This week on Breaking Battlegrounds, hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren sat down with U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri to discuss his new book, The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court, and to dig into some of the biggest debates shaping America’s future.
Schmitt pushed back on one of the most common criticisms of former President Trump—that his leadership would drag America into global war. He argued the opposite: Trump’s instincts, he said, are rooted in diplomacy backed by American strength. From easing tensions between India and Pakistan to trying to open talks between Russia and Ukraine, Trump projected confidence that brought rivals to the table instead of driving conflict.
The senator also highlighted how the “permanent Washington” establishment clings to the role of America as the world’s policeman. That mentality, Schmitt argued, is outdated. Instead, Trump’s shift toward prioritizing core national interests—especially countering China—marks the beginning of a needed realignment, while pressing allies in Europe to take more responsibility for their own defense.
Schmitt’s sharpest critique was aimed at globalism. He described it as a worldview embraced by elites who feel more at home in Davos than in working-class America. Globalism, he said, hollowed out U.S. manufacturing, exported jobs, imported cheap labor, and blurred the very idea of national sovereignty. In contrast, Trump’s agenda represents a reckoning decades in the making, one that puts America first after years of neglect.
According to Schmitt, this shift isn’t going away. The new wave of Republican leaders is increasingly aligned with Trump’s worldview, signaling that America’s political future will be defined less by globalist ideals and more by protecting sovereignty, national security, and economic strength at home.
Transcript
**Sam Stone: **Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds. With yours Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Jumping right into the action, our first guest up today, U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri. He has a new book out titled The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court. It is a Chuck approved book. Honestly, Chuck, it's one of the few good books you get from politicians. I hate to put it that way. Welcome Senator Schmidt.
**Senator Eric Schmitt: **I appreciate that. I love the stamp of approval. That's very nice.
**Chuck Warren: **You'll love it. So Senator, one of the accusations against President Trump that I have always found humorous, but the left likes to scream it from the rooftops, is that this man is going to cause World War III. You even had John Bolton, who's the figure in the media today, say that a major international crisis was much more likely of Donald Trump's second term. What would you tell these people? Because I don't think it's based on reality.
**Senator Eric Schmitt: **Yeah, I think people kind of caught up with the game of permanent Washington, the left, Democrats trying these scare tactics. It's very clear that President Trump's first instincts are diplomacy. And that takes a lot of confidence, a lot of strength. He projects America sort of first energy and strength, which makes that possible.
He knows what the levers are to try to bring people to the table. You look at some of the, whether it's India and Pakistan, or whether it's Azerbaijan or Armenia, or now of course, trying to open the door for a discussion with Ukraine and Russia, that's what he wants. And that's existed for a long time where a lot of people, their first instinct is that America could be everywhere, all at once, all the time.
We're the global cop of the beat. There's no conflict we shouldn't be involved with. That's changing, thankfully. And what are our core national interests? It's the homeland and it's focusing more on China. That the 21st century is going to be defined by who wins that great competition.
And Europe needs to stand up on its own two feet a lot more than it has in the last 30 years, that's for sure. So President Trump's bringing about that change in dynamic, but along the way is bringing parties together because of America's strengths to the peace table. So I just think that criticism falls flat. It didn't, it wasn't the case in the first term and it's certainly not the case now in the second term.
**Sam Stone: **Senator, one of the things that strikes me is that despite this sort of permanent Washington, uniparty, war all the time blob, those people at the same time were afraid to do what Donald Trump does so well and so easily, which is get on the world stage and say, America is still great. We have nothing to apologize for. And you need to listen because if you want to do business with us, if you want to exist in this world with us, we have to be taken into consideration you cannot continue to put the interests of the United States and its people way behind the interests of the rest of the planet.
**Senator Eric Schmitt: **Yeah, I think if you want to understand that mentality, you have to understand what globalism really is, right? And globalism is this idea that we're all just sort of world citizens. You got all these people that are much more comfortable in Davos than they are in my hometown of Bridgeton, a working class neighborhood. And they've kind of, they bought into this belief that we should ship our factories overseas because it's cheaper and then import foreign labor because that's cheaper. And they've really lost sight of what it means to have a country and we're not an economic zone.
We're a sovereign country, we're a people and we have interests. President Trump understands that. think a lot of the people that come before him, they didn't buy into that. And really what we're dealing with is a reckoning that's 30 years in the coming or in the making where after the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet communism was defeated.
There was never really an adjustment. Was never an adjustment on foreign policy. There was never really an adjustment as it relates to trade imbalances that exist. And President Trump's doing all that and they don't like it. And I think that's the ascending view. I don't know the majority view in Washington yet, but you look at the people I think have been elected in the last eight years or so on the Republican side, much more alignment, generally speaking, with President Trump's worldview. But I would also say even the people that were elected before then.
The fact that President Trump came all the way back and won the popular vote has got everybody's attention. And I think that's why you're seeing, even with these slim majorities, we're able to get a lot of things done.
Check out Senator Schmitt’s new book, The Last Line of Defense
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