On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 29, Axios reported that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt had grown close to Vice President JD Vance and was being floated as a possible 2028 running mate.
By lunchtime, Schmitt was a meme.
What happened in between is one of the most complete political embarassments I’ve seen in my life. It’s also a surprisingly clear window into what Republicans think their job is right now.
The Trap
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Republicans convened to relitigate his investigations of Donald Trump. When Schmitt’s turn came, he asked a very specific question: Did Smith attend an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024?
The date was the whole theory. One day earlier, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had acknowledged her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. If Smith was in Atlanta that weekend, the insinuation went, maybe he was there to coordinate with the Georgia team prosecuting Trump.
Smith said no. He didn’t recall being in Atlanta, allowed that he might have flown through the airport on the way to Florida, and was certain about one thing: “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game.”
That’s when Schmitt sprang it. He held up a poster board of text messages from Smith’s team referring to a “Hawks game” and, per C-SPAN’s footage, told Smith: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff. So I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
Watch what happens next, because it’s the tell.
Smith said the board had come down too fast to read and asked to see it again. Ranking Member Dick Durbin asked that the witness be given a copy. Schmitt declined (”We’ll put it in a follow-up”), announced “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” moved on to other questions, and closed his time by telling Smith, “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
A prosecutor who is confident in his evidence hands it to the witness. Schmitt is a former Missouri attorney general. He knows that.
“I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself.” The exchange between Sen. Eric Schmitt, Jack Smith and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 29, 2026. Source: C-SPAN.
The Hawks Are Not The Hawkeyes
Once other senators insisted that Smith actually be allowed to look at the board, he didn’t need long. He recalled going to a University of Maryland women’s basketball game right around that time, when Caitlin Clark and Iowa came to College Park. The U.S. Marshals Service, which protected him, was there with him.
Then Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar asked the question that ended the gambit: “Could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes?”
It could. The “Hawks game” in those texts was the Iowa Hawkeyes, playing at Maryland, roughly 700 miles from Atlanta. Clark scored 38 points that night.
Schmitt complained that Klobuchar was trying to “rehabilitate the witness” on his time. Klobuchar answered that people “should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong.” Schmitt said he stood by the statement.
“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar said.
Within hours, MeidasTouch turned up the broadcast footage of the game showing Smith in the stands, and MS NOW confirmed it.
The receipts: Jack Smith at Iowa vs. Maryland, Feb. 3, 2024. Broadcast footage from the Xfinity Center in College Park, Md. Source: MeidasTouch, as confirmed by MS NOW.
And then there’s Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, seated right beside Schmitt. Her expression as Smith explained the Hawkeyes went viral almost immediately, and it’s easy to see why. It’s the face of someone doing the math on how this is going to look in the afternoon news cycle.
Sen. Katie Britt watches it unravel. Source: MS NOW, Sept. 29, 2026.
No Apology, Just A Pivot
Schmitt hasn’t apologized. He posted, “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” and told TMZ that “Jack Smith is not credible,” KCUR reported. In a later interview he insisted he had only asked whether Smith was in Atlanta, noting that Warriors-Hawks was “the only NBA game with a tip-off at 7:30 that night.”
Which is a very precise defense of a question nobody needed answered.
Others were less generous. Durbin said Smith “deserves an apology for these baseless and FALSE accusations.” And Fox News’ own Brit Hume wrote that Schmitt “brought this on himself and deserves the obloquy.” When you’ve lost Brit Hume, you’ve lost the room.
The Clip Was The Point
The mistake itself is almost ordinary. A staffer skims a text thread, sees “Hawks,” and builds a theory around a word. People make that kind of error.
But this was an unmistakably staged moment.
According to MS NOW’s reporting, right-wing influencers were ready to amplify it the instant it happened; podcaster Benny Johnson posted the exchange claiming Schmitt had “just caught Jack Smith perjuring himself,” and Sean Hannity shared it too. Both posts were later deleted.
The Axios item about Schmitt’s VP prospects landed the same morning. The poster board went up just long enough for the cameras and came down before the witness could read it.
When a hearing is designed to produce a clip, the incentives run backward. The goal is a moment goes viral, so the evidence only has to survive long enough to be screenshotted. Nobody double-checks a text thread that will be on screen for four seconds. Showing the witness the board is a risk, because the witness might explain it.
And, as Schmitt discovered, he might.
Meanwhile, At The Pump
Now consider what was happening outside that hearing room the same week.
Diesel in Minnesota crossed $6 a gallon in mid-September, MPR News reported, up about $2.50 from a year earlier. Regular gas averaged $4.23, up roughly $1.19. The driver is the war with Iran, which has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that normally carries about a fifth of the world’s traded oil. As of Sept. 30, the national diesel average sat at $6.38, negotiations were stalled, and President Trump had publicly rejected Iran’s latest proposal.
Diesel is the price hiding inside every other price. It moves grain off farms in Carver and Scott counties, keeps grocery shelves stocked in Chaska and Shakopee, and runs the trucks that bring everything you order online to your front step. When it jumps $2.50 a gallon, you pay for that at the checkout line whether or not you’ve ever owned a diesel vehicle.
Then stack the tariffs on top. August’s consumer price index rose 0.4% in a single month, the biggest jump since January, with coffee up nearly 22% from a year ago, according to the latest report.
Minnesota has a particular stake in one of these fights. The trade war with Canada escalated again on Sept. 8, when Canada added new tariffs on U.S. goods. That isn’t abstract here.
Canada bought more than $5 billion in Minnesota exports last year, Canadian-owned companies employ about 30,000 Minnesotans, and nearly half of everything Minnesota imports comes from Canada. “As a border state we feel this more acutely,” said Matt Varilek of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Ending a war, unwinding a trade fight with our largest neighbor, doing something (anything) about grocery bills: These are the jobs Minnesotans are demanding of their leaders. None of them produces a viral clip.
And none of them was on the agenda when Senate Republicans gaveled in on Sept. 29.
It’s not just that Republicans are staging political stunts designed to distract us from the reality we can see with our own damn eyes, it’s that they refuse to object to the war against Iran, they refuse to object to the destructive tariffs, they remain silent on the policies that are driving up the costs of everything.
What It Adds Up To
This was not a random blunder. It’s what a governing majority does when it has nothing to show voters on the things voters actually care about, so it decides the next best product is a villain.
It comes from the exact same playbook Republicans drew from when they tried to smear Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Jack Smith’s cases against Trump were dismissed after the 2024 election. Re-prosecuting the prosecutor two years later isn’t oversight. It’s base maintenance: Keep the grievance warm, keep the audience angry, and hope nobody looks up at the price of gas while they’re at the pump.
The trouble with a distraction strategy is that it only works if the distraction lands. When it doesn’t, you’re left with a United States senator who called a man a dirtbag over a women’s college basketball game, while the people pay $6 for diesel.
Schmitt wanted a clip. He got one.
It just wasn’t the one he planned.
The Fish Rots From The Head
You can dismiss all this as national politics that has nothing to do with us here in the Southwest Metro, but I’d think again.
When the culture of an entire political party is set from the top—in this case the Republican Party under Donald Trump—that culture seeps down to the localest levels. When power is the only thing and the rules and public service don’t matter, this is what you get.
Here state Senator Alice Mann describes her experience serving with Minnesota GOP candidate for governor, Lisa Demuth:
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