Former president Trump issued a puzzling endorsement on Monday of “ERIC,” the first name shared by two front-runners competing in Tuesday’s Missouri GOP Senate primary race, leaving confusion as to whether he meant candidate Eric Greitens or candidate Eric Schmitt, or whether he was endorsing both.
“There is a BIG Election in the Great State of Missouri, and we must send a MAGA Champion and True Warrior to the U.S. Senate, someone who will fight for Border Security, Election Integrity, our Military and Great Veterans, together with having a powerful toughness on Crime and the Border,” Trump wrote in a statement. “I trust the Great People of Missouri, on this one, to make up their own minds, much as they did when they gave me landslide victories in the 2016 and 2020 Elections, and I am therefore proud to announce that ERIC has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”
No clarification has yet been issued by Trump’s team. Both rivals accepted the endorsement, each claiming to have earned the former president’s favor as the real “America First” choice.
“I’m honored to receive President Trump’s endorsement. From the beginning, I’ve been the true MAGA Champion fighting against the RINO establishment backing Schmitt,” Greitens, the former governor of Missouri, tweeted. “President Trump said it best when he characterized Schmitt’s campaign as ‘great dishonesty in politics.’”
“I’m grateful for President Trump’s endorsement. As the only America First candidate who has actually fought for election integrity, border security & against the Left’s indoctrination of our kids—I’ll take that fight to the Senate to SAVE AMERICA!” Schmitt, the state’s current attorney general, wrote.
Trump’s message is sure to further complicate an already turbulent contest, which takes place on Tuesday. Based on recent polling, however, Schmitt seems like the favorite to win, with Greitens trailing by a significant margin. A Trafalgar Group poll released Monday showed Schmitt leading at 27 percent, followed by Representative Vicky Hartzler at 24 percent and Greitens at 20 percent. A different survey from last Monday conducted by Remington Research, a firm associated with Schmitt’s consulting group, Axiom Strategies, projected Schmitt would carry 32 percent of the vote, compared with Hartzler’s 25 percent and Greitens’s 18 percent.
Before Greitens ran for governor of Missouri as a Republican in 2016 and won, he was a professed Democrat, who even considered a run for Congress as such in early 2009, although he later abandoned the idea. He took a break from politics after scandals involving sexual misconduct and campaign-finance violations forced him to resign from office before reentering the arena and rebranding himself a “RINO hunter,” NR’s Brittany Bernstein reported.