Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Full Court Press: Sen Eric Schmitt Writes New Playbook for the Left's Lawfare | TRIGGERED Ep.270

00:06:21.000 Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.

00:06:25.000 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.

00:06:34.000 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.

00:06:44.000 And he's telling those stories in his new book, The Last Line of Defense.

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00:09:06.000 Guys, joining me now, author of the new book, The Last Line of Defense, Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt.

00:09:13.000 Eric, great to have you back on here.

00:09:14.000 It's good to be with you, my friend.

00:09:16.000 So your new book, The Last Line of Defense, has a quote that sort of jumped out at me.

00:09:21.000 We're on the front line of freedom.

00:09:23.000 and the last line of defense until Trump could return.

00:09:27.000 Can you walk us through what that felt like being in the trenches during sort of the dark days of the Biden administration?

00:09:32.000 Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason I wrote the book, and you can get it on Amazon right now, is that...

00:10:04.000 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.

00:10:15.000 And so it kind of fell to some relatively unknown folks.

00:10:18.000 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.

00:10:25.000 But man, it was, what I try to do with the book is to lay that out.

00:10:30.000 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.

00:10:40.000 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.

00:10:50.000 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.

00:11:05.000 We just, they got caught red-handed, but the leviathan of government agencies engaged in censorship was crazy.

00:11:10.000 Yeah, I mean, let's talk about this.

00:11:12.000 I mean, you were sort of Missouri Attorney General before that.

00:11:16.000 I didn't really know you as well in that role.

00:11:18.000 And then you got into the Senate.

00:11:19.000 And I think, again, you became, you know.

00:11:23.000 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

00:11:53.000 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?

00:12:09.000 You know, what did the victory there feel like, knowing that you were directly fighting for the heart of the America First movement?

00:12:16.000 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.

00:12:26.000 But in that case in particular, um, I remember Jin Psaki was at the podium.

00:12:32.000 She would talk about how they were flagging, you know, posts for Facebook.

00:12:36.000 They started to float this idea of a disinformation governance board.

00:12:39.000 If you remember that, Mary Poppins, whoever that was.

00:12:41.000 Um, yeah, the censorships are.

00:12:44.000 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.

00:12:49.000 And so we took a leap of faith.

00:12:51.000 We saw enough.

00:12:52.000 We thought there was something there.

00:12:54.000 We filed the lawsuit in May of 2022.

00:12:57.000 And we made a strategic decision then.

00:12:59.000 to seek discovery before we sought the injunction, which is kind of unusual.

00:13:03.000 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.

00:13:09.000 People would call it a conspiracy theory, which they did.

00:13:11.000 So we needed more evidence.

00:13:13.000 So the moment that it occurred to me what was really going on was when we got that discovery.

00:13:18.000 So we got the discovery.

00:13:19.000 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.

00:13:30.000 They had special secret portals.

00:13:32.000 The CDC was providing words and phrases to these big tech companies to censor, to throttle, to deplatform.

00:13:38.000 And they started this operation, as we found out, on day three of the administration.

00:13:43.000 They were not messing around.

00:13:44.000 They wanted to control the narrative.

00:13:45.000 And so what the book is, it really kind of takes you behind the scenes of what those depositions looked like.

00:13:50.000 We took the deposition of a guy named Brian Scully.

00:13:52.000 People probably never heard of this dude.

00:13:54.000 He was in charge.

00:13:54.000 He was one of the high-ranking guys at CISA.

00:13:56.000 What is CISA?

00:13:57.000 It's a cybersecurity agency.

00:13:59.000 Well, they had their whole apparatus aimed at the American people.

00:14:03.000 Anybody who dared to question the efficacy of mass or efficacy of the vaccines or whatever.

00:14:09.000 it was, they were willing to shut the American people down.

00:14:12.000 And then I think it probably culminated, of course, with the deposition of Anthony Fauci.

00:14:16.000 It's only the second time he sat for a deposition.

00:14:18.000 And we kind of try to take you behind the scenes there.

00:14:21.000 He was enamored with lockdowns.

00:14:23.000 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.

00:14:29.000 It's just crazy what they were willing to do.

00:14:32.000 And I think that case exposed it.

00:14:35.000 Then, of course, Elon Musk buys Twitter and then you have the hearings and the rest is history.

00:14:39.000 But what I took from it, Don, is that in those moments when it's kind of dark and it felt like.

00:14:47.000 maybe this wasn't going to be the outcome.

00:14:49.000 You know, the left was just going to continue to march forward.

00:14:52.000 You need courage to stand up and fight in that arena.

00:14:55.000 And when you do, you realize that what people are really looking for is authentic leadership.

00:15:00.000 And I think your father has tapped into that in ways that I've never seen.

00:15:04.000 of any president in my lifetime.

00:15:06.000 He connects with real people.

