Things got very fiery on ABC as Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) clashed with the former Clinton adviser and current ABC host George Stephanopoulos during the Sunday, December 7, broadcast of ABC’s “This Week”, with the two sparring over the strikes on drug boats that President Donald Trump has launched on fentanyl-carrying drug boats off the coast of Venezuela.
In the heated exchange, the two fought over everything from the drug strikes to President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, which many see as being related to garnering information regarding and striking against the cartels that are flooding America with illegal narcotics.
Particularly, when pressed on the matter of the president’s approach to the pardon of Hernandez and the drug situation, Sen. Schmitt thundered at Stephanopolous that to portray President Trump as “soft on drug smuggling” is utterly “ridiculous,” as the president is going after the smugglers with a vengeance.
In fact, the staunchly pro-MAGA senator noted that the president is fighting to defend America’s borders from the drug cartels, saying, “And the fact is these cartels now, because the southern border is closed, they’ve gone to the high seas. So President Trump is acting with his core Article Two powers.”
Building on that, the senator noted that Trump has the authority under the Constitution to launch air strikes on the cartel boats that are trying to smuggle fentanyl into America, saying, “No serious legal expert would doubt that the president has authority to blow narco terrorists out of the water who are poisoning a hundred thousand Americans every year.”
Then, putting the scale of the carnage wrought by fentanyl in a context that nearly any American could understand, the senator explained, “If you watch the SEC championship game yesterday, the Big Ten championship game, combine those two stadiums with the number of people there, that’s how many people are dying each and every year from the poison that’s coming from these narco terrorists.”
Returning to the president’s authority for the strikes, Stephanopoulos said, “So the fact is, George, President Trump has been delegated the authority by Congress to designate terrorist organizations. He’s done that. He sent a letter to Congress saying he was going to initiate these strikes. We’ve had regular briefings about it, including from Secretary of State Rubio, including from the high -ranking officials in the Department of Defense.”
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Still not done, the senator then sounded off on the claims made by Democrat politicians and the woke media that the administration is engaging in war crimes, snapping, “And so now what we have now are Democrats who have such X -ray vision and clairvoyance that they know the intentions of narco -terrorists on boats, yet we’re so blind to see that they had a president for four years that was operating as a vegetable in Joe Biden. So, you know, forgive me if I’m a little skeptical that this isn’t all about politics and trying to take out Secretary Hegseth. That’s what this whole thing’s been about, George.”
And, noting how the Democrats have always been against Hegseth and are trying to get rid of him, the senator said, “They didn’t want him confirmed. They didn’t want a realist in place. They didn’t want to shift from their pet projects around the world and trying to build democracies in the sands of the Middle East by the barrel of a gun. We have core national interests at stake, the homeland in the Western Hemisphere, and the rise of China. That’s what this administration is focused on. The Democrats are just upset about that, and they try to create some controversy each and every week, and it goes nowhere.”
Stephanopoulos, returning to the pardon of Orlando Hernandez in an attempt to put Trump in the spotlight negatively and put the senator in a difficult position, then said, “He’s the former president of Honduras. He was convicted of conspiring to bring in 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, also guns and other materials. It’s been front page news across the country. Aren’t you curious about that?”
Brilliantly responding, the senator skewered the host, saying, “Well, I’m curious about your pushback on that particular point. With your previous guest, you had zero pushback because he’s giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad.”
Concluding, the senator noted, “But to make the point, what I’m saying is that you’re trying to you’re trying to divert here the attention from what the American people actually support. 75 percent of Americans support us blowing narco terrorists out of the water in the Caribbean.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video