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Aug. 25, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
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Full Court Press: Sen Eric Schmitt Writes New Playbook for the Left's Lawfare | TRIGGERED Ep.270
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Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
Today we'll be joined by Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt, who's been on the front lines of all the biggest fights for freedom on Capitol Hill.
And before that, he was the state attorney general of Missouri, where he was at the center of some of the biggest litigation in taking on the Biden administration madness.
And he's telling those stories in his new book, The Last Line of Defense.
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Guys, joining me now, author of the new book, The Last Line of Defense, Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt.
Eric, great to have you back on here.
It's good to be with you, my friend.
So your new book, The Last Line of Defense, has a quote that sort of jumped out at me.
We're on the front line of freedom.
and the last line of defense until Trump could return.
Can you walk us through what that felt like being in the trenches during sort of the dark days of the Biden administration?
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason I wrote the book, and you can get it on Amazon right now, is that...
deliberately open borders, DEI struggle sessions, and a censorship enterprise so vast that the Biden administration created, it's the biggest affront to the First Amendment we've ever seen in our country.
And so it kind of fell to some relatively unknown folks.
You'd throw me into that lot that had to stand up and fight back to kind of hold the line until the Calvary arrived a few years later.
But man, it was, what I try to do with the book is to lay that out.
So whether it was during COVID, we took on, We had the student loan debt forgiveness case, we took that to the Supreme Court and we won.
And then we had the censorship case, of course, that before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before we had these congressional hearings, kind of laid out to the American people what they were doing to silence conservatives.
And also we took the deposition, I know you'll find this interesting, of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI guy in Northern California pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story, you know, on the eve of the election in 2020, they were not like apologizing for any of this stuff.
We just, they got caught red-handed, but the leviathan of government agencies engaged in censorship was crazy.
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about this.
I mean, you were sort of Missouri Attorney General before that.
I didn't really know you as well in that role.
And then you got into the Senate.
And I think, again, you became, you know.
If not the one of the MVPs of the United States Senate, certainly, you know, once JD left, you know, I know we joke that, you know, that's a very small pool of you know you know sort of america first rock stars in there but but nonetheless you are the cream of the crop there but as a g in missouri uh you had a big one well arguably probably the biggest for a lot of the people in this audience uh which was missouri versus biden the case that exposed really the censorship industrial complex that was meta and
all of these guys basically working with the biden administration to censor what they didn't like not what was factually inaccurate just whatever they didn't like What was the moment when you realized the scale of, you know, government's collusion with big tech to suppress speech?
You know, what did the victory there feel like, knowing that you were directly fighting for the heart of the America First movement?
Yeah, and what I tried to lay out in the last line of defense was, um, that's a great question to ask because when I was AG, you saw the landscape.
But in that case in particular, um, I remember Jin Psaki was at the podium.
She would talk about how they were flagging, you know, posts for Facebook.
They started to float this idea of a disinformation governance board.
If you remember that, Mary Poppins, whoever that was.
Um, yeah, the censorships are.
The censorships are talking about, hey, the government's going to decide what the truth is and what you can see and what you can see and what you can't see.
And so we took a leap of faith.
We saw enough.
We thought there was something there.
We filed the lawsuit in May of 2022.
And we made a strategic decision then.
to seek discovery before we sought the injunction, which is kind of unusual.
Normally with those cases, you try to get the government to immediately stop what they're doing, but we knew it was going to get a lot of scrutiny.
People would call it a conspiracy theory, which they did.
So we needed more evidence.
So the moment that it occurred to me what was really going on was when we got that discovery.
So we got the discovery.
We got thousands and thousands of pages of emails, text messages of all these government agencies and the highest levels of government communicating with executive senior executives at Facebook.
They had special secret portals.
The CDC was providing words and phrases to these big tech companies to censor, to throttle, to deplatform.
And they started this operation, as we found out, on day three of the administration.
They were not messing around.
They wanted to control the narrative.
And so what the book is, it really kind of takes you behind the scenes of what those depositions looked like.
We took the deposition of a guy named Brian Scully.
People probably never heard of this dude.
He was in charge.
He was one of the high-ranking guys at CISA.
What is CISA?
It's a cybersecurity agency.
Well, they had their whole apparatus aimed at the American people.
Anybody who dared to question the efficacy of mass or efficacy of the vaccines or whatever.
it was, they were willing to shut the American people down.
And then I think it probably culminated, of course, with the deposition of Anthony Fauci.
It's only the second time he sat for a deposition.
And we kind of try to take you behind the scenes there.
He was enamored with lockdowns.
He would tell friends that masks didn't work and then tell the American people you had to wear a mask in order to go to school.
It's just crazy what they were willing to do.
And I think that case exposed it.
Then, of course, Elon Musk buys Twitter and then you have the hearings and the rest is history.
But what I took from it, Don, is that in those moments when it's kind of dark and it felt like.
maybe this wasn't going to be the outcome.
You know, the left was just going to continue to march forward.
You need courage to stand up and fight in that arena.
And when you do, you realize that what people are really looking for is authentic leadership.
And I think your father has tapped into that in ways that I've never seen.
of any president in my lifetime.
He connects with real people.
He's built this broad coalition.
So as much as we're on the march now, I think those are all great things.
We've got to be willing to fight in court also to win these fights.