00:15:08.000 He's built this broad coalition.

00:15:10.000 So as much as we're on the march now, I think those are all great things.

00:15:13.000 We've got to be willing to fight in court also to win these fights.

00:15:16.000 Yeah.

00:15:16.000 I mean, the law fair, you know, I'm obviously, I've been a big recipient of that.

00:15:21.000 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.

00:15:28.000 They controlled media, they controlled academia.

00:15:31.000 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.

00:15:41.000 They changed their plan.

00:15:42.000 That became all about the lawfare.

00:15:46.000 It was working with those same social media companies.

00:15:48.000 I remember it early on.

00:15:50.000 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.

00:15:56.000 Well, how do you know that?

00:15:57.000 It was like, well, because yesterday I was getting 5,000 retweets a post.

00:16:00.000 Today I'm getting 4, not 4,0000, 4, like single digits, 4.

00:16:06.000 And I was like, nothing changed other than obviously someone was messing around with the algorithm.

00:16:11.000 It took a while for other people to kind of catch on to that.

00:16:15.000 I know the Missouri case versus the Biden administration, I guess it was you and Jeff Landry, who was the AG in Louisiana.

00:16:23.000 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?

00:16:31.000 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.

00:16:38.000 How come everyone else just sat back and let that happen?

00:16:41.000 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.

00:16:46.000 But I think Landry and I certainly were of the two most aggressive in pushing back.

00:16:50.000 I think we intuitively understood what was at stake.

00:16:53.000 This wasn't just a case here or there.

00:16:54.000 This was, if you looked at the full landscape, this was an effort to remake America.

00:16:59.000 And they believed and they used, you know, they used the misinformation and disinformation.

00:17:04.000 They used January 6, all these building blocks they were using to sort of other half of America.

00:17:11.000 And then they would sometimes say the things out loud. 0.96

00:17:13.000 You know, you remember, you know, call people deplorable or call them trash. 0.88

00:17:17.000 And then, of course, President Trump is in every tweet happened from like the entire Democrat leadership and the media. 0.85

00:17:22.000 It was like the same three catchwords, whatever they were.

00:17:25.000 And they were in every tweet.

00:17:26.000 It's like, oh, they sent the memo out and everyone tweeted basically at the same time.

00:17:30.000 It was so contrived, but I guess you had to go through some of it to understand that.

00:17:35.000 You know, like with Russia, Russia, Russia, with me, even they were going after me.

00:17:38.000 I'm like, obviously I didn't do anything wrong.

00:17:40.000 We know that now.

00:17:40.000 It didn't matter.

00:17:41.000 And I was like.

00:17:42.000 There must have been something.

00:17:44.000 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.

00:17:55.000 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.

00:18:04.000 I literally was like, there must have been something wrong.

00:18:07.000 Like, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and like, they deserved none of that.

00:18:11.000 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.

00:18:21.000 Well, and I think also the original, the original sin.

00:18:25.000 was President Trump running in the first place to them because they knew he represented something so different than what Permanent Washington is.

00:18:33.000 And I see it now in the Senate and it's the things that I'm fighting against, but it's real.

00:18:36.000 Like, he's a real threat to them.

00:18:38.000 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.

00:18:45.000 Look at the disclosures that Tulsi Gavard is now making, right?

00:18:48.000 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.

00:19:00.000 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.

00:19:12.000 And then, of course, you know, President Trump's out of power.

00:19:19.000 His allies are out of power.

00:19:20.000 We're fighting back.

00:19:21.000 And then they make the decision, you know, two days after he announces he's running for re-election in 2024, guess what happens?

00:19:29.000 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.

00:19:34.000 Tish James begins her thing.

00:19:36.000 Jack Smith, who's a notoriously He gets brought on to do what he did.

00:19:44.000 And then the number three person of DOJ joins Alvin Bragg's office and the DA's office, which is totally insane.

00:19:49.000 So it's all coincidence, Eric.

00:19:51.000 It's just all coincidence.

00:19:52.000 I know you lived it.

00:19:53.000 I was up at that trial, you know, I went up to New York and saw you there.

00:19:56.000 I just couldn't believe this was America.

00:19:58.000 Like this is, this happened somewhere else, but they were willing to do it here.

00:20:02.000 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.

00:20:08.000 And we gotta know what it takes to fight back and win, because they're never gonna stop.

00:20:12.000 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.

00:20:21.000 A lot of people.

00:20:22.000 That's what they do.

00:20:23.000 That's not me.

00:20:24.000 And I think you need courage in the arena to fight back if you believe in this country.

00:20:29.000 And I think your dad in particular has given.

00:20:32.000 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.

00:20:41.000 Yeah, we've been playing an entirely different game than the Democrats for far too long.

00:20:45.000 And the fact that now that we're playing the same game, they can't even handle it.

