3 takeaways from Eric Schmitt’s high-profile new book

Some memoirs by Missouri politicians—Jason Kander and Jack Danforth come to mind—exude a desire by the authors to understand themselves and what happened, even if the fruits of those efforts, here and there, taste bad.

U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s new book, Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court, isn’t that way. It falls into a different category, one crowded with both Republicans and Democrats: That of a lawyer zealously advocating for his client, and the client is himself. 

In Schmitt’s book, set for release today, such an ethos flows from his goal, which is stated on the book jacket: to go beyond “war stories” and offer “a road map for how conservatives can use the law to defend individual liberty and the rule of law, and help return the country to common sense.” 

What follows inside is Schmitt’s account of his four years—2019 through 2022—as Missouri Attorney General. Here are a few major themes. 

1. The Glendale resident is a multi-faceted guy

Schmitt recently told the online news outlet Semafor, “I have deeply held beliefs and I’m going to fight for those, but that doesn’t mean you have to be, like, an asshole.” 

There he hints at a duality that was sketched out in SLM’s 2022 profile of Schmitt and also comes out in this book. On one hand, Schmitt, who grew up in Bridgeton and now lives with his wife and three kids in Glendale, can come across as funny, relatable, and curious about the world. He sprinkles into his narrative references to Milan Kundera, Netflix’s The Tiger King, St. Ignatius of Loyola, 1990’s West Coast hip hop, Office Space, George Orwell,  Unforgiven. He talks about bagging a gator in Louisiana and having the skin made into boots that bear the Missouri state seal. He writes movingly about his son, who has a rare genetic condition and relies on an unthinkable amount of care and patience from his parents. With respect to the early Covid-19 pandemic, Schmitt, who is 6 foot 6, recalls walking 25,000 steps a day down the leafy streets near his house, conducting state business through his earbuds and, later, celebrating with Busch Lights in a parking lot after suing China for allegedly causing the global outbreak. 

With respect to political rhetoric, meanwhile, Schmitt deploys the trademark symbol to mock what he considers unjustified deference to Covid-era “Experts™” and other entities. He uncorks this joke on page 5—and keeps it going until page 247. This is the Schmitt that emerged as the pandemic wore on: an attorney general whose voluminous public commentary suggested that his own interpretations of scientific findings and of Missouri law were beyond dispute, and anyone who disagreed must be a leftist acting in bad faith. More on this shortly.

2. Schmitt really did join—and pick—a ton of fights

Many Schmitt spats had a national flavor: He opposed the Biden administration’s efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon emissions, to withhold funds for the border wall, and to forgive student loans. (Schmitt’s own litigation strategy in that third case is why Missouri prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court, he writes.)

Back home, he tussled with some St. Louis pols. One was the city’s former mayor, Tishaura Jones, whose first name he misspells in the book as “Tashara.”

His other major adversary was former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. He recounts how, in the wake of her many staff departures, he offered his own state attorneys to help her with criminal prosecutions, and how she “never voluntarily” accepted this help. He also describes how Gardner sought to prosecute Mark and Patricia McCloskey—the Central West End couple who brandished guns as Black Lives Matters protesters passed—for unlawful use of a weapon and then built a campaign-fundraising email around this fact, so he then took the “almost unprecedented” step of filing to urge the judge to dismiss the charges. (The McCloskeys ended up pleading guilty but were pardoned by former governor Mike Parson, and just two weeks ago, retrieved their AR-15 rifle.) 

But by and large, Schmitt’s highest-profile fights were pandemic-related. Those fill almost half the book.  

3. In the pandemic, Schmitt did “beat the left in court”—sometimes

Under Schmitt’s direction, Missouri led or joined other states in going after several Biden administration attempts to mandate workplace vaccines. In one case, they won at the Supreme Court. In another, they failed there. A third ended when the government dropped its appeal; Schmitt claims it as a victory. “That’s not to say that I’m against vaccines,” he writes. “These issues will rightly be parsed out over time and debated, but for me the central issue was whether the federal government…. could force people to make medical decisions that they didn’t want to make. To that, my answer was always no.” 

The pandemic case to which Schmitt devotes by far the most pages is Missouri v. Biden, which he hails with Trumpian flair as “the most important free speech case in American history” and one that uncovered “a vast censorship enterprise.” In this matter, Missouri and Louisiana accused federal officials of illegally pressuring social-media platforms such as Facebook to remove pandemic- and election-related content that the government deemed false or misleading. 

Schmitt describes being in the room when Anthony Fauci was deposed for seven hours by Missouri’s solicitor general at the time, D. John Sauer, another St. Louis native who Schmitt writes is “a certified legal genius” and “thinks outside the box like no one I’ve ever met.” (Sauer is now the U.S. solicitor general.) A major topic in the deposition was Fauci’s alleged attempt to censor the lab-leak hypothesis—the idea that the coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It had been dismissed by Fauci early in the pandemic, but the FBI and the energy department began cautiously favoring this hypothesis later on in the Biden years, and in 2025, the C.I.A. joined them. As Schmitt describes the scene, Fauci could not hide that day the fact that he had “personally orchestrated” censorship. “We had won the argument,” Schmitt writes. 

