Eric Schmitt And The Twilight Of The Covid Republican

A new generation of Republican stars rose in the Covid era, channeling a backlash to lockdowns, mandates and racial politics into national prominence. In 2021, Glenn Youngkin, who focused his campaign on parents’ rights in schools and opposition to vaccine mandates, managed to flip the governor’s mansion in Virginia — just a year after Biden’s 10-point victory there. The next year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state had been among the first to ease Covid-era public-health restrictions, “romped” to a second term so convincingly that The New York Post dubbed him “DeFuture.” Early in 2024, Donald Trump mused publicly about then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — one of only a handful never to issue stay-at-home orders at the height of the pandemic — as a possible VP.

Today, nearly all of those stars have dimmed. DeSantis is a lame-duck Florida governor, Trump having crushed his Covid-centric 2024 presidential campaign right out of the gate in Iowa. Noem, who fell out of the veepstakes after her memoir detailed the time she shot an untrainable puppy named Cricket, landed a high-profile Cabinet position as DHS secretary, racked up scandals over spending and immigration-enforcement raids that killed two Americans, and was banished to the Southern Hemisphere via Truth Social — one of the first Cabinet secretaries to fall in Trump 2.0. Youngkin, who was term-limited, saw Democrat Abigail Spanberger crush his chosen successor by 15 points last year, prompting MAGA luminary Steve Bannon to declare: “Glenn Youngkin, you just ended your political career.” (“I don’t think he’s done,” countered Garrison Coward, a senior campaign advisor to Youngkin’s 2021 campaign.)

Then there’s Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt.

Schmitt made international headlines last week for insinuating at a hearing that special counsel Jack Smith was in Atlanta at a Hawks game — apparently trying to establish Smith was colluding with a Georgia district attorney — when in fact Smith was in Maryland at an Iowa Hawkeyes college basketball game. Social-media and cable-news pile-ons aside, the gaffe is far from a career-ender: Schmitt is halfway through a six-year Senate term in a Trump +15 state, a “conservative star,” in the words of the right-leaning Washington Reporter, whose “impact on conservatism is just getting started.” (Schmitt has since insisted he didn’t mix up the teams; he was simply asking about the only NBA game that started at a given time on a given date.)

In the meantime, his Covid-informed brand of politics — with its deep skepticism of the “expert” class, its hostility to the administrative state and its presumption of political opponents’ bad faith — has far outlasted the pandemic, in addition to many of the politicians who built their brands on it.

This is true even as the disease itself has faded to near-irrelevance in U.S. electoral politics for perhaps the first cycle since 2020 — even in 2024, the backlash to Covid-driven inflation helped bring Donald Trump back to the White House and, consequently, vaccine-skeptical RFK, Jr. to the helm of Health and Human Services. This year, though, the economic troubles weighing down the incumbent party are the product of war and tariffs, rather than a constantly mutating virus raging across the globe. Occasional attempts to revive Covid-related anger at overbearing Democrats, such as the Anthony Fauci hearing this summer, have produced no meme-able moments as viral as Hawksgate.

But Schmitt, for reasons related to timing, position, closeness to the White House, and near-constant media presence, has endured. Indeed, the morning of the hearing in question, Axios reported that he was a "top prospect" to be J.D. Vance’s VP pick should the latter run for the top job in 2028 (though no other outlet has confirmed that reporting, and Vance has said he’s not making a decision about 2028 until after the midterms). Covid itself may be largely irrelevant this cycle, but the Covid style in American politics is well-entrenched, with Schmitt as one of its foremost practitioners.

In an interview in his office the day after Hawksgate, Schmitt said that the Covid epoch was “very much a coming-of-age era” for him. Back then, he was about a year into an appointment as Missouri’s attorney general — backfilling for Republican Josh Hawley, who had gone to the U.S. Senate — and running for a full term to his first statewide office after eight years as an affable, aisle-crossing state senator out of suburban St. Louis. “I fully expected a very traditional attorney general time, where it was, we focused on like the Safer Streets Initiative,” he told me.