00:20:50.000 And it's interesting.

00:20:51.000 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.

00:21:05.000 But when they did the Durham report, report investigating the Russia-Russia thing.

00:21:13.000 None of the things that they found in the last two weeks are even remotely included, you know, two, three weeks, whatever it is.

00:21:18.000 How did that not end up in that?

00:21:21.000 How can you go through, you know, the entire Mueller investigation and those things don't make it into it?

00:21:26.000 Frankly, I'm actually shocked that some of those things even still exist.

00:21:29.000 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?

00:21:37.000 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.

00:21:43.000 But I think it's the tip of the iceberg.

00:21:45.000 I mean, just one example, the Missouri versus Biden case.

00:21:47.000 They gave us some stuff and we had.

00:21:49.000 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.

00:22:00.000 Now, Elon Musk fired a lot of them.

00:22:02.000 One kind of interesting note just to show you how incestuous this was.

00:22:06.000 There's a guy by the name James Baker, who's James Baker?

00:22:09.000 James Baker was the general counsel of the FBI at the end of 2016, most certainly was aware of the Russia Gate nonsense.

00:22:15.000 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?

00:22:26.000 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.

00:22:33.000 And he does.

00:22:34.000 And he knows it's right.

00:22:35.000 And they're still talking about it.

00:22:36.000 He knows it's right.

00:22:37.000 and the FBI knew it was real.

00:22:38.000 They had it in 2019.

00:22:39.000 They knew it was real.

00:22:40.000 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.

00:22:55.000 One of the things I appreciate about President Trump is he kind of, he's put together a team of disruptors around him.

00:23:01.000 And very, I think different than the first term, the time away in this nonconsecutive second term, he knows exactly.

00:23:09.000 what he wants to do, who he wants to do it with.

00:23:12.000 And I think we're seeing a lot of those, the fruits of that labor right now.

00:23:16.000 So I think it's great.

00:23:17.000 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.

00:23:34.000 Yeah, no, I mean, I think it was so important.

00:23:36.000 Do you think anything ever happens to those guys?

00:23:37.000 You know, I know, there's the highest level offenders and they all got pardoned by the Biden administration and stuff like that.

00:23:43.000 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?

00:23:58.000 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.

00:24:10.000 Yeah, they get to work at the Kennedy School and lecture on the clients for a lot of money.

00:24:15.000 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.

00:24:35.000 And my Solicitor General, this is kind of cool.

00:24:38.000 My Solicitor General was a guy by the name of John Sauer.

00:24:40.000 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.

00:24:45.000 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.

00:24:51.000 But to answer your question, I think there is a path.

00:24:54.000 So Obama may have immunity for the time he was in office.

00:24:58.000 I don't know what he did after he was out of office.

00:25:00.000 Was he part of a conspiracy?

00:25:01.000 We don't know.

00:25:02.000 I don't know that yet, but maybe we'll find out.

00:25:04.000 But there's no immunity for Clapper, Comey, and Brennan.

00:25:07.000 And if this was in fact an ongoing conspiracy, that's the fact that gets you out of the statute of limitations.

00:25:14.000 And I think there ought to be indictments.

00:25:15.000 So we'll see where that goes.

00:25:17.000 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.

00:25:27.000 I've got legislation.

00:25:28.000 100%.

00:25:29.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 You know, because I think that changes the incentive structure for sort of the lower level bureaucrat that's being told to do this.

00:25:35.000 they might say, you know what, I actually, I don't want to be personally.

00:25:39.000 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.

00:26:00.000 We got to preserve democracy.

00:26:01.000 Trump's the biggest threat to democracy.

00:26:02.000 I'm like, I don't know.

00:26:03.000 Seems like everything you guys have been doing.

00:26:05.000 are literally the greatest threat to American democracy since its founding.

00:26:09.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:26:10.000 And I got that in the book, Last Line of Defense.

00:26:12.000 You can get it on Amazon, is that their playback, they've had a playbook.

00:26:17.000 You know this.

00:26:18.000 You were a victim of it, which is create an emergency, other people aggregate power and then silence dissent.

00:26:28.000 That's their playbook.

00:26:29.000 And we have to have our own playbook.

00:26:30.000 And that takes courage.

00:26:31.000 That takes, you know, making sure we're playing in the courts and we're fighting to win.

00:26:35.000 Because we just saw it.

00:26:36.000 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.

00:26:43.000 Like you were a guy working overtime trying to provide for your family.

00:26:46.000 You were, you were going to lose your job because you decided not to get the COVID shot.

00:26:50.000 This is insane.

00:26:50.000 Like this was insane.

00:26:51.000 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.

00:27:14.000 There's a lot of good war stories, but more importantly, lessons learned for the future.

00:27:18.000 Yeah, so the book also talks about using the courts to dismantle the administrative state.