Yeah.
I mean, the law fair, you know, I'm obviously, I've been a big recipient of that.
I mean, it feels like, hey, before the media was really good at sort of just or the left, they're sort of one and the same, but the left was really good.
They controlled media, they controlled academia.
Once they started losing their grasp on that because the pendulum just, they went so far with the insanity and they couldn't stop and they just couldn't help themselves, it was like, well, they just adapted.
They changed their plan.
That became all about the lawfare.
It was working with those same social media companies.
I remember it early on.
I think in my father's early in the first term and even perhaps during the campaign, I'd be like, yeah, they're censoring me.
Well, how do you know that?
It was like, well, because yesterday I was getting 5,000 retweets a post.
Today I'm getting 4, not 4,0000, 4, like single digits, 4.
And I was like, nothing changed other than obviously someone was messing around with the algorithm.
It took a while for other people to kind of catch on to that.
I know the Missouri case versus the Biden administration, I guess it was you and Jeff Landry, who was the AG in Louisiana.
Of all the Republican AGs, of all the Republican governors that could have done something, how come you guys were the only ones that actually bothered to step up?
I mean, it seemed like there were plenty of other opportunities for other great states, perhaps even states that larger populations or could carry more weight.
How come everyone else just sat back and let that happen?
Well, there's a lot of people that, you know, there's a lot of different fronts in this fight and people took different roles.
But I think Landry and I certainly were of the two most aggressive in pushing back.
I think we intuitively understood what was at stake.
This wasn't just a case here or there.
This was, if you looked at the full landscape, this was an effort to remake America.
And they believed and they used, you know, they used the misinformation and disinformation.
They used January 6, all these building blocks they were using to sort of other half of America.
And then they would sometimes say the things out loud.
You know, you remember, you know, call people deplorable or call them trash.
And then, of course, President Trump is in every tweet happened from like the entire Democrat leadership and the media.
It was like the same three catchwords, whatever they were.
And they were in every tweet.
It's like, oh, they sent the memo out and everyone tweeted basically at the same time.
It was so contrived, but I guess you had to go through some of it to understand that.
You know, like with Russia, Russia, Russia, with me, even they were going after me.
I'm like, obviously I didn't do anything wrong.
We know that now.
It didn't matter.
And I was like.
There must have been something.
You know, like I literally wanted to believe that, oh, well, if the FBI's saying it, you know, maybe some guy got into a room that I'm in and that, you know, therefore there's this at least notion that I'm somehow compromised.
I'm like, I literally wanted to believe that these institutions were actually doing what's right by America as opposed to being totally weaponized, functioning as the marketing arm of the Democratic Party or whatever.
I literally was like, there must have been something wrong.
Like, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and like, they deserved none of that.
I think we all know that now, but it took them literally trying to put me in jail for treason, you know, crime punishable by death to be like, wait a minute, maybe it's just all BS.
Well, and I think also the original, the original sin.
was President Trump running in the first place to them because they knew he represented something so different than what Permanent Washington is.
And I see it now in the Senate and it's the things that I'm fighting against, but it's real.
Like, he's a real threat to them.
And so in 2016 they concocted this that we know now, like, by the way, you know why they were fighting so hard to make sure he never got back into office.
Look at the disclosures that Tulsi Gavard is now making, right?
The things that they never wanted the American people to see, which was George Soros, very much a part of this narrative from the get-go, the Steel dossier then, and then it becomes laundered through the intelligence agencies through Comey, Brennan.
Clapper, they made it an official narrative and they tried to sideline, they couldn't believe that he won in 2016 then, then they tried to sideline his administration through this ridiculous narrative that was totally made up and they knew it wasn't true.
And then, of course, you know, President Trump's out of power.
His allies are out of power.
We're fighting back.
And then they make the decision, you know, two days after he announces he's running for re-election in 2024, guess what happens?
The assistant DA in Atlanta, who has nothing to do with the White House Council's office, goes to the White House Council's office.
Tish James begins her thing.
Jack Smith, who's a notoriously He gets brought on to do what he did.
And then the number three person of DOJ joins Alvin Bragg's office and the DA's office, which is totally insane.
So it's all coincidence, Eric.
It's just all coincidence.
I know you lived it.
I was up at that trial, you know, I went up to New York and saw you there.
I just couldn't believe this was America.
Like this is, this happened somewhere else, but they were willing to do it here.
And the reason why I write the book, Last Line of Defense, which you can get on Amazon, is to say, we gotta remember that.
And we gotta know what it takes to fight back and win, because they're never gonna stop.
And, you know, I think of it, my job now or the job I had then, it's a lot easier to go to ribbon cuttings and get the pats on the back.
A lot of people.
That's what they do.
That's not me.
And I think you need courage in the arena to fight back if you believe in this country.
And I think your dad in particular has given.
One of the biggest changes I think he's made to the Republican Party is he's given everybody the confidence to fight back because if you fight you could win because the American people are with us.
Yeah, we've been playing an entirely different game than the Democrats for far too long.
And the fact that now that we're playing the same game, they can't even handle it.
And it's interesting.
I mean, you talk about the stuff that you were able to get both in, you know, the case versus the administration when you were AG at Missouri, but how much information I mean, I know you did the subpoenas and we're going to pretend they probably went along with that process.
