The irony of Eric Schmitt's faceplant is impossible to miss | Opinion - USA Today

It's always the folks screaming "protect women's sports!" the loudest who care the least.

That’s the big takeaway from Sen. Eric Schmitt’s "gotcha" moment gone so very, very wrong. The Missouri Republican and his staffers embarrassed themselves in front of the entire country on Sept. 29.

Why? Because it so obviously never occurred to them that former special counsel Jack Smith might have attended a women's basketball game while he was investigating President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents in 2024.

Schmitt is now the butt of endless ridicule because his interest in sports revolves solely around those played by men.

When you only think about women's sports as a weapon to brandish in manufactured culture wars, you don’t actually care about women's sports.

For those blissfully unaware, Schmitt tried to score political points by accusing Smith of lying about attending a "Hawks" game in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, the suggestion being it gave him cover to collude with another prosecutor investigating Trump.

But it was Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes playing at Maryland that Smith had gone to see that night. A pretty big difference, and one you'd think Schmitt would know given his deep-felt passion for women's sports.

The co-sponsor of the bipartisan "Protect College Sports Act," Schmitt has touted it as the best defense for women's and Olympic sports. Consensus on that point is hard to find, with the bill, which still needs to pass the House, facing both praise for its approach to preserving non-revenue sports and concerns it will lead to greater inequities between men's and women's college athletics.

Schmitt also has made it one of his pet projects to prohibit the participation of the small number of transgender girls and young women playing high school and college sports in the U.S.

But rather than admit he was wrong about the Hawks – God forbid – Schmitt got snippy with Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, when she called him out on the obvious error. Now he's backpedaling, first saying he asked about the Atlanta Hawks because they had the only NBA game that night (they didn't) and now saying it was the only one with a 7:30 p.m. tipoff (that, at least, is true).

But that's all irrelevant. The point is Schmitt only pretends to care about women's sports when it serves his purpose, and there's ample evidence the Senate hearing was not a one-off.

Schmitt describes himself as a "diehard" St. Louis Cardinals fan on his personal X account and posts about them often. Also Missouri football. And Saint Louis and Missouri men's basketball. Men's golf. During the Olympics, Schmitt posted twice about the U.S. men's hockey team's overtime win over Canada in the gold-medal game but said nothing about the U.S. women beating Canada for gold three days earlier.

This despite Joy Dunne, who had two goals and three assists at the Olympics for the U.S. women, being from O'Fallon, Missouri. Schmitt later congratulated Missouri's gold medalists in a Facebook post that featured a photo of Dunne alongside other unidentified U.S. hockey players.

Schmitt and others who champion themselves as "protecting" women and women athletes almost never take aim at the real threats to women's sports and those who play them. Like the schools that are still skirting Title IX requirements for funding and resources for their women athletes. Or coaches and support staff who abuse girls and young women. Or the costs and troubling societal messages about body image that cause girls to play sports at a lower rate than boys.

Or the dangers and threats to safety that some women face every day of their lives.

Social media has been filled this week with women, many of them former athletes, sharing deeply personal stories of sexual assault as a show of solidarity for a former Cornell student who said in a lawsuit she was drugged and gang-raped while at the school. Hours after Schmitt made a fool of himself, in fact, Las Vegas Aces guard Justine Pissott said in an Instagram story that she, too, had been drugged and raped.

"When something like this happens to you, it doesn't just end when that night ends. You carry it with you," Pissott wrote. "The confusion, the pieces you can't remember, questioning yourself, blaming yourself, and trying to understand how someone could take advantage of you when you weren't even able to protect yourself.

"And then you see people questioning survivors. Asking why they didn't speak sooner, why they stayed quiet, why they acted a certain way afterward," Pissott wrote. "But unless you've been through it, you really don't understand what trauma can do to a person. There is no 'right' way to respond to something that never should've happened to you in the first place."

Did Schmitt, on either his personal or Senate account, express his sorrow for Pissott? Or any of the other women who have bared their souls? Have any of the usual suspects demanded action for this or all the other ways in which women are degraded and short-changed?

Because culture warriors like Schmitt don't really care about women's sports. Their actions keep proving it.