00:27:22.000 I mean, that's sort of a tactic that I'm sure the other side definitely did against us.

00:27:27.000 You know, we've never done that.

00:27:28.000 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?

00:27:37.000 Yeah, because there's no accountability, right?

00:27:40.000 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.

00:27:47.000 Like if I vote on something, some regulation or whatever, or some law, they can hold me accountable.

00:27:52.000 Nobody knows who the deputy undersecretary of the EPA is that just issued a guidance letter that destroyed a family farm.

00:27:59.000 There's nobody accountable for any of that.

00:28:01.000 So that's why I think we got to get back to this place where you have greater accountability.

00:28:05.000 You get rid of the power that these unelected bureaucrats are doing. 1.00

00:28:08.000 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.

00:28:19.000 And I actually handled the resisions package in the Senate that we got done that clawed back, it defunded NPR, it defunded PBS.

00:28:26.000 It's something we've been talking about for a long time.

00:28:28.000 We finally did it.

00:28:29.000 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.

00:28:39.000 We finally pulled that back.

00:28:41.000 That had never been done.

00:28:42.000 And so again, that's the power of what this presidency is.

00:28:45.000 I think the band-aid President Trump got, I was honored to carry it.

00:28:47.000 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.

00:28:55.000 And so they're willing to do things that an elected senator or representative wouldn't do because we know we are accountable.

00:29:00.000 It's actually sort of funny because with our people, sort of the idea of term limits is actually very popular.

00:29:06.000 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.

00:29:26.000 But the argument, I had this conversation with Orrin Hatch, ironically, before he passed.

00:29:30.000 And it was like, because I was such a believer and he goes, that happens.

00:29:34.000 You got a big problem because all the people in that office are going to know where everything is.

00:29:37.000 They're going to know how to do anything.

00:29:38.000 And they're going to be able to subtly sort of manipulate everything around it.

00:29:41.000 And there's a lot of truth in that.

00:29:42.000 And we've seen the damage that it's done.

00:29:44.000 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.

00:29:53.000 And I've seen how bad it can be.

00:29:55.000 Yeah, no, I think.

00:29:56.000 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.

00:30:03.000 You know, I mean, kind of flip it on its head a little bit, too.

00:30:05.000 They get entrenched and you're right.

00:30:07.000 And they try to wait people out.

00:30:09.000 And one of the things.

00:30:11.000 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.

00:30:29.000 Right.

00:30:30.000 He's got scored some pretty big wins on that, be able to fire some people on the NLRB.

00:30:34.000 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.

00:30:50.000 No, they told him to learn to code.

00:30:51.000 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.

00:30:57.000 But the. 0.80

00:30:59.000 Yeah, there are no more concessions for that guy.

00:31:03.000 And you have twice as many people now that work in government that do in manufacturing, but that's kind of another issue.

00:31:09.000 But the point is that the president is resetting a lot of this stuff and being very aggressive.

00:31:14.000 And I think his legal team is doing a good job.

00:31:16.000 But again, that takes courage because the slings and arrows that come your way when you're willing to do it is real.

00:31:21.000 And again, one of the reasons I wrote the book.

00:31:24.000 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.

00:31:33.000 How does your legal playbook address and combat this woke corporate ideology that's taken over so many businesses and institutions?

00:31:42.000 Yeah, I talk about this in the book, Last Line of Defense, is that you think about, let's just take the private sector.

00:31:48.000 And we had a hearing with Hermit Dillon on the Judiciary Committee, and I asked her, like, what are your plans?

00:31:53.000 And she's coming after corporate America on this stuff, which is good.

00:31:56.000 There need to be a few scalps on this of the companies that still want to do it.

00:32:00.000 I think largely it's in retreat, or it's just being called something else.

00:32:04.000 But Coca-Cola, for example, they had sessions where you had to to explain how you were going to be less white. 0.65

00:32:11.000 Like, this is insane. 0.54

00:32:12.000 Like, it's totally insane.

00:32:14.000 And then of course it was like a South Park episode, but it's really happening.

00:32:18.000 It's real.

00:32:18.000 Like in one of the biggest companies in the country, like they're doing this.

00:32:21.000 So that stuff's nonsense.

00:32:23.000 ESG, which is also, I think, now in retreat too because of some of the executive orders that have been undone by President Trump.

00:32:30.000 But at the time, this was kind of on the march.

00:32:33.000 Think about it.

00:32:33.000 President Trump withdraws from the Paris Accords, rightfully so.

00:32:37.000 And then you have these companies that just want to do this stuff.

00:32:39.000 There was something called the Net Zero Banking Alliance, where like, almost fifty percent of all the assets controlled in this country.

00:32:45.000 What they decided to do was that they were going to have a net zero carbon emission portfolio by 2050.

