Why Democrats must keep calling out GOP bullsh*t on sight

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Republican Senator Eric Schmitt thought he’d caught former special prosecutor Jack Smith red-handed: At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in late September, Schmitt and his aides proudly displayed a giant poster bearing texts messages of unknown provenance that he claimed proved Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024. And [somehow], in Schmitt’s mind, that proved Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud were not above board. But within minutes, the entire “gotcha!” fell to pieces, with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar realizing whoever fed him this intel confused the team with the Iowa Hawkeyes. The whole episode could be best described as a real-time debunking.

With less than a month from the midterm elections, the Trump administration and their allies are throwing absolutely everything at the wall to avoid what’s shaping up to be a series of epic failures. On Friday, Cook Political Report shifted 18 more congressional races in Democrats’ favor, and Trump and Vice President JD Vance are scrambling from Nebraska to Alaska in order to stem the bleeding. During a speech last week in Maryland, Trump teased “some big surprises coming up in another few weeks,” and we know better than to expect these elections and their aftermath to go off without a hitch. But the tricks dropping so far against Democrats in Texas, Minnesota, and beyond, show the Republicans are shooting blanks.

There have no doubt been more dangerous times in the United States, but it’s hard to imagine there was any time more stupid. The siloing of internet communities has diminished any shared reality, and this dynamic has led to right wing politicians, operatives and content creators becoming so convinced they have a winner without stopping for one moment to think “does this make any sense?” That’s surely how Senator Schmitt’s nonsense was able to make its way to the Senate hearing room (and a nearby Kinko’s, apparently) instead of being snuffed out far earlier. It’s also how we got a pair of incidents on Sunday and Monday wherein Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar were accused of things so blatantly concocted by their opponents, that after the immediate fury subsided, we were left wondering how we could be surrounded by people who are so stupid.

On Sunday afternoon, MAGA influencer Nick Sortor posted the “BREAKING EXCLUSIVE” story on X that Talarico had been MIA from the campaign trail not because he had the flu (as his team said), but because he was receiving in-patient care at a mental health facility in Ohio. Sortor claimed another MAGA guy named Rhein Amacher had “confirmed” with an employee at the facility that Talarico had been a recent patient. 

“While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS,” Sortor posted on Sunday. “The job doesn’t get easier after being elected — it only gets MORE stressful. And Talarico clearly can’t handle it.”

But almost immediately, it became clear that Sortor couldn’t handle a successful smear campaign, with actual reporters finding holes in his and Amacher’s story immediately. 

“For starters, there was the issue of logic,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer and Andrew Egger explained in a post Sunday night. “If Talarico had actually had a mental breakdown, why would he go to Ohio for treatment and not, say, anywhere in his home state? Why wouldn’t he simply have someone come to him?”

Providing further evidence, Sommer and Egger added: “Then there was the timeline. Amacher said repeatedly on X that he had placed the calls in question on Saturday evening. But Talarico couldn’t have been discharged from a facility in Ohio—mental health or otherwise—on Saturday evening. He’d already returned to the campaign trail to attend the Austin City Limits music festival on Friday, and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert one day later.”

The facility then posted a comment stating “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope,” and Talarico followed up with a comment of his own: “I’ve never even been to Ohio 😂.”

Monday morning a more serious yet no less deranged story dropped, this one about a very real DHS raid on the Washington, DC-area home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as part of a supposed “criminal investigation.” It feels important to call whatever alleged misdeeds Trump’s Department of Justice used to procure this search warrant complete bullshit, and nothing more than a new chapter in their years-long racist and xenophobic attacks on the Somalia-born representative who moved to the US as a teenager.  

“Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last month cited an ‘ongoing investigation’ that he suggested was examining potential fraud in her family’s immigration paperwork,” the AP reported Monday. ‘Something’s going to happen,’ he said in a potential foreshadowing of the search.”

Omar responded defiantly a few hours after the search. “I’m ok,” she posted. “Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.” She added, “I will not be silenced.”

The potential implications of Omar’s situation are much more dire than for Talarico, with the entire power of the state being weaponized against a perceived political enemy so close to an election. 

“This is an unadulterated abuse of power,” Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove posted on X. “Trump is weaponizing the federal government to escalate his racist attacks against [representative] Omar, undermine her ahead of the midterms [on 3 November], and distract from his failures as president.”

But what the Talarico and Omar smear attempts have in common is that they were both bogus on arrival, and not afforded the same benefit of the doubt we might have seen in the first Trump administration or earlier in this one. It’s reminiscent of a 2019 effort by right wing operative Jacob Wohl to claim then-presidential primary candidate Elizabeth Warren had an affair with a 24-year-old sex worker and Marine. Warren laughed it off with a cheeky post in response, not allowing her campaign to be bogged down for even a moment.

Warren’s response—and now Talarico’s—modeled how all spurious accusations by far right figures should be treated: As laughable lies unworthy of anyone’s time. It does the work of shutting down [at least the mainstream] news cycle, and framing the people perpetuating it as clowns. While Omar’s story is gravely serious, it’s a relief to see people of sound mind see this ridiculous show and be able to immediately recognize it as trash. 

I’ve been peeking over at Twitter a bit lately out of morbid curiosity about what goes on there in the year 2026. After all, high-profile media figures like Casey Newtown have recently said that Twitter is where the real “conversation” is happening, and I idly wondered if I was depriving myself of information by continuing my more than three year hiatus. After scrolling the “For you” tab this morning for just a few minutes, I felt the matter binding my brain begin to dissolve. That feeling helped explain how people who spend all their waking hours there could believe a story so idiotic could sink a successful senate campaign. While people who insist on using X soak in the stupid, a whole world exists outside to debunk their delusions by contrast.

Senator Schmitt’s profound embarrassment by Senator Klobuchar didn’t stop him from taking a victory lap in the right wing radiosphere and convincing pea-brained far right commentators like Benny Johnson that the spectacular loss was actually a win. But getting stunned on the spot took away any chance of it catching on beyond Trump’s rabid base who will believe literally anything. It was immediately rendered fringe, embarrassing and stupid—things progressives have long asked Democratic elected officials to brand on their opponents’ foreheads but have largely failed to do. 

We’re seeing this attitude on the campaign trail in Michigan, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed continues to call bullshit on Islamophobia and outright “silly” questions he’s asked; and down in Georgia where Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, who’s running for reelection, openly calls his opponent out for being the Nazi that he is. It appears Republicans have reached the natural progression from “fuck around” to “find out,” and they have no coherent response. 

The midterm results will do little to change the way Trump has made the federal government his personal weapon; but attitudes leading up to these elections indicate that voters have a hunger for calling a spade a spade. It’s a cousin to Tim Walz’s 2024 strategy of calling Republicans “weird”—except this time we’re calling them desperate clowns.