Instead, he found himself suing China over concealing the disease and hoarding medical supplies; local Missouri governments over mask mandates; schools over the same thing; and the federal government for encouraging social-media companies to suppress what it labeled misinformation, about everything from Covid to Hunter Biden’s laptop. His record of success was mixed, but the crusading image he forged for himself allowed him to prevail in a crowded Republican Senate primary in 2022, then go on to easily beat a Democratic opponent in his deep red state.

Neither Schmitt nor his party invented the tactic of policymaking by litigation — the “big bang” of state-AG-led lawsuits, according to Marquette’s Paul Nolette, who studies them, was with the Big Tobacco case in the 1990s. Republican AGs accelerated their own use of such suits in the latter half of the Obama administration with a wave of Affordable Care Act-related litigation, and Democratic AGs escalated further against executive orders in the first Trump administration. Then Republicans, Schmitt among the most prominent (along with Texas AG Ken Paxton), picked up the charge against public-health orders, social-media censorship and even the 2020 election results in four other states.

And something else happened: Schmitt came to embody the hardening battle lines of American politics, portraying political opponents as not just misguided but malignant. Nicholas Phillips of St. Louis Magazine noted the shift in his rhetoric in a 2022 profile, tallying a 50-fold increase in Schmitt’s usage of the words “radical left,” “tyranny,” or “tyrant(s)” on Twitter in the years before and after he launched his campaign, from two to more than 100. “Always remember,” reads a representative missive from this era, Covid restrictions, particularly in schools, were “never about the science and the data” but “always about power and control and a whole generation of kids have been harmed by the Covid tyrants’ power trip.”

Reflecting on all of that now, Schmitt says, “with the Covid shot and threatening parents who show up at school board meetings questioning masks with the Patriot Act and investigations — it just felt like people were aggregating this power and abusing it, and I was in a position to do something about it.” He also saw this overreach as abetted by a class of experts — or as he derisively renders them in print, “Experts TM” — whom he also blames for “a globalist view” that led to “forever wars,” mass immigration and the shipping of factory jobs overseas. “I think it also informs my view of this expert class that was telling everybody that this was going to be great,” he said of expert-driven free-trade policy. “Well, it didn't turn out great for a lot of people, right?" That, he said, was probably already in his blood being from Missouri — dubbed the “Show Me State” because of its residents’ supposed penchant for saying “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But during Covid, Schmitt said, “I saw the whole landscape for the first time, and it was terrifying.”

There's something a little brain-breaking about the position that, on the one hand, people should be skeptical of authority including in the form of experts, and on the other hand, that you can and should believe what you read on Truth Social. It’s fair enough to say, as Schmitt does, that “settled” science can evolve and that science itself involves experimentation and questioning — and both the Covid vaccine and masks did turn out to be less effective than experts maintained at the time, though various studies estimate the vaccine saved millions of lives around the world (the exact numbers vary widely). It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that the skeptics are themselves trustworthy. "Experts” also warned that both tariffs and the Iran war would raise prices on Americans, and that rising vaccine skepticism could have consequences like America’s current measles outbreak.

For that last outcome, Schmitt says, “the so-called public health experts brought this on themselves” because “people were lied to, and it’s going to take a while for that public trust ever to be rebuilt again.”

He also cops to no inconsistency in his concerns about Democrat-driven “lawfare” against Trump officials, and his support for the current administration’s apparent zeal to go after Biden-era figures, an ex-Trump-aide-turned-witness, Federal Reserve officials and Democratic lawmakers. “I do not want the Justice Department to be in the position of prosecuting political enemies,” he said. “I think that’s terrible.” But he doesn’t think that’s what the current administration is doing, whether by trying to prosecute James Comey for an “86 47” social media post or anything else. The Biden DOJ, in this view, was weaponized against Trump. This DOJ is just acting to hold the weaponizers accountable.

Meanwhile, the Covid tone of partisan enmity endures, though Schmitt maintains he still works across the aisle, like helping negotiate the college sports bill the Senate passed in late September. “Do I go to battle for the things that I believe in? Absolutely,” Schmitt said. “But I also don’t think you need to be an asshole...I can separate zealously advocating for a position and being personally decent to people.”

We were, however, speaking a little over 24 hours after he’d declared in a hearing that Jack Smith was a “villain” who would go down as “a total dirtbag.”