00:32:50.000 The only way you do that is if you start honestly denying creditworthy applicants on family farms who have too many diesel trucks.

00:32:57.000 That's the only way you get there, right?

00:32:58.000 And they were willing to do this.

00:32:59.000 So we, you know, launched an investigation into maybe that was antitrust behavior by those, you know, big banks colluding.

00:33:07.000 Well, they backed away.

00:33:08.000 So the point is when you see this stuff, you got to fight back.

00:33:11.000 And I would also say DEI and schools, we kind of turned the FOIA requests on their head.

00:33:16.000 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

00:33:46.000 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.

00:34:03.000 You've got somebody in office.

00:34:04.000 We've got a Republican House, Republican Senate.

00:34:06.000 We can do something about it.

00:34:07.000 But those are some of the dark times.

00:34:09.000 Can you codify some of those things?

00:34:11.000 Because the executive order is a great way to kind of kickstart things.

00:34:14.000 It's sort of like pulling the choke on a cold engine.

00:34:17.000 It gets it going.

00:34:18.000 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.

00:34:26.000 Where's the wind blowing?

00:34:27.000 If it's a different administration, they'll go right back to those old policies.

00:34:30.000 How do you codify that in the Senate and the House?

00:34:33.000 I mean, you have it now.

00:34:35.000 Is there anything being done to actually lock those things into place?

00:34:38.000 Because it should never come back.

00:34:39.000 I mean, the fact that it ever happened in the first place is disgusting.

00:34:42.000 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.

00:34:55.000 You know, they'll do nothing about China polluting the world. 1.00

00:34:57.000 But, you know, it would be a disaster.

00:35:00.000 So how do we lock that into place to make it more permanent?

00:35:02.000 Well, one example is I'm on the Armed Services Committee.

00:35:06.000 We'll be voting on the, every year we do a National Defense Authorization Act.

00:35:10.000 Basically, how do you spend, you know, the $900 billion effectively we spend to protect our country?

00:35:16.000 Battery-powered tanks, Eric.

00:35:18.000 I heard that was a great idea.

00:35:19.000 That was a real thing.

00:35:20.000 I know, but that was a real thing.

00:35:21.000 I was like, wait, the battery in the desert and in a tank.

00:35:24.000 It just doesn't seem like it's a great idea.

00:35:26.000 Elizabeth Warren was very serious about this.

00:35:28.000 Good God.

00:35:29.000 But anyway, but we've got a provision in this year's NDAA.

00:35:33.000 I mean, it's great that President Trump did it.

00:35:34.000 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.

00:35:41.000 And it's like, it shouldn't do it anywhere.

00:35:43.000 But think about our military.

00:35:45.000 It's supposed to, it has been one of the greatest meritocracies in the history of the world.

00:35:49.000 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.

00:35:54.000 The idea that, like, you'd be dividing our military by race, by oppressor versus oppressed is counterintuitive.

00:36:00.000 It's why military members wear uniforms.

00:36:02.000 It's why they have haircuts.

00:36:04.000 It's all to build cohesion, not to separate people by this kind of cultural Marxism.

00:36:10.000 So that's one example of what we can do.

00:36:12.000 That I think is going to get done this year.

00:36:14.000 But there's a lot more to do, of course.

00:36:16.000 Well, you also sued the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, over their role in unleashing the COVID-19 pandemic. 0.86

00:36:22.000 That was really, I think, really a historic accountability measure.

00:36:26.000 Can you explain the importance of that legal action?

00:36:29.000 You know, what really comes from it in the end?

00:36:32.000 Well, so it's really interesting.

00:36:33.000 It's the first chapter in the book, Last Line of Defense, is...

00:36:44.000 We wanted to get to discovery.

00:36:45.000 So we filed the lawsuit.

00:36:46.000 We got around the sort of federal sovereign immunities act where you can't sue foreign countries.

00:36:50.000 We got around it.

00:36:51.000 And Missouri now has actually a $24 billion budget that we can use to seize Chinese farmland. 0.91

00:36:56.000 So that's like the next thing.

00:36:57.000 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.

00:37:07.000 Do you remember this?

00:37:08.000 It's like President Trump issued a travel ban on people coming from China, which was a smart thing to do. 1.00

00:37:14.000 He was called like the xenophobe and chief.

00:37:17.000 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.

00:37:37.000 No, no, no, no.

00:37:38.000 It came from two feet outside of the lab.

00:37:40.000 I'm like, no, it didn't.

00:37:42.000 How would you know you're not a virologist?

00:37:44.000 I'm like, you don't have to be a virologist. 1.00

00:37:46.000 You just have to not be a freaking idiot. 1.00

00:37:48.000 Like, it's not that hard. 1.00

00:37:50.000 Of course it was right.

