Jon Ossoff Just Delivered Maybe the Greatest Debate Zinger in Ages

Yet again, the Georgia senator showed in Thursday’s debate that he knows how to throw haymakers. Until someone else proves otherwise, he’s the front-runner for 2028.

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great.

At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as The Atlantic reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag?

Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball.

The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that it would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, What is my opponent’s core moral flaw? and who went right at it with both barrels.

He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him.

As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point.

It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa.

That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings.

He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary.

In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

Eric Schmitt’s a Joke. The Assaults on Jack Smith Are Anything But.

The Missouri senator and other Republicans made fools of themselves Tuesday. But that won’t stop them lying about—and trying to destroy—Donald Trump’s prosecutor.

We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.

What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made........

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