But when they did the Durham report, report investigating the Russia-Russia thing.
None of the things that they found in the last two weeks are even remotely included, you know, two, three weeks, whatever it is.
How did that not end up in that?
How can you go through, you know, the entire Mueller investigation and those things don't make it into it?
Frankly, I'm actually shocked that some of those things even still exist.
How much do you think it went beyond what we found recently that they were just smart enough to burn or hide or never perhaps put in paper?
Well, I think that, you know, they were so confident that they were going to win again that they didn't, I guess they didn't burn this stuff, honestly.
But I think it's the tip of the iceberg.
I mean, just one example, the Missouri versus Biden case.
They gave us some stuff and we had.
a lot of stuff, but we found out later, actually, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, when they did the Twitter files, that they lied to us about the stuff, the executives that were actually involved, that's say Twitter at the time.
Now, Elon Musk fired a lot of them.
One kind of interesting note just to show you how incestuous this was.
There's a guy by the name James Baker, who's James Baker?
James Baker was the general counsel of the FBI at the end of 2016, most certainly was aware of the Russia Gate nonsense.
He then, when President Trump gets into office for the first time, he leaves, does a sten of a think tank, then he becomes the general counsel at Twitter, right?
So when the Hunter Biden laptop thing's happening, he's the guy saying, yeah, we shouldn't talk about this or we should silence it.
And he does.
And he knows it's right.
And they're still talking about it.
He knows it's right.
and the FBI knew it was real.
They had it in 2019.
They knew it was real.
So, it's just one kind of story of how intertwined all this was in the kind of the administrative state, deep state, whatever you want to call it, and why it really takes a, you know, unrelenting desire for us in saving this country to upend it.
One of the things I appreciate about President Trump is he kind of, he's put together a team of disruptors around him.
And very, I think different than the first term, the time away in this nonconsecutive second term, he knows exactly.
what he wants to do, who he wants to do it with.
And I think we're seeing a lot of those, the fruits of that labor right now.
So I think it's great.
But, but yeah, at the time, man, it was kind of lonely, but there was a lot of pride I take in pushing back and winning in some of the most consequential cases and issues of our time and providing enough time, I think, like I said, for the Calvary to arrive and President Trump to win again.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it was so important.
Do you think anything ever happens to those guys?
You know, I know, there's the highest level offenders and they all got pardoned by the Biden administration and stuff like that.
Although it seems like there's a lot of things that I don't know that they could necessarily get pardoned for., but do you think some of those lower level offenders who are just as culpable and perhaps even more so because they were the minions actually doing the work knowingly, do you think there's any accountability to those guys ever?
Or do they just get a job at CNN, MSNBC, or whatever it is, and they get to talk about ethics and democracy and outrage when they're the worst offenders ever.
Yeah, they get to work at the Kennedy School and lecture on the clients for a lot of money.
I actually think, and I have an op-ed out today, about the path to indictments for Comey, Clapper, and Brennan., I actually think so the legal issue is, you know, Obama ironically has presidential immunity because of the case that Jack Smith brought against your father.
And my Solicitor General, this is kind of cool.
My Solicitor General was a guy by the name of John Sauer.
He was on the Trump legal team, then of course argued that case for the Supreme Court and is now the Solicitor General of the United States.
So I think part of what we were able to establish in Missouri was this kind of ecosystem that's now helping out the country.
But to answer your question, I think there is a path.
So Obama may have immunity for the time he was in office.
I don't know what he did after he was out of office.
Was he part of a conspiracy?
We don't know.
I don't know that yet, but maybe we'll find out.
But there's no immunity for Clapper, Comey, and Brennan.
And if this was in fact an ongoing conspiracy, that's the fact that gets you out of the statute of limitations.
And I think there ought to be indictments.
So we'll see where that goes.
But the other thing too is, I think moving forward, we ought to do things like if an individual government bureaucrat's part of this censorship effort, they ought to be able to be sued by the person whose First Amendment's rights have been violated.
I've got legislation.
100%.
Yeah.
You know, because I think that changes the incentive structure for sort of the lower level bureaucrat that's being told to do this.
they might say, you know what, I actually, I don't want to be personally.
I mean, if you knowingly did those things and he's like, if he's knowingly going out of his way to push a lie, using and manipulating an entire, you know, hundreds of millions of people on Twitter or whatever it may be, I mean, that's a pretty significant thing, especially when you talk about, you know, these are from the same people that talk about, you know, democracy dies in darkness.
We got to preserve democracy.
Trump's the biggest threat to democracy.
I'm like, I don't know.
Seems like everything you guys have been doing.
are literally the greatest threat to American democracy since its founding.
Yeah, that's right.
And I got that in the book, Last Line of Defense.
You can get it on Amazon, is that their playback, they've had a playbook.
You know this.
You were a victim of it, which is create an emergency, other people aggregate power and then silence dissent.
That's their playbook.
And we have to have our own playbook.
And that takes courage.
That takes, you know, making sure we're playing in the courts and we're fighting to win.
Because we just saw it.
I think those four years were just an incredibly instructive, terrible time for the country where they were trying to, you know, you would lose your job.
Like you were a guy working overtime trying to provide for your family.
You were, you were going to lose your job because you decided not to get the COVID shot.
This is insane.
Like this was insane.