00:37:51.000 And every doctor went along with it like the sheep and said it was.

00:37:54.000 Oh, no, it can' came from the wet market twelve feet away.

00:37:57.000 Like the penguin mated with the bat.

00:37:59.000 You're like, what?

00:38:00.000 Like, no, there's a virology lab in Mumbai.

00:38:03.000 Literally, that's what they do.

00:38:05.000 So yeah.

00:38:06.000 So, but you think about that time, how crazy that was.

00:38:09.000 And so that's all happening.

00:38:10.000 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. 0.74

00:38:24.000 Like they were everybody was being told by these local health officials, well, you shouldn't go outside, da da da da.

00:38:29.000 Except they wrote a letter.

00:38:30.000 If you're, if you're protesting qu, so-called systemic racism, the virus, we're not worried about the virus affecting you. 0.99

00:38:37.000 I think everyone kind of knew what the bullshit was. 0.99

00:38:39.000 I saw that in New York. 0.99

00:38:40.000 I go, no, no, no, because of the social construct of the way it's happening, you're now, you're immune.

00:38:44.000 I'm like, they were literally trying to make it, I'm like, I don't know, isn't contact, contact?

00:38:48.000 Apparently it's not.

00:38:49.000 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.

00:39:06.000 And he was adamant it didn't come from the Wuhan Lab.

00:39:08.000 He's now, well, maybe it did.

00:39:09.000 Maybe it's, it's possible.

00:39:11.000 He's sort of changed his tune a little bit.

00:39:12.000 But I just think it was fascinating to sort of unwind that a little bit in his deposition.

00:39:19.000 One fun fact that we outlined in the book, of course, is we go on a lunch break and we come back.

00:39:24.000 This is an all day deposition.

00:39:26.000 And the court reporter sneezed and Fauci asked her if she had COVID, would you please put on a mask?

00:39:34.000 This was November of 2022.

00:39:37.000 This wasn't March of 2020.

00:39:40.000 This is the guy that was in charge of public health.

00:39:42.000 They had Fauci captured.

00:39:43.000 He hasn't been right about anything since 1980, including the age pandemic.

00:39:47.000 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.

00:40:14.000 He tried to ruin.

00:40:15.000 There's a guy by the name of Jay Badacaria, who was actually a plaintiff in Missouri versus Biden.

00:40:19.000 He's now the head of NIH.

00:40:21.000 He was a plaintiff in lawsuit.

00:40:22.000 He was at Stanford.

00:40:24.000 He did, he proposed something so unbelievable that Fauci tried to ruin his career, which was that natural immunity was still a thing.

00:40:30.000 This great Barrington declaration that they made, these doctors said, you know what, natural immunity is still a thing even for COVID.

00:40:37.000 And they tried to ruin his life over it.

00:40:39.000 So it was just a, it's again a wild time that can never happen again.

00:40:43.000 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.

00:40:48.000 And I think what this whole movement about is, what, what, to me is so exciting.

00:40:51.000 This is the party, you know, I grew up in a working class neighborhood.

00:40:55.000 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.

00:41:03.000 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.

00:41:09.000 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.

00:41:19.000 We've got to be willing to fight.

00:41:21.000 And that's what I've tried to do as AG and what I'm trying to do now.

00:41:24.000 So your office was also instrumental in blocking the, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but Biden's illegal student loan bailout.

00:41:31.000 How did Missouri? 0.62

00:41:33.000 stop such a massive federal policy.

00:41:36.000 I mean, it was hundreds of billions of dollars of just, you know, freebies.

00:41:41.000 And what does that show about the power of principled legal action?

00:41:45.000 Because I thought that was a really.

00:41:48.000 big deal.

00:41:49.000 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.

00:41:56.000 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.

00:42:10.000 So he does this.

00:42:11.000 Everybody knows it's illegal.

00:42:13.000 The question, the legal question was, who can sue?

00:42:16.000 Like who has standing to sue?

00:42:18.000 And that's a very important part that we kind of walk through in the book.

00:42:21.000 Well, Missouri had this little known loan servicing agency called Mohila, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, which serviced loans.

00:42:29.000 So we said, well, look, Mohila might be affected by this. 0.84

00:42:33.000 So therefore, Missouri has standing to go sue you over it.

00:42:35.000 And that's what the case came down to.

00:42:37.000 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?

00:42:45.000 And we made that argument and we affected and we won.

00:42:47.000 And we prevented literally a half a trillion dollars going out the door.

00:42:51.000 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.

00:43:01.000 By the way, I agree with you.

00:43:03.000 The people who call themselves the elites and all this stuff and look down their noses at everyone else who's a hardworking American.

00:43:08.000 I was like, I don't know, if you're so freaking elite, shouldn't you be able to pay back your loans?

00:43:12.000 Like, it doesn't seem like you're all that elite.

