THE FIGHTER
Eric Schmitt wants you to know he’s a fighter. That he fights, that he’s in the fight and won’t back down. The Missouri attorney general, who grew up near the airport and earned a reputation in state government as a courteous, open-minded Republican, now spits rhetorical fire at every opportunity on Fox News, where he often appears to discuss his lawsuits: against China for the COVID-19 outbreak, against schools for mask mandates, against the Biden administration for you name it. Schmitt deploys the language of combat on social media, too. Since announcing in March 2021 that he would seek higher office–a seat in the U.S. Senate–he has posted variations of the word “fight” at least 325 times on his personal Twitter account alone, touting, for example, his fight “against the Democrats who are hell-bent on destroying our country.” He hammers home the message with me in mid-March, when we meet up for beers and discuss not just how he fights, but also what exactly he’s trying to win in the end.
Folks take note when Schmitt strides through the rear entrance of The Village Bar & Restaurant, a divey institution on Manchester Road in Des Peres. This is because (a) he’s a 6-foot-6 former college football and baseball player; (b) he comes here often enough to know the staff, whom he chats with briefly; and (c) he exudes an affable frat-guy energy, gladhanding his way to our corner table, where his press aide has left him a dewing Busch Light. True to his friends’ descriptions, he does come off as “down-to-earth.” Twice during our interview, one older gentleman will come over and interrupt us, praising Schmitt for a recent appearance on local conservative radio and promising in a low voice: “You have my vote.” When the man departs for good, Schmitt grins at me and says, “I bet you want to know how much I paid that guy.”
Schmitt turns 47 in June. His dark blond hair and blue eyes may be a legacy of his German ancestors, who he says began hacking at the soil of central Missouri five generations ago. His grandfather was a butcher. Schmitt’s father, who labored for decades at Anheuser-Busch, would take his son downtown to ball games–sparking Schmitt’s ongoing, near-religious devotion to the Cardinals–and would also, back at home, sit with him and watch political pundits battle it out on CNN’s Crossfire. By that point, the young Eric had already written a get-well message to President Ronald Reagan after Reagan was shot and had received a thank-you note from the White House. (This note is now framed and hanging in the Attorney General’s office.) Yet the first politician whose words Schmitt remembers really resonating was Jack Kemp, co-architect of the Reagan tax cuts. “I grew up in an area where there were a lot of Democrats around, ” he recalls of his youth in Bridgeton. “I would get into debates with my friends’ parents about tax cuts.”
Schmitt draws a straight line from those days to the present, arguing that he’s always been a conservative who prefers low taxes, small government, and state solutions over federal ones. And indeed, in the state Senate, he championed tax relief, a reining in of traffic fines and fees collected by municipalities, and state-mandated insurance coverage for children with autism (a group that includes Schmitt’s own son).
One thing that’s quantifiably changed, however, is Schmitt’s rhetoric about his opponents. Whereas he posted the words “radical left, ” “tyranny, ” or “tyrant(s), ” only twice on Twitter in the year leading up to his campaign launch, the year after, he used those words more than 100 times. This is a reaction, he claims, to Democrats’ ascent in Washington, D.C., and overreach in the pandemic era. The left is not merely wrong, he now says; they are “obsessed with power and control, ” and the