The student loan debt forgiveness deal, Biden had no authority to go do that but if Missouri they they acknowledged that and they were like we're gonna do it anyway because we're gonna buy a couple votes for a few weeks we'll get overturned after the election so we'll get the credit for it now and it doesn't matter I mean that's right so it's a wild time you know you had social unrest all this crazy stuff and and that's why I wrote it just like there's a There's a lot of lessons learned there.
There's a lot of good war stories, but more importantly, lessons learned for the future.
Yeah, so the book also talks about using the courts to dismantle the administrative state.
I mean, that's sort of a tactic that I'm sure the other side definitely did against us.
You know, we've never done that.
You know, can you explain to the average person, you know, why an unelected bureaucrat writing a regulation is so much more dangerous than a law that's actually passed by Congress?
Yeah, because there's no accountability, right?
Our system of government's based on this idea that the people of Missouri can send me there, they can send me home, or they can send me back.
Like if I vote on something, some regulation or whatever, or some law, they can hold me accountable.
Nobody knows who the deputy undersecretary of the EPA is that just issued a guidance letter that destroyed a family farm.
There's nobody accountable for any of that.
So that's why I think we got to get back to this place where you have greater accountability.
You get rid of the power that these unelected bureaucrats are doing.
It's, by the way, Don, why they're losing their minds over this administration's posture of firing a bunch of bureaucrats we don't need getting rid of a lot of regulations.
And I actually handled the resisions package in the Senate that we got done that clawed back, it defunded NPR, it defunded PBS.
It's something we've been talking about for a long time.
We finally did it.
It also took away 8.1 billion dollars worth of money that these NGOs, you know, think of the Guatemalan sex changes, think of the DEI trainings in Burma.
We finally pulled that back.
That had never been done.
And so again, that's the power of what this presidency is.
I think the band-aid President Trump got, I was honored to carry it.
But I think that's all part of this effort to dismantle the administrative state because these people aren't accountable to anybody and they know it.
And so they're willing to do things that an elected senator or representative wouldn't do because we know we are accountable.
It's actually sort of funny because with our people, sort of the idea of term limits is actually very popular.
And yet it's sort of the argument against term limits because those unelected guys, the chief of staff at a congressional office, By the time, you know, they become, you know, if someone's out, by the time they figure out the game, you're wondering, one of the few guys that sort of got into it and started fighting right away usually it takes years for people to either create the power or whatever it is that they can do that.
But the argument, I had this conversation with Orrin Hatch, ironically, before he passed.
And it was like, because I was such a believer and he goes, that happens.
You got a big problem because all the people in that office are going to know where everything is.
They're going to know how to do anything.
And they're going to be able to subtly sort of manipulate everything around it.
And there's a lot of truth in that.
And we've seen the damage that it's done.
So I know that's sort of an unpopular take, but it was sort of the one thing against term limits that I was like, that actually makes a lot of sense.
And I've seen how bad it can be.
Yeah, no, I think.
One of the things that's been floated is sort of, you know, term limits for some of these bureaucrats, you know, because they do get entrenched.
You know, I mean, kind of flip it on its head a little bit, too.
They get entrenched and you're right.
And they try to wait people out.
And one of the things.
and why, you know, one of the things President Trump's, I think, winning right now in court on is, of course, that the one person that's elected by the entire country, or JD Vance is too, but the two people, you know, elected, the president has the authority to make decisions on personnel and programming.
Right.
He's got scored some pretty big wins on that, be able to fire some people on the NLRB.
I think a lot of these things that USAID, those, you know, getting rid of those people is very important because just look at all the ridiculous, like people are crying outside of the office building, you know, like nobody ever did that for the factory that closeded in Missouri, the 1990s.
No, they told him to learn to code.
And ironically, AI is going to actually displace the guy that was telling the pipe fitter to learn to code because the pipe fitter still will have a job.
But the.
Yeah, there are no more concessions for that guy.
And you have twice as many people now that work in government that do in manufacturing, but that's kind of another issue.
But the point is that the president is resetting a lot of this stuff and being very aggressive.
And I think his legal team is doing a good job.
But again, that takes courage because the slings and arrows that come your way when you're willing to do it is real.
And again, one of the reasons I wrote the book.
So yeah, I mean another big one that you've been vocal on as you've been just a huge opponent of DEI and the ESG insanity.
How does your legal playbook address and combat this woke corporate ideology that's taken over so many businesses and institutions?
Yeah, I talk about this in the book, Last Line of Defense, is that you think about, let's just take the private sector.
And we had a hearing with Hermit Dillon on the Judiciary Committee, and I asked her, like, what are your plans?
And she's coming after corporate America on this stuff, which is good.
There need to be a few scalps on this of the companies that still want to do it.
I think largely it's in retreat, or it's just being called something else.
But Coca-Cola, for example, they had sessions where you had to to explain how you were going to be less white.
Like, this is insane.
Like, it's totally insane.
And then of course it was like a South Park episode, but it's really happening.
It's real.
Like in one of the biggest companies in the country, like they're doing this.
So that stuff's nonsense.
ESG, which is also, I think, now in retreat too because of some of the executive orders that have been undone by President Trump.
But at the time, this was kind of on the march.
Think about it.
President Trump withdraws from the Paris Accords, rightfully so.
