📰 Political Firefight: Senator Eric Schmitt Battles George Stephanopoulos, Accusing Host of Partisan ‘Hackery’

Schmitt Attacks Stephanopoulos’s Credibility and Program Ratings in Explosive Interview

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a forceful and highly personal counter-attack against host George Stephanopoulos during a televised interview, accusing the ABC anchor of being a “Democrat hack” with “bad ratings” for repeatedly challenging the administration’s focus and decisions.

The exchange, which quickly went viral, began with Stephanopoulos pressing Schmitt on a controversial pardon granted to the former Honduran president, convicted on drug smuggling charges. Schmitt immediately dismissed the question as a politically motivated diversion, pivoting sharply to the administration’s policy on combating drug cartels.

“I’m not familiar with the facts or circumstances,” Schmitt stated regarding the pardon, but quickly shifted focus. “I think what’s telling here is to try to imply that somehow President Trump is soft on… drug smuggling is just ridiculous. It’s totally ridiculous.”

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The Narco-Terrorist Pivot: Shifting the Debate

Schmitt aggressively redirected the conversation to the highly popular, legally contested strikes against “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean, arguing that 75% of Americans support “blowing narco-terrorists out of the water” to stop the flow of poison killing “100,000 Americans every year.”

When Stephanopoulos pushed back, citing the well-reported details of the pardon, Schmitt delivered his first direct, personal critique of the host:

“Well, I’m curious about your push back on that particular point. With your previous guest, you had zero push back because he’s giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad.“

Schmitt framed the focus on the pardon as a deliberate tactical move by Democrats to “divert here the attention from what the American people actually support,” arguing the left was “peddling another lie” after the initial narrative surrounding potential war crimes for the naval strikes “clearly fallen away.”\

Defending the Military and the Chain of Command

The Senator dedicated significant time to defending the administration’s military decisions, particularly against the backdrop of Democrats cautioning soldiers to “disobey orders.”

Schmitt derided this as “hard to sort of overstate how problematic that is for the chain of command.” He then contrasted the current military leadership under Secretary [Hegathth] with the previous administration, arguing: “The Democrats had their shot at all this and it was rejected… recruitment is sky-high, morale is sky-high. They’re upset about that.”

He emphasized that the current administration is focused on “core national interests, including protecting Americans from being poisoned by the narco-terrorists,” criticizing the previous focus on “trying to build democracies in the sand of the Middle East by the barrel of a gun.”

Dismissing the IG Report as a ‘Nothing Burger’

Stephanopoulos next challenged Schmitt on Secretary [Hegathth’s] alleged risk to operational security by using the unsecured Signal app to transmit sensitive information about U.S. aircraft strike times, citing an Inspector General (IG) report.

Schmitt instantly dismissed the report and the entire controversy: “I reviewed the IG report… and it’s a nothing burger.”

He claimed there were no operational integrity problems and no classified information was disclosed. He swiftly counter-attacked by bringing up a genuine “operational risk” from the previous administration: “You didn’t have a hue and cry about from the Democrats was when Secretary Lloyd Austin went in for a medical procedure, was incapacitated, and didn’t tell the president. Literally, we had a Secretary of Defense that wasn’t on duty and nobody knew about it for days. Like, that’s a real problem. This was a nothing burger.”

Schmitt concluded his defense by accusing the host and the Democratic opposition of having “Trump derangement syndrome,” asserting their attacks were not based on substance but a sustained effort to undermine the President and Secretary of War.

“They can’t believe that he won,” Schmitt declared. “And so now you just have a series and series of issues that come up every week to try to undermine this president and the Secretary of War. And it’s not working.”