00:43:14.000 It doesn't seem like you made the best decisions in life.

00:43:17.000 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.

00:43:22.000 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.

00:43:29.000 I just felt like it was the right thing to do.

00:43:30.000 And at the end of the day, we were successful.

00:43:33.000 And I think, you know, the country's better off for it.

00:43:35.000 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

00:44:05.000 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.

00:44:20.000 Gender studies, like, well, what are you going to do?

00:44:22.000 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? 0.98

00:44:30.000 And what can you do with it?

00:44:31.000 It's like, you know, you don't usually see that with, like, guys who get physics degrees or electrical engineers.

00:44:36.000 Like, those guys usually can pay back their stuff, it seems.

00:44:38.000 Yeah, sadly, we found out what all the gender study majors at Ivy League schools ended up doing. 1.00

00:44:43.000 They worked in the Biden White House, right?

00:44:45.000 They were they were all They were right.

00:44:48.000 They became admirals, you know, in the Biden Navy.

00:44:51.000 It's like, it's like, how?

00:44:53.000 We don't know how.

00:44:54.000 doesn't matter.

00:44:55.000 You know what?

00:44:56.000 This whole borders thing, these are just arbitrary lines on a map.

00:44:59.000 Let's just open up the border.

00:45:00.000 My professor talked about that at Harvard one time.

00:45:03.000 So like we lived it sadly, what these people ended up doing.

00:45:07.000 So you talk about the book as being a comprehensive playbook on how to fight back and win.

00:45:12.000 What's the next big legal battle that you see coming?

00:45:15.000 We talked a little bit about how sort of the law fair evolved from their sort of insanity controlling the media.

00:45:22.000 It was the next play.

00:45:23.000 The left seems to be really good at evolving.

00:45:27.000 and coming up with the next fight to take us on.

00:45:29.000 We're sort of always lagging back and catching up.

00:45:32.000 But what do you see as that next big battle?

00:45:35.000 And how can conservatives use lesson from the book to prepare for it?

00:45:38.000 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.

00:45:58.000 And it, by the way, that's exactly what happened.

00:46:01.000 President Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices the first term.

00:46:04.000 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.

00:46:10.000 The first four actually from Missouri that worked in my Attorney General's office.

00:46:14.000 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.

00:46:19.000 Now Biden got in a bunch too.

00:46:21.000 He got over 200 in his four years.

00:46:23.000 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.

00:46:30.000 And you're seeing this play out.

00:46:31.000 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.

00:46:41.000 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?

00:46:49.000 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.

00:46:57.000 They got rid of the universal injunctions in that birthright citizenship case.

00:47:02.000 The ability to fire and control programming has been largely upheld.

00:47:06.000 And then I think most specifically on immigration, President Trump has been victorious on being able to get rid of the temporary protective status.

00:47:13.000 I say this because We have to be, we established it.

00:47:19.000 We know what it is.

00:47:20.000 We just have to have the courage to implement it.

00:47:22.000 And I think the people that he has around him, they're really smart.

00:47:26.000 And we're winning a lot of these cases.

00:47:28.000 But I also think it should give the book, should give hopefully some inspiration to people.

00:47:34.000 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.

00:47:40.000 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.

00:47:50.000 And now we know that if we can stand up and fight, we can win.

00:47:52.000 So I think those court battles are playing themselves out on this term of President Trump.

00:47:56.000 But largely, I think he's going to be successful.

00:47:58.000 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.

00:48:08.000 Yeah, no, I love that.

00:48:09.000 I mean, that message that we can win, but we actually have to fight like hell in the courts and otherwise.

00:48:15.000 There was always such a consequence to being vocal as a conservative.

00:48:19.000 You could say the most asinine stuff on Twitter as a leftist or whatever it was, Twitter 1.0 or in the media.

00:48:24.000 No consequence, no problem.

00:48:26.000 You say common sense conservative thought as a Republican and you'd get canceled.

00:48:29.000 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.

00:48:39.000 They've seen the insanity and they're sick of it.

00:48:41.000 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?

00:48:49.000 Because again, it can be brutal, right?

00:48:52.000 The social consequence of stepping out.

00:48:54.000 You saw that, honestly, it's like, you know, the suburban housewife theory.

00:48:57.000 You see half the stuff that becomes, you know, the suburban housewife theory in America, and you're like, I don't know, man.

00:49:03.000 Like, I don't think any of them actually believe that.

00:49:05.000 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. 0.99

00:49:16.000 You know, well, I Yeah, I think the message, John, is, well, first of all, you're seeing this play out.

00:49:20.000 What's another front that will end up in the courts, but needs to start somewhere first is take redistricting. 0.99

00:49:26.000 Yeah.

00:49:27.000 Like for a long time, the Democrats have gotten all the juice out of this that they can.