And then you have these companies that just want to do this stuff.
There was something called the Net Zero Banking Alliance, where like, almost fifty percent of all the assets controlled in this country.
What they decided to do was that they were going to have a net zero carbon emission portfolio by 2050.
The only way you do that is if you start honestly denying creditworthy applicants on family farms who have too many diesel trucks.
That's the only way you get there, right?
And they were willing to do this.
So we, you know, launched an investigation into maybe that was antitrust behavior by those, you know, big banks colluding.
Well, they backed away.
So the point is when you see this stuff, you got to fight back.
And I would also say DEI and schools, we kind of turned the FOIA requests on their head.
I saw at the highest levels of government this insanity, but then even also say a superintendent in Springfield, Missouri, you wouldn't think that this stuff would have gotten there but they get they go to Washington they go to these trainings they start putting the the gender um the uh the gender unicorn in front of teachers they start putting the oppression matrix in front of kids kids were doing privilege walks think about this this is not like just in St. Louis or Kansas City this was in rural you know ex urban kind of areas and so we expose that and
I think what that did is it put some of those issues on the ballot and you saw some more conservative people elected to school boards but again this this era this kind of woke mind virus four years that gripped the country you needed people who were willing to fight back and and now it's in retrereat.
You've got somebody in office.
We've got a Republican House, Republican Senate.
We can do something about it.
But those are some of the dark times.
Can you codify some of those things?
Because the executive order is a great way to kind of kickstart things.
It's sort of like pulling the choke on a cold engine.
It gets it going.
But some of these, even the institutions that are acting good and they're not doing those things right now, I see them as putting their finger up.
Where's the wind blowing?
If it's a different administration, they'll go right back to those old policies.
How do you codify that in the Senate and the House?
I mean, you have it now.
Is there anything being done to actually lock those things into place?
Because it should never come back.
I mean, the fact that it ever happened in the first place is disgusting.
But, like, there's no doubt in my mind that if you get a Democrat president and Democrats at a Democrat House, they would put this thing right back into place, destroy every farm in Middle America, destroy every manufacturing, send all our jobs abroad.
You know, they'll do nothing about China polluting the world.
But, you know, it would be a disaster.
So how do we lock that into place to make it more permanent?
Well, one example is I'm on the Armed Services Committee.
We'll be voting on the, every year we do a National Defense Authorization Act.
Basically, how do you spend, you know, the $900 billion effectively we spend to protect our country?
Battery-powered tanks, Eric.
I heard that was a great idea.
That was a real thing.
I know, but that was a real thing.
I was like, wait, the battery in the desert and in a tank.
It just doesn't seem like it's a great idea.
Elizabeth Warren was very serious about this.
Good God.
But anyway, but we've got a provision in this year's NDAA.
I mean, it's great that President Trump did it.
To your point, Secretary Hexeth, they want to get rid of it, but we're actually going to enshrine it into law that you can't do this ridiculous DEI stuff.
And it's like, it shouldn't do it anywhere.
But think about our military.
It's supposed to, it has been one of the greatest meritocracies in the history of the world.
Like, you can be from anywhere and have a tick or tape parade if you do a great job and you're a war hero.
The idea that, like, you'd be dividing our military by race, by oppressor versus oppressed is counterintuitive.
It's why military members wear uniforms.
It's why they have haircuts.
It's all to build cohesion, not to separate people by this kind of cultural Marxism.
So that's one example of what we can do.
That I think is going to get done this year.
But there's a lot more to do, of course.
Well, you also sued the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, over their role in unleashing the COVID-19 pandemic.
That was really, I think, really a historic accountability measure.
Can you explain the importance of that legal action?
You know, what really comes from it in the end?
Well, so it's really interesting.
It's the first chapter in the book, Last Line of Defense, is...
We wanted to get to discovery.
So we filed the lawsuit.
We got around the sort of federal sovereign immunities act where you can't sue foreign countries.
We got around it.
And Missouri now has actually a $24 billion budget that we can use to seize Chinese farmland.
So that's like the next thing.
But I do think what's most interesting about that case is that when we filed it, it really exposed the sort of Trump derangement syndrome on the left.
Do you remember this?
It's like President Trump issued a travel ban on people coming from China, which was a smart thing to do.
He was called like the xenophobe and chief.
it was just totally insane they would they you know where did the lab where did the virus come from well maybe it came from at the wuhan institute of virology like yeah and it was oh boy i got canceled for this uh you know because i was like Of course it came from the lab that studies the exact virus in question at the exact point of the outbreak.
No, no, no, no.
It came from two feet outside of the lab.
I'm like, no, it didn't.
How would you know you're not a virologist?
I'm like, you don't have to be a virologist.
You just have to not be a freaking idiot.
Like, it's not that hard.
Of course it was right.
And every doctor went along with it like the sheep and said it was.
Oh, no, it can' came from the wet market twelve feet away.
Like the penguin mated with the bat.
You're like, what?
Like, no, there's a virology lab in Mumbai.
Literally, that's what they do.
So yeah.
So, but you think about that time, how crazy that was.
And so that's all happening.
And then you have the, I think another thing that kind of made people understand what the COVID experiment was all about with some people, the left was whenever, you know, like people, like the George Floyd thing happens, Black Lives Matter starts rioting at night.