The Supreme Court has seemed less impressed, though. Ruling on a preliminary injunction, the majority—which included three conservative justices—not only sided against Schmitt and his co-plaintiffs on procedural grounds, but also cast doubt on the merits, finding that while the government had indeed pressured the platforms, the latter “had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.” So, at the very least, it’s far from over. 

But the pandemic-era crusade of Schmitt’s that made the biggest splash in St. Louis was his effort to quash school mask mandates. He took this on during the spike of omicron-variant cases in early 2022. Our profile of Schmitt chronicled that clash in detail: how he and school leaders interpreted the scientific evidence differently and so disagreed on masking’s trade-offs. Schmitt’s position may well become the consensus in hindsight: New books such as In Covid’s Wake, which was written by two Princeton University political science professors, argue that cities got some policy tradeoffs disastrously wrong. 

Yet at the time, Schmitt writes, his stance was legal in nature: that school mask mandates violated recent Missouri case law. So, readers may recall, he sent districts an initial letter threatening “enforcement action” if they didn’t stop masking, and a second letter demanding that they cease and desist. One district, Lee’s Summit R-7, would fire back and sue Schmitt over these letters, and about a year later, a Jackson County circuit judge would rule that Schmitt had “exceeded the Attorney General’s authority” and that his letters “had no legal force or effect.” (The state never appealed, so the Missouri Supreme Court hasn’t endorsed that ruling.) 

Schmitt also called on parents to act as informants and send him tips through a special email address. In the book, Schmitt reveals what inspired this: “tip lines” set up by Democrats, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to allow people to report violations of masking rules. “The tendency of government bureaucrats to turn friends and neighbors against one another simply to advance their own political agendas was downright chilling,” Schmitt writes. “So, my office decided to set up a ‘tip line’ of our own.” The difference, Schmitt explains, was that the Democrats’ portals had been set up to suppress rights, whereas his portal was meant to protect them. So did righteous ends make the means less chilling? He doesn’t quite say. 

Finally, Schmitt’s office filed a raft of petitions in courts across Missouri—roughly 50 cases in all. The results were mixed. School districts voluntarily dropped their mandates in response to his pressure, true, but also in response to changing Covid metrics or some combination of the two. Schmitt still claims the victory: To him, any halt to masking was a win. 

Schmitt insists in Last Line of Defense that he was fighting for kids—not headlines. “I certainly knew it would get coverage,” he writes, “but that wasn’t my motivation.” Any Schmitt critic who accuses him of lying here would be falsely claiming access to his mind, in the same way that Schmitt falsely claims access to the minds of St. Louisans who supported school masking policies (he writes that they were adopted “just so a bunch of left-wing adults could feel good about themselves”). At the time of the school suits, Schmitt was running for U.S. Senate in a crowded field, and he’d been a professional politician for more than a decade. Readers can decide for themselves whether to take him at his word or conclude that he was fueled by a desire for publicity rather than—or in addition to—a desire to help kids. Those two aren’t mutually exclusive.  

In any case, he has no regrets. To this day, he writes, people in grocery stores will come up and thank him. Even at the time of the conflict, he recalls, most folks he ran into were firmly on his side, but “didn’t want to say it, for fear that they’d be socially ostracized by the mask police on the Left.” To the extent that’s true, one needn’t ascribe good-faith motivations to Eric Schmitt to suspect that the rigidity of Covid-cautious liberals alienated plenty of people—and caused some kind of political backlash. 

The intended audience of Last Line of Defense appears to be, first and foremost, conservative activists and lawyers. The book’s publisher, Broadside Books—an imprint of HarperCollins, one of the “Big Five” publishing houses—caters to that crowd. But it doesn’t seem to be making the case to Trumpworld that Schmitt should be U.S. Attorney General. According to the Semafor piece, Schmitt was offered that very cabinet post and turned it down to stay in the Senate, where his stock is rising fast. 

Perhaps it’s simply of a piece with all the many other media appearances that raise his profile. You could also see it as a prepackaged way to tell his own backstory to voters and pundits if, in 2028, he lands on the shortlist for vice president. (That office’s current occupant, J.D. Vance, could well end up the presidential nominee and happens to have a blurb on the back cover of Last Line of Defense.) 

Whomever the audience is, Schmitt evidently wants to hammer home, as always, that he’s a fighter. “There is a certain pride that can come with taking on the tough fights,” he writes in the epilogue. “But you have to have the courage to step into the arena.” One thing he rarely does, though, is publicly disagree with the leader of his party, President Donald Trump. It’s possible that the two see the world exactly the same way. Yet in the last chapter of Schmitt’s book, the senator decries the left’s “tired playbook” of creating some emergency—about Covid, about climate change, etc.—in order to aggregate power. Trump, meanwhile, “has declared in dozens of presidential documents that the U.S. faces emergencies requiring him to take extraordinary actions that circumvent normal government processes.” At least, that’s according to the Wall Street Journal—hardly a bastion of the legacy liberal media that Schmitt distrusts.  

Maybe fodder for his next book.