I think the ordering principle for the modern … party, you’ve certainly seen it play out over the last 10 years … is resentment, wanting to tear things down. … They just have a disdain for half the country.

Yes, that’s a pretty good description of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and its degradation of the Republican Party over the past decade. Except, it’s a quote from Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt regarding what he typically and inaccurately refers to as the “Democrat Party.”

The psychologists call it “projection”: attributing one’s own negative qualities and actions to one’s adversaries. In a remarkable Fox News interview this week, Missouri’s MAGA junior senator dished out enough of it to merit its own chapter in a psychiatric textbook.

His theme (seriously) is that Democrats will use the congressional majorities they won last week to illegitimately punish their political enemies, because “we’ve seen this movie before.”

We sure have — from Trump, throughout his second term. For almost two years now, unadorned vengeance has been the glaring Trumpian constant, of which Schmitt seems almost comically unaware.

We deconstruct Schmitt's fictional four-and-a-half minute diatribe here for two reasons: to correct the record, which is always necessary when MAGA acolytes start in with their alternate realities; and to remind ascendant Democrats what not to do as they go about the necessary business of holding this lawless administration accountable.

— Now with these gavels, they’re going to show the full force and effect of what that (disdain) means … They did it the last time they had power, and they’re coming back and they’re coming back with a vengeance.

Schmitt is referring here to efforts before the 2024 election to hold Trump accountable for crimes he committed during his first term — chief among them, flinging his MAGA mob at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Going after the prosecutors who undertook those thoroughly legitimate probes has been a particular obsession of Schmitt’s. He was last seen on the national stage making a fool of himself by trying to set a perjury trap for former special prosecutor Jack Smith during a Judiciary Committee hearing, only to trap himself when it turned out he had all his facts wrong.

For examples of actual political “vengeance,” look to Trump. Among his many targets has been former FBI Director James Comey, for posting a joke photo of seashells that the president ludicrously called a death threat. Trump himself effectively made death threats against six members of Congress, calling for their prosecutions and executions because they correctly reminded U.S. soldiers that they have a constitutional obligation to refuse illegal orders.

For a sense of how unhinged and improper Trump’s attempts to use the government for personal score-settling have been, consider that his Justice Department has repeatedly failed to secure indictments from grand juries, which is basically unheard-of in the legal world.

— I think the American people are going to be reminded that the Democrats should never be trusted with power.

Last time we checked, Democrats hadn’t used, say, the power of immigration enforcement to gun down U.S. citizens in the streets, as Trump’s immigration officers did to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January in Minneapolis. Nor did they follow up by slandering the dead, as Trump personally did from the bully pulpit of the presidency.

— Intimidation is kind of the calling card. … Normal people … cannot afford to go through these investigations, hiring lawyers for doing nothing more than having an “R” behind their name.

Tell it to Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide the administration tried to criminally charge last month over her honest testimony regarding Jan. 6. (Trump’s Justice Department couldn’t even get an indictment.)

Or tell it to Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., target of a vicious administration attempt to literally expel a prominent Trump critic from the country by taking a fine-tooth comb to her immigration background from when she was brought here — at age 12.

— They called (Trump’s movement) a threat to democracy, when they know exactly what they’re doing is the true threat to democracy.

Where to start? Trump’s various full-on attacks against democracy — by shrugging off Congressional oversight, by siccing the Justice Department on perceived enemies, by threatening media broadcast licenses and barring journalists from the White House, by using the presidency to enrich himself, and most of all by trying to violently overturn the 2020 election results — have no precedent in modern U.S. history. Full stop.

If Schmitt’s narrative doesn’t remotely reflect reality, it does reflect what the MAGA movement expects from the next Congress. While the administration must be held to account for its numerous transgressions, it’s urgent that Democrats frustrate those predictions. If accountability becomes vengeance, they will be no better than the current president and his delusional cheerleaders like Schmitt.

_____

© 2026 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Visit www.stltoday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.