Like they were everybody was being told by these local health officials, well, you shouldn't go outside, da da da da.
Except they wrote a letter.
If you're, if you're protesting qu, so-called systemic racism, the virus, we're not worried about the virus affecting you.
I think everyone kind of knew what the bullshit was.
I saw that in New York.
I go, no, no, no, because of the social construct of the way it's happening, you're now, you're immune.
I'm like, they were literally trying to make it, I'm like, I don't know, isn't contact, contact?
Apparently it's not.
Well, it's funny because we took, we took Fauci's deposition and, and we spent a lot of time actually asking him about the origins of COVID because he, like, what became very clear is that he spent a lot of time trying to discredit anyone, anyone who questioned his authority on these sorts of things.
And he was adamant it didn't come from the Wuhan Lab.
He's now, well, maybe it did.
Maybe it's, it's possible.
He's sort of changed his tune a little bit.
But I just think it was fascinating to sort of unwind that a little bit in his deposition.
One fun fact that we outlined in the book, of course, is we go on a lunch break and we come back.
This is an all day deposition.
And the court reporter sneezed and Fauci asked her if she had COVID, would you please put on a mask?
This was November of 2022.
This wasn't March of 2020.
This is the guy that was in charge of public health.
They had Fauci captured.
He hasn't been right about anything since 1980, including the age pandemic.
Like, how does this guy still have a job or is that exactly the point about the government and just you know not exactly let's just say not our finest i can guarantee you this guy was never the best at anything other than perhaps being the best bureaucrat meaning anyone else who put up a conflicting view that was probably right he'd figure out how to snake him anyone who got in front of a tv camera in front of him that wasn't agreeing with him 100 he'd snake him that's what he was good at but as a doctor he seems like a total incompetent Well, and think about this.
He tried to ruin.
There's a guy by the name of Jay Badacaria, who was actually a plaintiff in Missouri versus Biden.
He's now the head of NIH.
He was a plaintiff in lawsuit.
He was at Stanford.
He did, he proposed something so unbelievable that Fauci tried to ruin his career, which was that natural immunity was still a thing.
This great Barrington declaration that they made, these doctors said, you know what, natural immunity is still a thing even for COVID.
And they tried to ruin his life over it.
So it was just a, it's again a wild time that can never happen again.
But if you're going to, if you say that, you got to be willing to take action, which is what the book's about.
And I think what this whole movement about is, what, what, to me is so exciting.
This is the party, you know, I grew up in a working class neighborhood.
And I said to somebody I got, had the honor of speaking at the convention last year that, you know, it was a convention that had Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and like normal people.
I'm like, this is what I've been waiting for my whole life, a Republican party that's like normal and speaks for the people.
And I think to keep that coalition together that you guys have built and that allowed a popular vote win, we've got to be speak truth to power.
We've got to be willing to fight.
And that's what I've tried to do as AG and what I'm trying to do now.
So your office was also instrumental in blocking the, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but Biden's illegal student loan bailout.
How did Missouri?
stop such a massive federal policy.
I mean, it was hundreds of billions of dollars of just, you know, freebies.
And what does that show about the power of principled legal action?
Because I thought that was a really.
big deal.
The other side has definitely tried to utilize all those things against us, but this was a state that took on the federal government and did a great job stopping the insanity.
Yeah, well, I think everybody when Biden, which was a very like just obvious play to get votes in the midterms in 2022, said it's like, you know, running for class president, you know, it's like somebody promises free subway for everybody and then they get enough votes to win or something.
So he does this.
Everybody knows it's illegal.
The question, the legal question was, who can sue?
Like who has standing to sue?
And that's a very important part that we kind of walk through in the book.
Well, Missouri had this little known loan servicing agency called Mohila, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, which serviced loans.
So we said, well, look, Mohila might be affected by this.
So therefore, Missouri has standing to go sue you over it.
And that's what the case came down to.
If you listen to the oral arguments at Supreme Court, they knew he didn't have authority to do it, but could anybody actually have the standing to say, I was going to be injured by this?
And we made that argument and we affected and we won.
And we prevented literally a half a trillion dollars going out the door.
And I just found it so offensive growing up where I grew up that somehow the truck driver or the waitress was going to be paying for the student loan debt of a college theater professor at Harvard who hadn't paid it off in 30 years.
By the way, I agree with you.
The people who call themselves the elites and all this stuff and look down their noses at everyone else who's a hardworking American.
I was like, I don't know, if you're so freaking elite, shouldn't you be able to pay back your loans?
Like, it doesn't seem like you're all that elite.
It doesn't seem like you made the best decisions in life.
But that was one, that was an example too, where there were a lot of people, and that was, you know, I was running for the Senate at the time.
There were people saying, you know, like, I don't know, Eric, that might be, I don't know how the politics of that plays out or what that looks like.
I just felt like it was the right thing to do.
And at the end of the day, we were successful.
And I think, you know, the country's better off for it.
And for the people that, you know, in real America that work or, by the way, chose not to take out loans or work their way through college or doing something else or paid them back right right but the guys actually feel like the biggest shuck is the guy that actually did it took out the loans but actually paid it back and they're like wait a second i didn't have to pay that back i i sacrificed you know perhaps vacations and weekends and you know the cool toys i could have otherwise played with uh it it's insane but it seems like the biggest beneficiaries of the whole forgiveness were really those who
chose to take on you know get their underwater you know basket weaving doctorate uh you know it's like they chose in you know in their 20s to take on something that had no chance of ever paying back those loans anyway because there's you know there's there's no market for some of these things.