00:49:31.000 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.

00:49:53.000 I mean, it's It's disgusting.

00:49:55.000 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.

00:50:00.000 I'm like, there's like seven or eight states that don't have a single Republican seat in them.

00:50:03.000 I don't know that there's any states that don't have a Democrat seat.

00:50:06.000 Right.

00:50:06.000 We're just going to start playing theying the game that the rules that they set up.

00:50:10.000 And you also, most people are shocked to find out you don't need to be a citizen to be counted in the census.

00:50:15.000 Yeah.

00:50:15.000 That ought to change, right?

00:50:16.000 California right now would have a lot, you know, a lot fewer seats right now if that were not the case.

00:50:21.000 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.

00:50:34.000 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.

00:50:45.000 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.

00:50:54.000 What I saw was people who maybe voted Republican before, they then had a MAGA flag out, or they had a yard sign out.

00:51:01.000 Something has changed.

00:51:02.000 And I think President Trump is this singular political figure.

00:51:06.000 We've never seen anything like this, not in my lifetime.

00:51:08.000 I don't think anyone that's alive right now has seen anything like this, which is a desire.

00:51:13.000 He loves the country so much.

00:51:14.000 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.

00:51:19.000 And he's willing to put it all on the line.

00:51:21.000 Almost took a bullet twice.

00:51:22.000 Twice.

00:51:23.000 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.

00:51:33.000 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.

00:51:39.000 And that's what I've tried to do in the jobs that I've had, AG and now Senate.

00:51:43.000 And I think if we had more and more people doing that, this country would be an entirely different place.

00:51:48.000 And that's the hope.

00:51:49.000 Yeah, no, I agree with that.

00:51:50.000 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.

00:51:57.000 What do you think is the most significant legal victory that you had in the two A space in that arena.

00:52:03.000 And how do you see the fight for gun rights evolving in these coming years?

00:52:07.000 Well, so there's two things.

00:52:08.000 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.

00:52:24.000 The state shouldn't be determining whether or not you can protect yourself.

00:52:28.000 That's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.

00:52:30.000 These are rights that we have that God gave us that that our constitution protects and government is supposed to protect.

00:52:36.000 And so we won that at the Supreme Court.

00:52:38.000 That's a big win.

00:52:38.000 Also something that happened in Missouri during that crazy summer of 2020, the McCloskeys thing happened, right?

00:52:44.000 I was AG at the time.

00:52:45.000 So these Black Lives Matter rioter folks go across a private street.

00:52:50.000 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.

00:52:58.000 And so we stepped in there.

00:52:59.000 And I think again, it's just finding these fights wherever they are and willing to stand up.

00:53:04.000 And if you do it, you can be successful.

00:53:06.000 And I think, you know, as far as the case law is concerned on Second Amendment, we've never been in a better position.

00:53:11.000 You know, you had the Heller decision, you know, 30 years ago.

00:53:16.000 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

00:53:46.000 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.

00:53:59.000 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.

00:54:13.000 But we've frontloaded money for the border.

00:54:14.000 We've frontloaded billions for the wall, billions for new ICE agents.

00:54:18.000 There's over 100,000 new applications for ICE agents in the last month, which is great.

00:54:22.000 We've also funded money for more deportations.

00:54:25.000 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. 0.61

00:54:32.000 We've effectively now frontloaded.

00:54:34.000 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.

00:54:41.000 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.

00:54:48.000 So I think all that stuff's coming.

00:54:49.000 And as much as the book is written, Last Line of Defense, waiting for the cavalry, which came, now we're on offense.

00:54:56.000 And I think it should be pedaled to the metal.

00:54:58.000 That's a really big deal.

00:55:00.000 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.

00:55:07.000 That's a real big deal.

00:55:08.000 And you can see the TDS kicking in because they know that's exactly what's happening.

00:55:12.000 So Senator Eric Schmidt, thank you so much, guys.

00:55:14.000 Make sure to check out his new book, The Last Line of Defense.

00:55:17.000 Again, one of the truly guys that's been the tip of the spear pushing back on this insanity, Eric, without you.

00:55:23.000 I imagine a lot of this stuff we wouldn't even know.

00:55:26.000 And we certainly wouldn't have the wins that we've had.

00:55:29.000 So I want to thank you for all those efforts because I know it's not easy.

00:55:32.000 Thanks for all you do.

00:55:33.000 I appreciate you too.

00:55:35.000 Look forward to seeing you soon, man.

00:55:37.000 Thanks so much for tuning in, guys.

00:55:38.000 Remember to like, to share, and to subscribe.

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00:55:46.000 Or if you have friends that do, make sure they are aware.

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - August 25, 2025

Full Court Press: Sen Eric Schmitt Writes New Playbook for the Left's Lawfare | TRIGGERED Ep.270

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