away. And they were fighting for the little guy. They were fighting for the little guy. And he had Ronald Reagan, of course, then trying to build this coalition, too.

So anyway, the punchline is, Perot was right. This “giant sucking sound” was real. Letting China into the World Trade Organization was a huge disaster, but it doesn’t need to be that way. And I think that’s the hope with advanced manufacturing, that we can bring those jobs home. It won’t look the same as the 1960s. It won’t be an assembly line in Detroit in that way.

But I just think people are looking for more opportunities. And I think the people that I grew up around, their parents were truck drivers or cops or factory workers. And I didn’t know any lawyers growing up. Not one. But I thought the law gave structure, which kind of, and people, real people, normal people, to pursue their dreams, whatever that was, which is why that’s what I pursued.

But the people I grew up around, they got dealt this double whammy, which was their jobs went overseas, and then as they’re looking for new jobs, those wages get undercut through illegal immigration and mass migration. So it’s no wonder people are looking for something different. And we better be the ones that provide that.

And I think that we’re on the right track, but there are warning signals out there that we better be the ones with the solutions, because Mandami is kind of a kook and a commie, but maybe there’ll be somebody smarter than him.

Democratic Presidential Prospects and Party Direction

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s the biggest city in the country. So last question about that. I know you’re probably not going to drinks with Democrats every night or anything, but are there any Democratic members of the House or Senate who you’re pretty sure going to run for president? Because, of course, it’s wide open on the other side.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Oh, yeah. You can look at the theatrics right now, the ones that are stomping on the floor a little bit more. I think, you know, Cory Booker is making some moves, actually.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I mean, if you’re Chris Murphy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. So and look, I think in many ways.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we’re safe, right?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think in many ways, though, it is a competition to be the greatest resistor. That’s what’s going on right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: And I don’t think that’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But that’s such a dead end.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I know, but they think it is. And it’s also why some of these nominations, which are, you know, I think the last time we had to vote, roll call vote on the ambassador to Uruguay was 50 years ago. But we’re doing all that now because the Democrats view this sort of obstruction as the path.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t think that Uruguay is a more important ally than it was 50 years ago.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No, that’s not why we’re voting.

TUCKER CARLSON: The stakes aren’t higher in Uruguay.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Right? Yeah. So I think that there’s, in Chuck Schumer, by the way, I don’t know that he runs again in two years, but he hears the footsteps of AOC.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, of AOC.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: So that’s where the party’s going. They’re terrified of that. They’re terrified of it because that’s where the energy is on their side and by the way, that’s good news for us because it’s just crazy stuff. It’s the same old race essentialism and control. And it just, you know, this Green New Deal nonsense that would last forever.

The Disappearance of Traditional Democrats

TUCKER CARLSON: If you had a modern Democrat, which is to say an old fashioned Democrat.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Harry Truman, maybe.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, no, but that’s exactly right. Or the earlier version of Dick Gephardt from your.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: The, you know, pro life, pro labor, that guy could win.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think they’ve all been run out. This is a good example actually, in Missouri. So Missouri was this ultimate bellwether state for 100 years and picked the winner, I should say, every time but once. Yes, Adlai Stevenson, the only exception. It was great bellwether. There were rural Democrats everywhere, everywhere. In fact, most of outstate Missouri was blue with pro life, pro gun Democrats. They’re all gone. They’re literally all gone.

TUCKER CARLSON: Probably pro labor.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, that too. And you can’t find them anywhere in Missouri. They’re just in St. Louis and Kansas City and they’re pretty radical. They’re competing to be the most, during COVID you had the mayor of St. Louis, the mayor of Kansas City competing to be the most woke COVID restrictor in the country. That was the competition.

So the incentive structure is really messed up for them right now because the only way you do it is if you’re one of the lefties.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everyone hates that stuff.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. But in their circle, again, I think this is the Trump derangement syndrome stuff. It’s so hard for them to get rid of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do donors push that on them, do you think?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Oh, yeah, I think that they think, I mean, Soros, what Soros has funded, they chase that. Look at the prosecutors that did all the damage across the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: You know, you talk about an arbitrage of the system. Very little money went to disrupting a lot of our lives. So yeah, but I think, but now in Missouri, there’s literally no Democrat representing rural Missouri. And the margins in my last race in some of the counties, say in the boot heels, 80 to 86% of the vote.

Electoral Dynamics in Missouri

TUCKER CARLSON: Really? What were your numbers in St. Louis and Kansas City?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I’m from the St. Louis area, so in St. Louis county, which is where I live, was able, you know, I’ve been more effective of kind of holding the line. But you know, in St. Louis City it’s, you know, 80, 20, you’re going to lose. But it’s, the city itself is 300,000. The metro area is 3 million, but St. Louis county has a million people.

You just basically hold on as much as you can appeal to people, and then you’re running up the score everywhere else in a dramatic way. It used to be the dynamic was they did much better in rural Missouri, and then they get into the cities, and then that’s what would get them over the top at midnight by a certain number of votes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, boy, that pattern you just described is everywhere.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Everywhere. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does that stay the same for a while?