Gender studies, like, well, what are you going to do?
Like, unless you're going to become a professor, like, how many gender studies professors can there be in the world relative to how many students are getting master's degrees in gender studies?
And what can you do with it?
It's like, you know, you don't usually see that with, like, guys who get physics degrees or electrical engineers.
Like, those guys usually can pay back their stuff, it seems.
Yeah, sadly, we found out what all the gender study majors at Ivy League schools ended up doing.
They worked in the Biden White House, right?
They were they were all They were right.
They became admirals, you know, in the Biden Navy.
It's like, it's like, how?
We don't know how.
doesn't matter.
You know what?
This whole borders thing, these are just arbitrary lines on a map.
Let's just open up the border.
My professor talked about that at Harvard one time.
So like we lived it sadly, what these people ended up doing.
So you talk about the book as being a comprehensive playbook on how to fight back and win.
What's the next big legal battle that you see coming?
We talked a little bit about how sort of the law fair evolved from their sort of insanity controlling the media.
It was the next play.
The left seems to be really good at evolving.
and coming up with the next fight to take us on.
We're sort of always lagging back and catching up.
But what do you see as that next big battle?
And how can conservatives use lesson from the book to prepare for it?
So one of the things that's so important about President Trump winning in 2016 and then having another term now is, I mean, if you remember in the waning days, and I know you do, you were like on the front lines in 2016, people knew that there was going to be for sure one, maybe two, likely maybe three Supreme Court justices on the line.
And it, by the way, that's exactly what happened.
President Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices the first term.
I don't know that he'll get another one, but I also know that he appointed over 200 federal judges and he's well on his way.
The first four actually from Missouri that worked in my Attorney General's office.
So anyway, he's going to populate the bench with conservatives who view the law as it is, not how they want it to be.
Now Biden got in a bunch too.
He got over 200 in his four years.
So the point I'm making is that we have a playing field now that if we're smart and we're tough, we can actually go win.
And you're seeing this play out.
So if you think about the legal battles, and I know it's frustrating in the first, say, 60 days of Trump 47, there'd be some random district court win here that would block something here or there.
Judge Bosberg, who's a, you know, who's somehow who was on vacation and not the emergency judge got some of these high-profile cases, right?
But the truth is, as they've made their way up, by and large, President Trump and his legal team have been successful in winning at the Supreme Court.
They got rid of the universal injunctions in that birthright citizenship case.
The ability to fire and control programming has been largely upheld.
And then I think most specifically on immigration, President Trump has been victorious on being able to get rid of the temporary protective status.
I say this because We have to be, we established it.
We know what it is.
We just have to have the courage to implement it.
And I think the people that he has around him, they're really smart.
And we're winning a lot of these cases.
But I also think it should give the book, should give hopefully some inspiration to people.
Maybe they're a maybe they're an AG in another state or maybe they're just a citizen looking to get involved in their local school board.
The punchline is that the left for a long time was successful because they intimidated Republicans or Republicans were just doing other things or didn't act a certain way.
And now we know that if we can stand up and fight, we can win.
So I think those court battles are playing themselves out on this term of President Trump.
But largely, I think he's going to be successful.
And this four year run here is going to help kind of pull back the administrative state and allow people to kind of pursue their dreams with less of this nonsense in their face.
Yeah, no, I love that.
I mean, that message that we can win, but we actually have to fight like hell in the courts and otherwise.
There was always such a consequence to being vocal as a conservative.
You could say the most asinine stuff on Twitter as a leftist or whatever it was, Twitter 1.0 or in the media.
No consequence, no problem.
You say common sense conservative thought as a Republican and you'd get canceled.
I think we've gotten through a lot of that, you know, from the just the social, you know, I think people are largely over it.
They've seen the insanity and they're sick of it.
But, you know, that message to the millions of Americans who feel like they're fighting for sanity and freedom every day, what do you think that is?
Because again, it can be brutal, right?
The social consequence of stepping out.
You saw that, honestly, it's like, you know, the suburban housewife theory.
You see half the stuff that becomes, you know, the suburban housewife theory in America, and you're like, I don't know, man.
Like, I don't think any of them actually believe that.
But like saying it in line at Starbucks with all the other ladies on the way to yoga, you know, I guess it wins them social credit scores that, you know, they can't get elsewhere in life.
You know, well, I Yeah, I think the message, John, is, well, first of all, you're seeing this play out.
What's another front that will end up in the courts, but needs to start somewhere first is take redistricting.
Yeah.
Like for a long time, the Democrats have gotten all the juice out of this that they can.
You look at the gerrymandered, like Illinois my neighbor to the east you know it's funny that people from Texas were talking about fleeing to Illinois to fight redistricting and it's the most gerrymandered state in the country I don't know is there a republic it's like yeah well they the list of entire states that don't have a single Republican seat and then you look at the map it's like here and Yep, they have five feet just to cover it.
I mean, it's It's disgusting.
So when we fight, start fighting back, all of a sudden they're going to move and they're going to flee and it's the greatest threat to democracy.
