Why do Missouri and Kansas senators keep turning up the political heat? | Opinion
It’s not a golden age. It’s a democratic disaster in the making.
President Donald Trump is sending prosecutors after his enemies and ordering troops into American cities. His allies are using Charlie Kirk’s death as an excuse to investigate and suppress the sources of dissent against Trump’s government. And his trade wars are going so badly — just ask your local farmer friends — that investors are driving up the price of gold in expectation of an imminent economic collapse.
This is just the short list. Things are bad out there in America, folks.
Worse yet: Some of Kansas and Missouri’s most prominent Republicans are rooting for Trump and fanning the flames of catastrophe.
Sens. Josh Hawley, Eric Schmitt and Roger Marshall? They’re on Team Chaos.
They’re portraying the president’s critics as violent, setting the stage for a possible National Guard crackdown.
They’re also falsely rewriting the story of Jan. 6, 2021 — the most dangerous moment of American political violence in recent memory, at least so far — as one of Republican victimization and Democratic perfidy.
Why? Just listen to Schmitt.
“The Left had their moment,” he posted Wednesday on X. “We know what it looks like when they’re in charge. And we can never, ever let it happen again.”
It’s not the kind of thing you say when you’re trying to preserve American democracy.
‘Hopefully, it will be peaceful’
Two moments from the last week:
Marshall went on Newsmax Friday, suggesting without evidence that this Saturday’s anti-Trump “No Kings” protests across the country will turn violent, while rooting for intervention by armed troops.
“This will be a Soros-paid-for protest, where his professional protesters show up,” he said, a reference to perennial GOP bogeyman George Soros, the Holocaust survivor and pro-democracy philanthropist. “The agitators show up. We’ll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully, it will be peaceful; I doubt it as well.”
You’ll remember that hundreds of thousands of Americans — mostly unpaid, as far as we know — turned out for an earlier round of similar protests back in June. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe even preemptively called out the National Guard, but looked silly for doing so: Nothing happened at those demonstrations. Why would Marshall expect this event to be different?
Hawley and Schmitt, meanwhile, raged against revelations that Jan. 6 special counsel Jack Smith collected phone data involving eight GOP senators, including Hawley.
“Joe Biden’s FBI SPIED on 8 Republican senators because we disagreed with him,” Hawley wrote on X. “Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and Chris Wray need to be put UNDER OATH. And anyone involved needs to be PROSECUTED.”
“The time has come for criminal prosecutions,” Schmitt added, saying that senior figures involved in the investigation had “better lawyer up.”
But Hawley didn’t come under Smith’s scrutiny for merely disagreeing with Biden. The senator was a prominent part of the effort to overturn the 2020 election falsely in Trump’s favor. Remember his fist-bump salute to the gathering Jan. 6 crowd? Hawley does: His campaign website still sells a mug with that image emblazoned on it, in ongoing violation of U.S. copyright law.
Is it a crime to investigate a terrible crime against America? Hawley and Schmitt seem to think so. They want you to think so, too.
Turning up the temperature
Schmitt, of course, has spent the weeks since Kirk’s death arguing that American political violence comes almost entirely from the left — ignoring Jan. 6, the June killing of a Minnesota lawmaker by an antiabortion activist and the U.S. government’s own report (now withdrawn from the public) showing the bulk of political violence in the United States comes from the right.
But the point here isn’t to get into a who’s right-who’s wrong debate.
The point is that America is in crisis, with the tipping point getting a little closer every day. You can feel it.
Wise leadership would involve working to turn down the temperature. Hawley, Schmitt and Marshall instead seem eager to see just how hot the room can get.
Maybe that’s good for Trump. And maybe that’s good for their own political prospects. But it’s terrible for America.