Looking Ahead: Redistricting and the New Coalition

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I think so. For a while. I tell, I warn people all the time that nothing is static. I think that’s the dynamic that we’re in, at least for right now. And I don’t think, I don’t know how to gauge the midterms, Tucker. I don’t know the House races as much, and the redistricting thing is going to have a play.

But the one thing that’s true is the Democrats have gerrymandered these seats for a long time. They’ve got nowhere else to go. So and by the way, the idea that you don’t have to be a citizen to be counted in the census is insane. California would lose seats, no doubt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can that be fixed?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, it could be. You could ask the question on the census and only that would be counted then in the next census cycle. Now, there would be legal challenges of that, but I think you can do that. And by the way, it has enormous impact on federal dollars and how they’re doled out.

But I think if the redistricting will affect the numbers, so I don’t know about the midterms. I have confidence that we’ll hold the House, the Senate will remain in Republican hands. There’s just not that many seats that are in battleground territory.

But longer term, I think we’re in a strong position, but we’re also going to have to be very mindful, which I love, that we’ve got this new coalition that’s kind of, I joked when I spoke at the convention last year that you had Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, and normal people on the stage. This is exactly the party that I’ve been waiting for my whole life, and we’ve got it. And so I want to work as hard as I can to help you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just don’t want the party of Bill Gates to steal economic populism from you. That’s when you lose.

The Democrats’ Strategic Dilemma

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. No, and they’ll. Some people will be smart enough to understand it. I think, again, they’re, they’re. You notice how, like Beto O’Rourke and all these guys are, like, cussing more often. It’s like.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’ve noticed.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It’s like, could, if you can be like. It’s like faking authenticity. I know, it’s ridiculous.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’d love to talk to Beto’s wife. I haven’t never met her, but I wonder if she’s impressed, because I bet she’s not.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I bet she thinks it’s phony as hell.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet she really does. I bet nobody has more. I’m just guessing. I’ve never talked to Mrs. O’Rourke and I doubt her name is Mrs. O’Rourke, but she’s got another name because she’s so embarrassed. But I bet she’s more contemptuous of him than anything.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah. So I think they, they’ve, again, I don’t think they’ve fleshed all this out yet. And I think they’re in a real troublesome spot. Right. You’ve got this kind of Star Wars bar of leftists that they can’t get out of the room, and it’s pushing everybody to the left. And I think people will reject that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there was no moment because, remember, for the month after the election, there were Democrats, including Gavin Newsom, who were like, “really, this isn’t working for us and we should try something new.” That never went anywhere now.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: I mean, Rahm Emanuel is kind of talking that way. Yeah. As a diagnosis. But I don’t. But in order to get the nomination, that, like, post mortem assessment will get you nowhere. Because I don’t think their base wants to hear that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Their base wants them to fight over everything. Right now, that’s not where the American people are. That’s the good news. Right. Because Trump got a mandate. He got the population.

TUCKER CARLSON: You see that in the Senate.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oof.

Legislative Victories and Senate Dynamics

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah, it’s in. And for that place, you know, for that place to operate with 60 votes, that’s a, that’s a different environment. Right. Like we’re, we’re dealing with. And by the way, been very successful, I think, of the three stages so far, which is getting Trump’s team in place. Cabinet added a thousand on that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Reconciliation, which, by the way, not a lot of people have they talked about the one big beautiful bill, the name. But, like, you’ve got for the first time, school, school choice provisions in there, more for working families with 529s to save. You’ve got no tax on tips, no tax on overtime for the, for the truck driver that’s working overtime or the waitress that’s working two shifts. Like that’s a big deal. Like that’s, that is.

Now there’s other stuff in there, but you front loaded money for border, like for deportations, more ICE agents and beds, like that’s all in there. You front loaded a lot of that. So there’s a lot of wins there. And then we get to rescissions, which, which I handled. And that was, you know, probably more difficult than it should have been. But we got it done.

Those are the three big things so far. So there’s more to do. But I think we could do all that with 51 votes. Right. Because of just the way the statutes are drafted. But if the Democrats are really in this mode of resistance, it’s going to be, who knows how this all plays out. Because right now Chuck Schumer doesn’t see an incentive of working with Republicans or anything. And I think that ultimately burns them.

Long-Term Political Implications

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, Trump after the midterm is, you know, can’t run again. So at that point, if the Democrats message is “we hate Trump,” does that get you the presidency?

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: No, I think it’s a, I think you’re right. It’s a midterm play. But they have long term problems because that is defined their party. And in many ways this lawfare that was exhibited was all just a symptom of the same problem. Right. Is they’re singularly obsessed with President Trump and every policy position he takes, they take the opposite again.

Tried to throw him in jail, censoring anybody who believes, believes the same thing he believes. So they got a, they have a real problem. It’s a structural problem that I don’t, it’s easy to diagnose. I don’t know how they fix it because there are no Dick Gephardts walking around.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Or Bill Clinton.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, right. Senator, thank you very much for spending all this time. The book is “The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court,” which you have done.

SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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