I'm like, there's like seven or eight states that don't have a single Republican seat in them.
I don't know that there's any states that don't have a Democrat seat.
Right.
We're just going to start playing theying the game that the rules that they set up.
And you also, most people are shocked to find out you don't need to be a citizen to be counted in the census.
Yeah.
That ought to change, right?
California right now would have a lot, you know, a lot fewer seats right now if that were not the case.
And so I think we just got to understand what we're up against, because if they ever have what we have right now, they will end the filibuster in the Senate, they'll pack the Supreme Court, they'll federalize elections, they'll add DC as a union, maybe into the union, maybe Puerto Rico for a permanent majority.
So what we got to be willing to do is be tough, don't worry about what the Sunday shows are going to say, be willing, and I think JD Vance has always done a great job, our friend on this of just confronting the lies methodically.
And if you do that, I will say that in this, I spent a lot of time with President Trump on the campaign trail in the fall, a lot of time with Vice President Vance on the campaign trail.
What I saw was people who maybe voted Republican before, they then had a MAGA flag out, or they had a yard sign out.
Something has changed.
And I think President Trump is this singular political figure.
We've never seen anything like this, not in my lifetime.
I don't think anyone that's alive right now has seen anything like this, which is a desire.
He loves the country so much.
I mean, the time that I spent with him, he's your father, but the time that I've gotten to know him, he just loves America.
And he's willing to put it all on the line.
Almost took a bullet twice.
Twice.
In addition to all the law fair, in addition to trying to bankrupt your family, he stood, he stared all that down and came out on the other side and won.
And that should give everybody a lot of confidence that if you're willing to do it, not even to the degree of that, that we can save this country.
And that's what I've tried to do in the jobs that I've had, AG and now Senate.
And I think if we had more and more people doing that, this country would be an entirely different place.
And that's the hope.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
I mean, I know a big one for the group, you know, on here would be your book touches on the efforts to defend the Second Amendment.
What do you think is the most significant legal victory that you had in the two A space in that arena.
And how do you see the fight for gun rights evolving in these coming years?
Well, so there's two things.
Yeah, we played a large role in the New York Pistol and Rifle case, which effectively said that New York, New York had this crazy law that said, you can have a concealed carry permit if you show us you have a heightened need, like you're under threat or that's crazy.
The state shouldn't be determining whether or not you can protect yourself.
That's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.
These are rights that we have that God gave us that that our constitution protects and government is supposed to protect.
And so we won that at the Supreme Court.
That's a big win.
Also something that happened in Missouri during that crazy summer of 2020, the McCloskeys thing happened, right?
I was AG at the time.
So these Black Lives Matter rioter folks go across a private street.
They're out there protecting their home and a Soros prosecutor decided not to charge the rioters really that summer with crimes, but charge them.
And so we stepped in there.
And I think again, it's just finding these fights wherever they are and willing to stand up.
And if you do it, you can be successful.
And I think, you know, as far as the case law is concerned on Second Amendment, we've never been in a better position.
You know, you had the Heller decision, you know, 30 years ago.
And then, of course, this recent decision really cementeements people's second amendment rights to defend themselves defend their homes um you know and uh and protect their families and so i think we're in a good spot there but we've got to be vigilant well i i agree a hundred percent i mean so as we wrap up congress gets back to work in early september uh what should we be keeping our eye on and what you know what are the top priorities uh for the end of the year i think we're going to move forward i'm working on some rule changes in the senate so we can process some of these appointments quicker um we've got
to get president trump's team in place he's got his core team in but there's a lot of other people ambassadors key you know sort of undersecretaries things like that be working on that i think we'll have um you know we're going to end up with with a funding fight here at the end of the day.
But I think the good news is one of the benefits that not a lot of people are talking about on the one big beautiful bill was, of course, we're fighting for working-class families, no tax on tips, no tax on overtimes, no tax on social security, all those things.
But we've frontloaded money for the border.
We've frontloaded billions for the wall, billions for new ICE agents.
There's over 100,000 new applications for ICE agents in the last month, which is great.
We've also funded money for more deportations.
That debate, what the Democrats try to do is they try to hold military funding and border funding over our heads to get more social spending.
We've effectively now frontloaded.
border spending and military spending so that that can't be leveraged for them in this funding fight, which is a very smart strategic thing to do.
So we'll have kind of those fights, but I also think we should continue to do more on resisions to kind of claw back some of the waste, fraud, and abuse.
So I think all that stuff's coming.
And as much as the book is written, Last Line of Defense, waiting for the cavalry, which came, now we're on offense.
And I think it should be pedaled to the metal.
That's a really big deal.
The fact that we're finally on offense, not just always on our, resting on our heels as they're pummeling us in the corner.
That's a real big deal.
And you can see the TDS kicking in because they know that's exactly what's happening.
So Senator Eric Schmidt, thank you so much, guys.
Make sure to check out his new book, The Last Line of Defense.
Again, one of the truly guys that's been the tip of the spear pushing back on this insanity, Eric, without you.
I imagine a lot of this stuff we wouldn't even know.
And we certainly wouldn't have the wins that we've had.
So I want to thank you for all those efforts because I know it's not easy.
Thanks for all you do.
I appreciate you too.
Look forward to seeing you soon, man.
Thanks so much for tuning in, guys.
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